Introduction
On April 28, 2006, the first concrete for one of the new pontoons for the Hood Canal Bridge Replacement project was poured at the Concrete Tech facility in Tacoma.
This is precisely 493 days after work at the graving dock site at Port Angeles was abandoned in December 2004. It is a tribute to the work of WSDOT staff, the contractor and others that in that span the entire work program for the pontoons has been brought from a complete stop to this milestone point.
The graving dock story, however, must also unhappily note that had everything gone as planned in Port Angeles, some five months after the groundbreaking in Port Angeles in August 2003, and 28 months ago, this point would have been reached with a concrete pour in a new graving facility in Port Angeles.
Whether denominated as the Hood Canal Graving Dock misadventure or the Tse-whit-zen Village re-discovery, the substantial delay and added cost to the bridge rehabilitation project is only a small part of what the events at Port Angeles now represent. Now this experience is marked as a major moment in cultural discovery that, though burdened with pain of many kinds, have contributed much more than a trove of archaeological artifacts to our search for meaning in our past and our present.
What does our report attempt to do?
This report tells the story largely through a chronology that is built of the participants’ words of the moment. Probably at the expense of dramatic narrative, we use the actual text of letters, reports, contemporaneous newspaper articles and other documents to draw the outlines of events. One of our goals indeed has been to capture and map the documentary record of the complex activities into which we all were drawn. This allows others to go to the same sources we have used, either to verify our interpretations or to offer their own if they vary from ours.
Copies of the Graving Dock Report are available to borrow from the WSDOT Library, (360) 705-7750.