High Waters, Man-Made Damage On The Flood Plain Man’s Futile Efforts To Control Floods Have Made Life Hard For Steelhead

Rivers didn’t bother anyone, until people began building roads, erecting buildings and planting crops in those mostly tranquil life zones called “the flood plain.”

For centuries, rivers took care of themselves, tending the gravels fish need for spawning, pruning their shores and mending their wounds after major floods.

Nowadays, people won’t let them be.

Too much is at stake.

On Feb. 9, a rampage of water blew out of the banks of the Tucannon and Touchet river systems, damaging 25 of Columbia County’s bridges and causing $30 million in damage.

The steelhead trout that depend on these rivers have evolved with floods. The people have not.

County commissioner John McFarland said 343 rural families were stranded at one time and more than 1,000 people had to be evacuated from the Dayton area.

That’s a major impact, considering that only 4,100 people inhabit Columbia County.

“We continue to be in an emergency status,” McFarland said last week, noting that the river in its natural post-flood condition “is an accident waiting to happen.”

Some fisheries experts say the flood damage to steelhead and salmon habitat was minimal.

“The major impacts occurred when the county, the Corps (of Engineers) and the farmers got in the rivers with their bulldozers,” one biologist said.

Wildlife officials have warned that Columbia County was taking advantage of emergency leniency in state shoreline permitting. County officials had encouraged contractors to go beyond bridge sites to alter streams in a manner that harms fish and wildlife habitat, and possibly could promote more serious damage in future floods.

“Yes, we’ve been guilty of aggressiveness,” said McFarland, saying that the precious few weeks before spring runoff are critical to the protection of lives, property and livelihoods.

“This is why we in this community cannot accept what’s on the books. We have too many homes in the endangered areas.”

The Touchet and Tucannon rivers are two of only four vital lifelines in southeastern Washington for steelhead, the prized sea-running giants of the trout world.

The Tucannon also is the only major Snake River tributary below the Clearwater that’s hospitable to dwindling chinook salmon.

Fewer than 2,000 steelhead have been returning to spawning areas on the Tucannon in recent years, owing to curses ranging from warm ocean currents to Columbia River dams.

Only about 400 steelhead a year are reaching spawning areas on the Touchet River upstream from Dayton, not counting the hatchery fish killed by anglers.

The challenge for fish managers is protecting wild steelhead. Fishing can be controlled with rules that require anglers to release wild steelhead. Regulating rivers, however, is a headache.

“The floods didn’t help matters,” said Mark Schuck, Fish and Wildlife steelhead specialist in Dayton. “There’s been habitat damage during and after the flood. In some areas, recovery will take years.”

Schuck did not suggest that heavy equipment should have been kept out of the rivers.

“An unstable channel isn’t good for landowners or fish,” he said.

However, he couldn’t help but distinguish “unimproved” stretches from those that have been routed and reshaped by bulldozers.

“The upper Tucannon, where the debris is untouched looks pretty remarkable,” Schuck said. “There’s some gorgeous habitat. The stream has retreated into big meanders.

“Some big trees have toppled along the river, providing shade and causing the stream to dig holes 4-6 feet deep in some places. That area, at least, should be good rearing conditions for young steelhead.”

Outsiders assume the February floods were caused by the Pineapple Express that dumped relentless rain onto a region smothered in snow.

But Columbia County residents want to blame government, too.

As the flood waters were receding in February, state Fish and Wildlife Department officials met with about 350 people in Dayton to discuss emergency procedures for dealing with flood-damaged rivers.

The crowd’s sentiment was loud and clear - and intimidating to state employees charged with protecting fish and wildlife habitat.

In the early 1970s, the Legislature gave Fish and Wildlife the responsibility to enforce hydraulics codes that regulate work done in stream channels. This enforcement, crowd members said, has stalled in-stream manipulation that could have prevented damage to public and private property.

“The crowd wasn’t interested in hearing about the downstream impacts of straightening stream channels or diking shorelines,” said John Andrews, Fish and Wildlife’s regional habitat manager.

Nor was the crowd in a mood to acknowledge the agency for being on the scene immediately, issuing emergency permits to rip-rap, rebuild channels and control damage to property and bridges.

“Normal processing of a hydraulics permit takes a month,” Andrews said. “We were issuing them in 24 hours. We issued close to 200 emergency permits in Garfield, Asotin, Columbia and Whitman counties. That’s about 75 percent of the permits the agency normally would issue in a year.”

Andrews insisted on some mitigation and that most equipment be out of the Tucannon and Touchet by March 15, when steelhead typically begin spawning.

