PORT ANGELES — This week’s Port Angeles Business Association meeting was supposed to feature an update on cleanup efforts at the site of the former Rayonier Inc. pulp mill.
State Department of Ecology’s Bill Harris was invited by the business group to speak about the recently announced cleanup schedule for the site.
He was joined by Dana Dolloff, Rayonier’s environmental affairs director, and David Hanna, cleanup project manager for the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe.
But the Tuesday morning session morphed into a discussion of the site’s potential archeological value and how that would affect its future use.
The Rayonier property at the end of Ennis Street is in the fourth year of a toxic-waste cleanup project supervised by the state Department of Ecology, Rayonier officials and the Lower Elwha tribe.
Ancient Klallam village
The site is also home to an ancient Klallam village designated as a state historic place in 1972. It is marked with a bronze plaque on the east bank of Ennis Creek in the heart of the 75-acre site of the mill, which was closed in 1997.
A map accompanying a Larson Anthropological Services report outlines the village as within a rectangular area just northwest of the large brown reservoir tank, still standing on the Rayonier property.
Larson is the company now working with the tribe to uncover ancestral remains and artifacts at the state Department of Transportation graving yard site at the other end of Port Angeles Harbor.
The 1,700-year-old Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen, which was inhabited until the early 20th century, has been rediscovered by archeologists and the tribe as construction of the onshore dry dock to manufacture Hood Canal Bridge pontoons idles.
The discovery at Tse-whit-zen just east of the Nippon Paper USA Co. Ltd. mill raised the question of what archeological artifacts or remains of the village of Y’Innis might be on the Rayonier property 2.75 miles east.
Contamination the priority
Hanna emphasized that contamination left over from the pulp mill, not the property’s history as a Klallam village, is the impediment to the site’s future use.