Nisqually Tribal Chair Willie Frank III grew up on stories from his grandfather, Willie Frank Sr.

The Nisqually people lived in paradise before the white man came, said the elder Frank, who died in 1983. There was enough fish to feed the tribe, and the Nisqually River was a bountiful resource.

That’s since changed.

Climate change has affected the Nisqually River, as have the bridges that carries Interstate 5 over the river. More specifically, the causeway that leads to those bridges chokes the Nisqually, which used to flow freely for more than a mile and a half on its final leg to Puget Sound.

Today it is largely squeezed into a space of about 180 feet beneath the bridges, altering the current.

As a result, the water cuts into the riverbank, and trees fall into the flow. Trunks and branches jut out, making it dangerous at points for tribal members to catch steelhead trout and chum and chinook salmon.

“It scares the hell out of me,” Frank III told The News Tribune earlier this year.

 

The chairman worries about the next big flood and the impact it will have on those living near the Nisqually watershed. The Nisqually Tribe of Indians counts more than 650 members.

“I remember the flood of 1996. It devastated our whole community down here,” he said. “This is not going to be a good situation unless we do something about it.”

The tribe and other concerned groups have started advocating for a 2.5-mile stretch of Interstate 5 on the Pierce and Thurston county border to be reconstructed.

The addition of a second bridge over the river in 1968 included filling the pilings from the original bridge and those of the second span with dirt, rocks and concrete, essentially creating a more than 2-mile causeway. The work left only four outlets for the Nisqually River to flow into Nisqually Reach, none of which is wider than 180 feet. The causeway acts in a sense as a dam.

The tribe has started talking to elected officials and state agencies about a $4.2 billion project that would allow for a more natural path for the Nisqually River as well as prepare for population increases and climate change impacts by adding lanes and elevating the bridges.

“It’s not just the focus of the salmon recovery or the tribe’s treaty rights. It also has significant impacts to the southern resident killer whale, and also potentially at risk of a major avulsion event that could take out I-5 entirely, placing the South Sound economy and our national security at extreme risk,” said David Troutt, the tribe’s natural resources director.

 

In the early 2000s, Nisqually tribal government workers were going through aerial photos, deciding which to archive. As they began laying out prints, they discovered the river’s path was altering course at a rapid pace. They saw the river meandering more and more to the right, creating a sharp turn in the river’s course before hitting the bridges.

“We found this out by accident,” Troutt said.

Since then, the tribe has been bringing its concerns to groups like South Sound Military & Communities Partnership, elected officials and the Washington state Department of Transportation.

The U.S. Geological Survey has been working on a report studying changes in the Nisqually River basin. Lead scientist Eric Grossman reports that 2019 photos show the river current has snaked just before flowing under the Interstate 5 bridges, jutting out more than 100 meters since 2002.

If that meandering portion of river continues to erode into the bank at the same rate, Grossman estimates, the Nisqually River will consume the last 130 meters separating the river from Interstate-5 by 2050.

Preliminary models conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey say a major flood on the Nisqually River could occur as soon as the next 20 years.

The USGS models predict that with the combination of higher stream flows, sea-level rise and the constriction caused by the Interstate 5 causeway, the region could see more flooding.

“As a result, flow and capacity for the Nisqually River to migrate is restricted to (less than) 10 percent of its actual floodplain width, and this affects important ecosystem and cultural resources,” Grossman said.

Troutt said the tribe has recognized the impact of the bridge on the river for the last 20 years but began ramping up work to find a solution in the last three.

“This is one of our highest priorities,” he said of the bridge project.

The Nisqually River is affected by climate change up and downstream. Rising sea levels in Puget Sound and rainier winters in the mountains are leaving the river “squeezed,” leading to more high water events, Troutt said.

While much of the impact to the ecosystem in the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge has been attributed to climate change, Troutt said, the Interstate 5 causeway has exacerbated the changes because it is working as planned: keeping the river underneath the highway where it was in 1967.

“It’s highly inadequate for the changing climate,” he said.

On either side of the Interstate 5 bridge across the Nisqually River, there is over a mile of concrete, dirt and rocks. The causeway extends across the refuge.

