Once pipeline is finished, new beach can emerge
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, November 30, 2003
EVERETT — It will be a short stroll from downtown to the bald eagle’s nest, to a sand-strewn beach, to the tidelands that spread out beneath a chapped and weathered sign that reads "Everett Junction."
For years, the city’s residents have longed to walk along a beach during lunch or at sunset.
In June, a little piece of Everett’s shoreline will finally open to the public. A half-mile walking trail will lead visitors from Bond Street to a 200-foot-wide swath of sandy beach just south of the alumina dome.
The park’s opening is either right on schedule or seven years overdue, depending on whom you ask.
Access to Everett’s waterfront has been blocked by railroad tracks, asphalt and political riprap, said Peggy Toepel, head of the Everett Shorelines Coalition, which advocates for public waterfront access.
"I started hearing about this park years ago," Toepel said. "It’s something they said yes to, and then it didn’t happen."
In 1996, the Port of Everett received a shoreline permit to dredge near the Hewitt Avenue terminal, Everett senior planner Gerry Ervine said. It also required the port to set aside 7 acres for construction of a pocket park, Ervine said. But within a year, plans for a new pipeline project intervened.
When project engineers checked the blueprints, they realized the pocket park sat squarely in the pipeline’s path.
Construction of the park was put on hold.
"We made the determination not to put it in, but to wait until the pipeline’s outfall was completed," said John Klekotka, the port’s project manager.
"Otherwise, we would have had to rip it up. We didn’t want to build it twice," Klekotka said.
True to plan, the beach park will straddle the pipeline that will take wastewater from Kimberly-Clark, Everett and Marysville to the deep waters of Port Gardner Bay.
The park’s construction will begin in January after the removal of a 1,300-foot-long temporary trestle that runs parallel to the beach. No trace of the trestle, built to protect the fragile shoreline during the laying of the pipeline, will remain.
But the beach will be transformed from a jagged, rocky slope into a 200-foot-wide sand beach that fans out over a third of an acre, Klekotka said.
The Port of Everett and its partners in the beach project, Kimberly-Clark and the city of Everett, each will contribute more than $150,000 toward the park and the beach’s restoration.
"They’re trying to mimic what was there before the railroad," Klekotka added.
"While the pipe is being installed, they will be contouring the beach so it will slope at a gentle angle," said Eric Grinde, the paper mill’s pipeline project manager.
Construction is also set to begin on a 10-foot-wide pedestrian trail that will run parallel to the railroad tracks. Access to the train tracks will be blocked by a 10-foot-high fence.
Eventually, the city’s shoreline access plan calls for an overpass to be built linking Forest Park to the new trail.
Today, a trip to the rocky beach requires a hard hat and permission from pipe fitters.
But those requirements don’t seem to apply to the resident eagles or their tormentors — the crows. For decades, their skirmishes have been hidden from city dwellers.
Officials promise that will change.
"You’ll be able to come down here and walk the beach at low tide," Grinde said.
That’s a long overdue stroll, Toepel said.
"For years, the port has told us, ‘We can’t get the railroad’s attention, or there’s a legal constraint,’" Toepel said. "Their excuses may have a basis in reality, but in the meantime nothing has happened. I hope this is it. Expectations about this park have been raised and punctured."
Reporter Janice Podsada:
425-339-3029 or
