Portland General Electric's $19 million project to restore the Sandy River for endangered fish began with a bang last summer as contractors blasted the Marmot Dam open. Next week, contractor JR Merit begins phase two of the project with less fanfare to the sound of heavy excavating equipment.

"There's no explosions or anything; it's a more conventional decommission," said Mark Radich, a project manager for JR Merit.

The $6 million project is not without its James Bond element, however.

The Vancouver, Wash.-based contractor will use traditional construction methods to fill in Roslyn Lake and remove the Little Sandy Dam. Then the company will bring in helicopters to tear out a 3-mile long flume, a wooden tunnel connecting the Little Sandy Dam to the Sandy River.

Starting on Monday, PGE will begin draining Roslyn Lake in a two- day spill through the Bull Run power station into the Bull Run River. The utility will continue pulling power from the shrinking lake as it drains through the generators, said Tim Keller, PGE's construction manager on the project.

But once the lake level drops too low, electricity generation will shut down and flow through the powerhouse will be reduced to a trickle to keep silt and other debris from the lake water out of the wild river.

Merit will then backfill the lake with soil from the former dikes that prevented the lake from overflowing into the surrounding forestland.

"It's going to look like a large meadow when it's done," Radich said. "You won't really know there was a lake (underneath)."

The bulk of the demolition work will start in July, however, when workers tear out the Little Sandy Dam and cut the 15,000-foot-long flume into 30- to 40-foot sections. They'll lift the sections by helicopter, one at a time, to a 15-acre area at the empty Roslyn Lake site.

Within nine days of the start of that work, the helicopters will make 500 lifts of the flume and about 500 more lifts of the flume's supporting structure. Workers will be on the ground at the flume and Roslyn Lake sites to attach and detach the pieces from the chopper.

The wooden sections will be sent to Calbag Metals for recycling into building materials or wood chips for hog fuel, according to PGE.

"We proposed taking it out using the flume itself as a roadway and hauling pieces out from the inside of the flume once it was dried," said Mike McDougall, a project manager with Natt McDougall Co., which finished tearing down the Marmot Dam last year.

Hauling it out by helicopter turned out to be a more cost- effective method, he said.

McDougall will wrap up work on the first phase in the coming weeks, filling in the old canals that connect the Marmot Dam to the Little Sandy Dam.