The river is “strongly constrained” by the highway, said Grossman, who labeled the causeway as a “principal vulnerability” for the Nisqually River.

In the coming decades, Puget Sound will see intensifying heavy rainfall events and rising seas, according to a 2015 climate change report from the University of Washington.

The UW report said while there are multiple scenarios depending on global response to climate change, both the extent and the frequency of flooding is projected to increase.

A precipitation shift from snowfall to rainfall in the winter will be a large factor in increased flooding. Rather than snow on the mountains slowly melting over the year into the rivers, there will be more rainfall, which would flow into rivers suddenly from the higher elevations.

A majority of models Grossman has used predict that Puget Sound’s fall, winter, and spring rainfall will increase over time, between 2 and 11 percent by 2050. Heavy rainfall events during the winter are expected to increase from twice a year to about seven times a year by 2080. On average, summers are predicted to become more dry.

“Combined with sea level rise and an increase in the intensity of heavy rain events, the decrease in snow accumulation will contribute to a widespread increase in the frequency and size of winter flood events,” the 2018 UW report said.

Regional sea level rise is projected to accelerate and reach between half a meter and one-meter increase by the 2080s, according to initial models from USGS. By 2080, Grossman said, initial models suggest increased sea levels and rainfall intensity could push floods within a foot of the decks of the Nisqually River bridges.

Grossman said it is worth noting that large surges of water tend to bring higher amounts of sediment down to the lower Nisqually Valley, slowly elevating the riverbed.

Nisqually River floods are expected to increase in frequency by up to 50 percent by the 2080s, according to USGS models.

The Nisqually River has seen two major floods in the last century, one in 1933 and the other in 1996. Newspaper archives from the February 1996 flood show first responders carrying senior citizens out of homes in knee-high waters, cars stranded on flooded roads, and farmlands flooded enough to look like lakes.

 

Major flood levels like the 1996 flood on the Nisqually River were once thought to be 100-year floods, or a flood that has a 1 percent chance of happening every year, Troutt said. Studies in other Puget Sound rivers like the Nooksack and Skagit indicate that such floods are now considered to be 22-year floods, Grossman said.

On an average summer day, the Nisqually River hits about 900 cubic feet per second. In a flood, Troutt estimates the river could get up to 40,000 cubic feet per second.

“These floods will be bigger and more powerful, more regularly,” Troutt said.

For more than a century, farmers diked hundreds of acres of the Nisqually River estuary. The eight miles of dikes walled off the delta and provided farmland and livestock pastures.

A federal refuge was created in 1974 to protect the Nisqually River delta and its diversity of fish and wildlife habitat. The refuge expanded as dikes were removed and the tideflats returned.

 

In 2009, the Nisqually Tribe of Indians removed the last of the dikes on the Nisqually, restoring more than 900 acres of land, and the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge grew into a 21-mile network of winding waterways.

Wildlife like bald eagles, raptors, herons, harbor seals, otters and beavers can be found on the refuge.

Salmon have returned, but not to the level Troutt would like to see.

In 1999, the tribe recorded 29,494 chinook and 16,996 chum salmon. In 2019, the tribe recorded 17,165 chinook and 4,106 chum salmon.

This delicate balance of saltwater and freshwater is critical for the survival of salmon. In the refuge, the salty water from Nisqually Reach and fresh water carried by the Nisqually River from Mount Rainier converge.

Gabe Madel is the district biologist for the Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife who oversees the Puyallup and Nisqually rivers.

Salmon will travel from other rivers with higher concentration of urbanization, including the Puyallup and Green, to the refuge in order to undergo the changes between freshwater and saltwater, he said.

“It’s the only intact estuary in the Puget Sound,” Madel told The News Tribune. “They head south then turn around and migrate north on their typical journey out to the actual Pacific. Just from that standpoint alone, it’s a pretty important habitat in South Puget Sound.”

Eighty percent of chinook salmon in the Nisqually River delta use the refuge to adapt to the salt changes of Puget Sound, Troutt said. They spent a month or so adjusting in the waters near the bridge for their kidneys to slowly adapt. The habitat for salmon to acclimatize to the new salinity levels is disappearing as the salinity of the area is increasing, Troutt said.

