Region: West

Portland General Electric (PGE) operates seven hydroelectric facilities throughout Oregon that provide power to more than 1.7 million customers. To maintain its Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license, PGE must meet stringent dam-safety requirements, but its existing data-gathering system required more than 200 man-hours to compile, analyze and generate the required annual reports. PGE asked GeoEngineers […]

The Cascadia Conservation District (CCD) and Trout Unlimited (TU) are working together to decrease instream structures that divert water from the Entiat River and Roaring Creek in Central Washington. These streams provide valuable salmon habitat and the direct diversions reduce streamflow in the lower Entiat basin during the irrigation season to a dangerous level for […]

One of the first major dams in the Pacific Northwest, the Cushman Hydroelectric Project, created two dams on the North Fork of the Skokomish River in the 1920s to provide power to the surrounding area. As part of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) relicensing term and a settlement agreement for the use of the […]

The Kentch Reach on the South Fork Walla Walla River has been subject to large-scale human disturbance for more than 100 years. Timber and agricultural uses involved straightening the river channel and isolating the river from its historic floodplain. The result was a fast-moving conduit that was virtually devoid of native fish spawning and rearing […]

When a tank trailer spilled approximately 2,800 gallons of gasoline into a drainage ditch along a remote stretch of State Highway 21 (SR-21) on the Colville Indian Reservation in northeastern Washington, the gasoline quickly reached groundwater and threatened to migrate to the Sanpoil River on the opposite side of the highway. Our project client Able […]

Before this project was completed, Meeker Creek flowed through a straight man-made ditch in a suburban neighborhood of Puyallup, Washington. The artificial nature of the creek caused problems for residents and wildlife alike. Poor water quality and a lack of spawning and off-channel habitat meant very low salmon populations, and the creek often flooded during […]

The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) needed to make critical improvements to the SR 520 Floating Bridge across Lake Washington, a major four-lane artery connecting Seattle to Bellevue and suburbs to the east. Evaluations showed the bridge, in service since 1963, to be in poor condition, and a significant seismic risk in the event […]

Pier 54 is a turn-of-the-century pier in Seattle, Washington, along the Puget Sound waterfront, home to Ivar’s, a waterfront seafood restaurant. Concerns about the stability of the 100-year-old wooden pier, especially in the event of an earthquake, motivated Ivar’s to begin a series of significant seismic upgrades to the structure. As a member of the […]

The Yelm Hydroelectric Project provides reliable clean energy to the City of Centralia, Washington. A run-of-the-river concrete ogee dam diverts water from the Nisqually River into a nine-mile canal before it falls 200 feet into the powerhouse. In 1996, flooding in the Nisqually River washed out the canal’s earth-fill embankments, originally built in the late […]

The Palermo Wellfield is an underground source of drinking water for the City of Tumwater, Washington. The wellfield is situated near a residential neighborhood at the foot of a steep hillside, below a number of current and former commercial sites containing potentially dangerous contamination by chlorinated solvents. This contamination poses a risk to the Palermo […]