Presenter/s: Sky Miller, PE
Symposium Session: 2024 - 02 Restoring Puget Sound Estuaries: Insights from Monitoring and Lessons Learned from Construction
Topics covered: estuary and lessons learned
ABSTRACT
All of our large estuary restoration projects are intended to maximize salmon habitat restoration. However, each project has neighbors or stakeholders with unique concerns and needs to be addressed. I’ll describe twelve estuary projects that have been designed and constructed, and how we addressed these concerns and lessons learned. For example, the Nookachamps Mitigation Bank project constructed the City of Mount Vernon a new dike to keep a major arterial open during floods and constructed a passive recreational trail for the Parks Department, in exchange for 40 acres of City owned land. The zis a ba (1) project included design and construction of a $400,000 one-way flood gate structure to drain 4000 acres of agricultural land during large floods, providing much needed flood relief for neighboring farms. On the Port Susan Bay estuary project, Construction crews use innovative low ground pressure equipment (“floating excavators”) to allow construction in soft soils and construction to continue after breaches allow tides into the construction site. At the Blue Heron Slough Conservation Bank, we used an innovative public-private partnership between the Port of Everett and a private investment firm to develop and finance the project. All of these and more lessons learned will be discussed in this presentation.