As Puget Sound salinity moves upstream due to sea level rises pushing water into estuaries, so too should the “off-channel” habitats where the salmon adjust their salt intake. Troutt said the pinch point of Interstate 5 is impeding the movement upstream, making it difficult for salmon to find these habitats.

“It means less time to slowly adapt to becoming ocean animals, which means their survival will drop, and we’re already in a position where our survival is very poor,” Troutt said.

A decrease in fish has repercussions up the food chain.

Studies on southern resident orcas show chinook salmon from the South Sound are key components of their diet.

The Nisqually River is the largest producer of natural salmon and steelhead trout in southern Puget Sound, according to studies on orcas’ diets conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

One 2009 study found that chinook salmon are half of the orcas’ diet in the fall, between 70 and 80 percent of their diet in the winter and nearly all of their diet in the spring. The chinook predominantly come from the Columbia River, California’s Central Valley and Puget Sound.

Most of the fish caught — 69 percent — in a 2017 USGS and Nisqually Tribe study of South Puget Sound fish came from the two hatcheries on the Nisqually River, where about 4 million juvenile chinook are released annually, Troutt said.

“The Nisqually chinook are critical to the survival of the southern resident killer whale,” he said.

The Nisqually Tribe measures how many fishing days it can pursue by the population of fish returning to the Nisqually River. In 1987, the tribe had 105 fishing days. In 2018, fishermen could only cast their nets for eight days.

“That’s a huge dropoff of time on the river for our fishermen to be doing what they were promised they could do in the treaties back in 1854,” Troutt said. “Anything we can do to improve the survival of the chinook will get us another day and another day and another day on the river.”

Some species, like chum salmon, can no longer be fished by the tribe. In 2019, Washington saw the lowest return of chum salmon on record, Madel said.

“Five out of the past six years, we haven’t even fished chums, and those are the richest salmon here on the Nisqually,” Frank said. “Growing up, I always heard those stories from my dad and our other elders about how sacred our chum salmon were, and now we can’t even get enough fish in the river to have a season.”

“That’s losing that connection to a resource that they were promised in the treaties, they would have forever,” Troutt said.

The 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek between the Nisqually Tribe of Indians and other local tribes and the U.S. government reserved the tribes the rights to continue to hunt and fish in their usual grounds in exchange for them giving up 4,000 square miles around Puget Sound.

In the past 20 years, Frank said, fishing has become less about feeding a family and more about exercising treaty rights.

“There were times when we fish on Sundays we’d catch 100 fish, put in at noon and we’d have that by 1, or 2 o’clock,” he said. “Now, I don’t even think my brother and I caught 100 fish all season last year.”

Past the bridge out almost into the Nisqually Reach, nearly 50 floats bob in the water. Each float represents a family’s fishing ground. When Frank goes out in his father’s boat, he is casting his fishing net in the same 200 feet his grandfather and his great grandfather did decades prior.

 

Asked how often he is on the river, Frank said, “not as often as I need to be. Being on the river is medicine.”

The health of the river represents more to the Nisqually Tribe than a body of water. The tribal chairman said it’s the essence of his people.

“There’s that misconception that all Indians are about is casinos, smoke shops and fireworks. For me, it’s about educating these people about who we really are,” Frank said. “All of that stuff has been great for our jobs, but if that all went away tomorrow, we’re still gonna be Nisqually. We’re still gonna have this beautiful river, I hope, and that’s what we have to fight to really protect.”

The tribe believes that because reconstructing the bridge is more than a salmon recovery project, it will be easier to get traction for the estimated $4.2 billion project.

“The fact that it does have this connection to these other issues, including traffic in the south and economy, the national security issues, makes a perfect project to move forward in a unique way,” he said. “We’ve gotten support from leaders of both parties.”

Nisqually Tribal leadership worries that if it doesn’t act now before a major flooding event occurs, it won’t get a say in how the area is repaired.

Whether the state takes on the bridge project, Frank and Troutt said they will continue to fight for the Nisqually River to be freed from the 180 feet under the Interstate 5 bridge.

“In my heart, I know, we’re doing the right thing, making sure we protect, protect this river, at all costs,” Frank said.