EVERETT – It was one of Jack Olson’s last big projects as Port of Everett engineer, but it wasn’t until after he’d retired that his colleagues learned how important the Union Slough wetlands were to him.
People kept bumping into Olson out at the wetlands, said John Mohr, the port’s executive director.
“He was out here often,” Mohr said, “sitting out here, looking at the water. It was clear that this was a very special place for him.”
Mohr spoke Monday at a ceremony to unveil a plaque honoring him, which is mounted on a granite boulder next to the marsh. The port commission already had dedicated the restoration project in Olson’s name.
“He very much loved and cared about this project,” Mohr said.
Olson, who retired from the port in 2001 at age 70, died last year.
The wetland covers 20 acres in the Snohomish River delta on Union Slough. The salt marsh was created between Everett and Marysville by excavating a field and then breaching a dike so that brackish water from the slough could go in and out of the marsh on the tide – thus creating habitat for fish and wildlife.
It was a mitigation project, creating new wetlands to allow the port to fill in other wetland areas as it worked on port facilities.
Olson’s daughter, Tara Stormo, told of how the family had helped out on the project, volunteering to plant about 100 trees donated by Weyerhaeuser Co. on the site. She said her father was someone who was “tough on the outside, but a real softy on the inside.”
Ironically, while the wetlands project became a labor of love, Olson wasn’t thrilled with having to do it at the start, Stormo said. That changed, she added. “He might not have claimed it, but it became his.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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