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ISSAQUAH | SAMMAMISH
Friday, November 30, 2012
www.issaquahreporter.com
Gone green
Sammamish resident Wally Pereyra played a major role in this year’s increased kokanee run, removing a 70-year-old blockage on Ebright Creek to allow the salmon more room to spawn. Below, a male and female kokanee pair up for spawning in Ebright Creek (Photo by Roger Tabor, USFWS). KEVIN
Two Issaquah facilities to be honored for energy efficiency BY LINDA BALL ISSAQUAH & SAMMAMISH REPORTER
Typically only three streams — Ebright Creek, Laughing Jacobs Creek and Lewis Creek — have a significant number of fish spawn, but this year a new stream, Pine Lake Creek, started to see heavy numbers. While there’s no way for St. John to pinpoint the exact reason for the surge, he said it could
Using a combination of new technologies, Issaquah’s Fire Station 72, will be rewarded for its innovation and energy efficiency in January, when its creators receive an ASHRAE award, what project manager Brad Liljequist described as the Oscars of engineering. Nationwide, two of the six first-place awards given in 2013 will be for projects in Issaquah. The second is for Swedish Issaquah, the state-ofthe art hospital that opened in 2011. ASHRAE, or the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers, recognizes the most energy efficient structures throughout the country each year. The fire station, open since Oct. 2011, is the highest scoring LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum fire station in the world. “This is the most energy efficient fire station in America,” Liljequist said. “There’s been a lot of evolution in the green building process for a number of years.” Liljequist said they were in some pretty exalted company, including the Montreal biodome, which was the site of a 1976 Olympic venue, and is now a conservatory which allows visitors to walk through replicas of four ecosystems found in the Americas. Liljequist also said the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. will be honored. Fire station 72 won in the institutional category, and Swedish won in the new health care facilities category.
SEE KOKANEE, 11
SEE ENERGY, 3
ENDEJAN, ISSAQUAH & SAMMAMISH REPORTER
A STRONG RETURN Lake Sammamish kokanee continue to make record runs up local creeks
BY KEVIN ENDEJAN ISSAQUAH/SAMMAMISH REPORTER
W
hen Wally Pereyra says he’s never seen anything like it before, take note.
The Sammamish resident has lived along Ebright Creek — a feeder to Lake Sammamish — just shy of 40 years. In that time, he said he’s never seen so many brightly colored kokanee salmon splash their way up the adjacent waterway to spawn. “This is the biggest run I’ve ever seen, by far,” said Pereyra, noting that in one day volunteers counted 1,100 kokanee in the stream. “I think the total is going to be several thousand.” David St. John, an administrator with King County’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks, shares Pereyra’s enthusiasm, but remains cautiously optimistic. “I never use the words ‘great,’ ‘good,’ ‘well’ or any of that, I just say we’re doing better because there is a long way for us to go,” he said. “This is a good sign. We think something good is happening, something is going right.” St. John said the first signal things were different this year came with an early run. The
“This is the biggest run I’ve ever seen, by far.” – Wally Pereyra kokanee, which typically start spawning in mid- to late-November, began to run the last week of October — the earliest he’s ever seen in 15 years of monitoring the species. And it wasn’t just a few kokanee here or there — the feeder streams have remained thick with the bright red fish. “There really hasn’t been a drop off,” St. John said.