MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK – When floodwaters washed away roads and trails, damaged campgrounds and forced the closure of this popular Pacific Northwest park earlier this month, officials there couldn’t begin to estimate the cost of the damage.
Now that they have, the numbers are as sobering as the damage was when they first encountered it.
Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga said repairs will cost an estimated $29.85 million, the bulk of it – $16 million – to repair roads wiped out or weakened by water.
The park has been closed since Nov. 6, when 18 inches of rain fell on the park in 36 hours, swamping roads and bridges, cutting power and sewer lines and forcing park officials to swing the gates closed to visitors for the first time since nearby Mount St. Helens’ massive May 18, 1980, eruption.
The shutdown now marks the longest closure at Mount Rainier since all national parks were closed during World War II.
“Every day I keep adding to it and adding to it. Originally, I would have said $25 (million) to $30 million,” Uberuaga said. “And it could go up very easily. We could have more damage during the winter. Every culvert that’s plugged now could cause trouble when the snow melts next spring.”
National forests in Washington and Oregon also face extensive repairs, particularly the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, which includes Mount St. Helens, and the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, in Seattle’s backyard. The North Cascades National Park and Olympic National Park also saw roads washed away.
“It comes at a bad time because trails funding for national parks and national forests is declining,” said Andrew Engelson of the Washington Trails Association, a group representing hikers. “Now the storms have hit us pretty hard and that’s going to set the work back even further.”
Fixing all the forest roads and trails that lace Washington’s flood-hammered mountains could cost more than $50 million, and the extensive damage will keep people from many favorite destination spots well into the summer, if not longer.
Road-repair money could be the easiest to find for the parks and the national forests. The Federal Highway Administration often pays to fix forest roads damaged in floods. But money for trails and campgrounds could be more scarce because that spending is usually part of annual budgets that take months to hammer out.
The National Park Service doesn’t have enough money to pay for all the repairs right now, and will have to turn to the highway administration and Congress for help, Uberuaga said.
U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said securing money to repair Mount Rainier will be his first priority in Congress. Dicks is expected to chair the congressional committee responsible for spending in national parks and national forests when Democrats take control in January.
“This isn’t going to happen overnight,” Dicks said Tuesday after a tour of the damage with park officials. “As the new chairman, I’m going to be in a good position to see that it does get done.”
Meanwhile, Uberuaga said he is pushing to reopen the park at least at the Nisqually entrance as far as Longmire, where the National Park Inn and many park offices are. The Nisqually River washed away chunks of the road leading there and severed sewer, water and power lines.
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