Overview

Beaver Creek is a year-round salmon-bearing stream that runs through the US Navy’s Manchester Fuel Depot near Port Orchard, Washington, and empties into Clam Bay in Puget Sound. Since the 1940s, the creek and its estuary have been re-routed, blocked by dams and covered with fill. These activities have impaired the natural function of the stream and estuary, severely limiting the salmon foraging, spawning and rearing habitat the stream environs would normally provide.

In 2001 the US Navy began a long-term project to completely restore Beaver Creek from the Navy’s property line to the estuary where the stream enters Clam Bay. GeoEngineers was the lead consultant for the project, under contract to the US Navy. 

During the multi-phase design and construction project, GeoEngineers and its subcontractors completely restored six acres of the creek’s lower channel, floodplain and estuary to their pre-World War II conditions.

Upstream, the team planned and designed for the removal of an existing culvert and installation of a 22-foot bottomless arch culvert. The team also removed several existing instream fish weirs, re-graded the stream bed and constructed a side-channel flood-pond as over-winter fish habitat.

Overall, the project recovered approximately three acres of downstream floodplain and estuary as active habitat, and the Beaver Creek sub-estuary is now reconnected with the stream channel and Puget Sound.

Approach

Results