But the rage continued to boil last week at a meeting orchestrated by McFarland to take advantage of state legislators and bureaucrats touring the flood damage.

A dozen Columbia County farmers and ranchers were ushered in to restate their grievances.

“It’s really devastating to see your land wash away,” said Gerald Howard. “About 75 percent of our flooding was caused by islands. We asked Fish and Game to take them out and they said no.”

“We want to sit down and take a nutcracker to this hydraulics act,” said Rick Turner.

“We’re not out there trying to ruin the environment or fish or anything,” said Dick Rubenser. “If I could have done the maintenance work that needed to be done, I could have prevented the damage.

“Laws to protect fish and wildlife aren’t what the farmer wants.”

Rubenser was asked a hypothetical question: If you’d have been allowed to clear and straighten the Tucannon River through your property without restraint, where would all the flood water have gone?

Rubenser chuckled. “Starbuck.”

“No one can blame the government for over-regulation; you could make a good case that there’s not enough,” said one state scientist who asked to be anonymous.

“It’s unbelievable what they’re doing under the guise of an emergency. They’re cutting trees and running bulldozers up and down the rivers. Tax dollars will be paying for this. Fish will pay, too.”

Local government officials face intense political pressure to manhandle flooding rivers.

Kittitas County planner Amy Tousley lost her job this winter because she refused to abandon her professional training.

County commissioners fired Tousley after she told the Ellensburg newspaper she couldn’t in good conscience endorse the commission’s aggressive action to suspend shoreline protection laws in dealing with flooding on the Yakima and Teanaway Rivers.

Several county, state and federal employees said they would prefer not to be quoted regarding work being done on southeastern Washington steelhead streams.

“Maybe when I retire,” one said.

McFarland and his vocal constituency say they prefer flood control based on making river channels straighter, deeper and with fewer obstructions so floods can flush through towns and private property without overflowing river banks.

Scientists respond:

“Any energy you can dissipate high in the watershed is beneficial downstream,” said Doug Pineo, Department of Ecology regional shorelines manger. “The sooner you get out the brakes, release energy and reduce velocity, the better. Some flooding over a long area is better than massive flooding in a few spots.”

“People look only at the problems on their land,” Andrews said. “If we let anything go up and down the valley, we wouldn’t have a river. We’d have a ditch.”

“People are trying to come to grips with the fact that a river needs room,” said Bruce Howard of the Department of Ecology.

“There’s an obvious correlation with the lack of trees and areas where the floods scalloped big areas and took out huge chunks of fields,” said Fish and Wildlife shoreline expert Ken Bates after he flew over the flooding Touchet and Tucannon.

“Clearing vegetation and straightening channels only moves the problem somewhere else.”

Waitsburg mayor Tom Baker showed touring of state officials an aerial video taken as as the flood swept through the Touchet valley. “One of the town’s main intersections was under 4 feet of water,” he said. “We built the dike after the 1964 floods. This year’s flood just blew portions of it out.”

Baker was meeting with state officials to seek $200,000 the tiny town needs to pay contractors for repairs to roads and bridges.

The room became quiet as officials studied footage of the water streaming sometimes half a mile wide down the Touchet valley.

“If you’d have known a month in advance, you still couldn’t have filled enough sandbags,” the mayor said. “You look back and wonder what you could have done. You look at this, and you realize there was nothing.”

On Feb. 9, the Touchet River crested at 9,000 cubic feet per second. The flood inflicted damage to Dayton and Waitsburg in spite of dikes built after the 1964 flood of virtually the same water volume.

Meanwhile, the Tucannon crested at 5,580 cubic feet per second. This flood volume was considerably less than the 7,980 cfs recorded on the Tucannon during the flood in December 1964. Yet this winter’s flood appears to have inflicted greater damage, according to landowners and county officials.

“There wasn’t near the population along the Tucannon River back in 1964,” said Duane Bartels, of the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service field office in Pomeroy.

“Since then, there’s been more channel work and more diking. A flood can’t spread out as much. The velocity is greater. The flood really did a number on things this time.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used the muscle of man’s greatest earth-moving machines and a fortune in concrete to straighten and contain 300 miles of the Mississippi River.

The Mississippi reclaimed two-thirds of those shorelines in the massive floods of 1993.

“We’re encouraging a national debate on the whole question of flood control,” Corps of Engineers spokesman Scott Saunders announced in the aftermath. “We need to look again at whether we should divert some resources from building levees and flood walls to wetlands and flood plains.”

“The Tucannon’s never going to be the way it used to be,” said Columbia County farmer Don Howard.

“People have screwed everything up. People are here now. We have to do the best we can.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo