Leadership in Engineering
Habitat Restoration
Re-establishing a known salmon migration route along the edge of a major city is no easy feat. Applying known environmental requirements for salmon migration, MKA created a 3-D model of the proposed Elliott Bay Seawall. The model analyzed light conditions for a variety of tide levels along the historical migration corridor to ensure the salmon’s stringent light-level needs in the restored habitat were met.
MKA’s restorative design of Magnuson Park (pictured above) involved the creation of four different wetland habitats. A daisy-chain flow of water navigates around 11 acres of new playing fields and through 63 interconnected ponds before reaching the shores of nearby Lake Washington.
MKA engineered naturalistic solutions that mimic Mother Nature for Magnuson Park. As the solutions degrade over time, nature takes over and does the job on its own.
The creation of the Virginia Mason Athletic Center, a world-class sports facility showcasing natural ecology on the site of a contaminated brownfield at water’s edge, is a model of urban restoration and 21st-century civil engineering.
For Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, MKA’s innovative solution of buttressing 800 feet of failing seawall from the water side with materials that also create new salmon habitat cost just 1/10th of the City’s original seawall repair estimate.
