MONROE — Joe D’Angelo asks what you would have done in his place, watching a fish-bearing pond turn into a dark, stagnant pool ringed with orange slime.
That’s the scenario that confronted the homeowner in early March at his property on Tester Road, south of Monroe.
He first tried to alert the state Department of Transportation to an unfolding emergency, that the Highway 522 widening project running by his house was diverting fresh water from his pond.
Hearing nothing from officialdom, D’Angelo said he approached the state’s contractor and ventured to the other side of the highway with a worker. They found a culvert blocked by five sandbags, which they removed to get water flowing again through a pipe under the highway, to his property.
“The whole pond was brown, it was mocha,” D’Angelo said. “Within three hours, it was clear. That’s how well this stream circulates the pond.”
Salmon habitat crisis averted — or so it seemed.
If D’Angelo expected thanks, he was in for disappointment.
On discovering the sandbag removal, the state notified the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The federal agency had issued the state a permit for the widening project, allowing it to work in streams and wetlands that flow into the Snohomish River, a short distance away. To prevent harm to fish populations, no work is allowed in the water from the beginning of October to the end of June.
“He could have easily started a discussion with us and the Corps” before trying to fix the situation himself, said WSDOT spokesman Travis Phelps, who added that “our permit’s pretty strict for good reasons.”
The Corps sent D’Angelo a letter on March 31 about a possible violation of the federal Clean Water Act, and asked him for an explanation.
“We have been talking with him and we still have not resolved the violation yet,” said Patricia Graesser, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Corps in Seattle.
The situation stems from a mistake that D’Angelo brought to the state’s attention in August.
Now he wonders how he can trust officials to make things right, after they’ve nearly killed off his pond and put him in the cross hairs of federal regulators.
“They’re trying to make me the guilty party when how many mistakes have they made?” he asked.
He said a simple knock on his door could have saved time and money.
The 52-year-old medical equipment machinist bought his house in 2005. The pond was the main attraction for the avid fisherman, who also has worked as a licensed fishing guide.
The water takes up almost half of his 2.5-acre property. It supports coho salmon. Juvenile fish shelter there as they grow.
“They feed under these lily pads all summer long,” he said. “I can watch that cycle from my porch.”
There also are bass, catfish and bluegill, he said, plus beavers, a family of muskrats and an otter. Two types of ducks nest there.
The state has spent years preparing to widen four miles of Highway 522 between the Snohomish River and the U.S. 2 interchange. Environmental studies began in the 1990s. An updated assessment came out in 2008, four years before major construction commenced.
Work was mostly finished by the end of 2014. To date, the highway project has cost $118.7 million. In addition to adding extra lanes of highway, the money has paid for design costs, a flyover interchange, reconfiguring wetlands and more.
D’Angelo’s property adjoins an interesting feature of the project: a 12-foot-high wildlife tunnel designed to improve habitat and traffic safety. The passageway lets animals cross under four lanes of highway to the Snohomish River, on one side, and Lord Hill Regional Park, a nearly 1,500-acre nature preserve, on the other.
The state credits the tunnel with reducing car-versus-deer collisions. There were seven recorded wildlife collisions in just one month during the fall of 2013, but that number has dropped to zero, Phelps said.
The state sought to improve water quality in nearby streams by routing a daylighted creek through the wildlife tunnel.
Keeping the creek that fed D’Angelo’s pond wasn’t an option because the culvert that carried it under the highway is collapsed and doesn’t provide acceptable fish habitat. The state intended to combine that stream with the other going through the nearby wildlife tunnel.
That would have been fine with D’Angelo, had it worked.
“It wasn’t until last summer that it was discovered that this stream feeds into Mr. D’Angelo’s pond,” WSDOT spokeswoman Kris Olsen said.
After D’Angelo brought the problem to the state’s attention, the WSDOT modified the project. The agency intended to direct water to his property with a temporary channel coming off the combined stream. That didn’t work, either.
Throughout fall and winter, the pond was cut off from its supply of fresh water. During that time, the state was unable to work in the water because of the seasonal limitations of its construction permit.
By March, the low, stagnating water was impossible for D’Angelo to ignore. That’s when he removed the sandbags with the construction worker.
The state’s plan is to dig a new channel this summer, bringing some of the flow from the tunnel creek to his pond. The water, however, will hit it from a different angle than the old stream did.
The work is expected to cost $5,000 or less.
“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Phelps said. “He’s going to know everything that we know. We intend to make this right for him.”
D’Angelo is skeptical. While the state’s new plan might restore water to one side of the pond, he isn’t sure how it could circulate fresh water through all of it. There’s also a small dike and duck nesting grounds in the way of the proposed channel, he said.
“I was assured this would not alter my view or my property,” he said. “I’m going to have a mosquito pond, stinking with nice orange slime.”
What D’Angelo saw when he woke up Friday morning put him in a foul mood: The pond water was dropping again, and fast.
“This is the stress I wake up to,” he said. “This is not once in a while — this is an ongoing nightmare.”
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; nhaglund@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @NWhaglund.
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