Sealaska was the prime contractor on the $1.3 million project for the US Forest Service, teaming with Glacier State Contractors, a Sealaska shareholder-owned business, to complete the work. Work began on the project in October 2017 and is expected to be substantially complete in early September 2018. Sealaska’s staff on the project included Aaron Meredith a project manager based in Seattle and Dick Kraft (pictured) who oversaw daily on-site operations and work by subcontractors.

Kraft brings many years of experience working on construction and engineering projects for local governments and utilities and said this project had a lot of variety, requiring him to draw from that past experience. He noted that replacing the culvert with the new bridge over Picnic Creek is already starting to make a difference. “It’s hard to tell that there was a culvert there before and we’ve seen some salmon already trying to come upstream during high tide,” Kraft said.