Residents Damaged Streams Fighting Floods Critics Say Some Abused Waivers By Moving Waterways To More Convenient Locations

The flood waters have receded, but emotions still are running high in parts of the Panhandle.

That was evident during a Friday morning meeting of 35 people from government agencies, environmental groups, and others involved in fighting February’s disastrous flood.

The meeting was called by the Idaho Department of Water Resources to address some of the excesses that followed the flood.

Some streams and rivers were damaged by people who used permit-waivers from regulations to do work that went far beyond flood mitigation. Critics of the emergency measures told stories of ranchers taking advantage of the waivers to move a stream to a more convenient location.

One participant called the problem “recreational bulldozing.”

During the emergency, the water resources agency issued waivers to its normal permitting process for stream-alteration work.

The result was small disasters that led to bigger problems downstream.

“People who go in with their Cat to push gravel up against their house are just asinine,” said Art Burbank, a water resources specialist with the Nez Perce Tribe. “What they’re doing is making the problem worse.”

Too often, streams are straightened or altered in a way the leads to faster currents, causing more problems downstream, the experts said.

Several people pointed to problems along Bear Creek in Latah County, where a landowner allegedly tore out trees and blasted rock to protect a road from the raging creek.

“We call it recreational bulldozing,” said Chuck Pezeshki, director of the Clearwater Biodiversity Project. “It’s just incomprehensible why someone would do that.”

Gregg Servheer, an Idaho Fish and Game employee from Lewiston, agreed.

“It was far and above what we felt was needed to take care of the road,” he said.

When the blame fell on public agencies, such as the Army Corps of Engineers, for failing to enforce good stream management practices, Pezeshki and others in the room turned the criticism toward anti-government attitudes.

Pezeshki told a story about an employee of the Department of Environmental Quality who was physically threatened when he asked a landowner to remove his bulldozer from a creek.

Buell Hollister, a member of the Kootenai Environmental Alliance, blamed politicians for stirring up anti-government sentiments that prevent agencies from enforcing environmental laws.

“They encourage this kind of response from people, ‘To hell with you, I’m going to take my bulldozer and move the stream,”’ he said.

Kootenai County Commissioner Dick Panabaker said he isn’t inciting residents to damage streams, but senses frustration from people who fear losing their property.

“I guarantee you one thing,” Panabaker said. “If some of us don’t do something to help, these people will do it themselves. They’ll go in with a bulldozer and fix the problem because they don’t want to see their houses wash away.”

In the long term, several people agreed, the solution is to minimize erosion upstream and prevent development in the floodplains downstream.

“It’s more a sociological problem,” said Michael Doherty of the Army Corps of Engineers. “These streams will heal themselves if we just leave them alone.”

The problem is, he said, attempts to protect property result in hemming streams into narrow channels that further exacerbate flooding problems.

But the point of the meeting was to arrive at some agreement about what can be done in the short term, particularly in another emergency situation.

“We may very well be in a flood situation next week,” Doherty said. “This is a dysfunctional system here. We may be as dysfunctional as the watershed.”

The group came up with a number of suggestions, such as increasing inter-agency cooperation to give the Department of Water Resources more manpower to regulate stream work during another emergency.

“We ought to develop guidelines for waivers, so we don’t have people building dikes out of cobble,” suggested Chip Corsi of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

As a start, the group formed a short-term advisory committee to figure out a means of implementing some of the ideas raised during the meeting.

, DataTimes