Cda River In The Wake Of Trouble Boats Cause Major Shoreline Damage, But It’s A Political Hot Potato

Dennis Liming loves to zoom up the Coeur d’Alene River in a speedboat.

“Then I look behind me,” he said, “and I see the problem it’s causing.”

The problem is riverbank erosion, much of it caused by pounding boat wakes. Banks are deeply gouged, trees are crashing. The water is dirtier.

“We have to do something,” said Liming.

There are two obvious things to do: reinforcing the riverbanks, or restricting boat traffic.

The first approach is costly, and greatly complicated by the fact that the reddish dirt washing into the river is not natural riverbank. It’s mine tailings, and it’s polluted with lead, zinc and other toxic metals.

Limiting the speed or number of boats in the lower Coeur d’Alene would be extremely controversial. Liming, a Harrison dock builder, knows that from the years he’s spent on the Kootenai County waterways advisory board.

Farmer Mike Schlepp knows it from the years he’s spent seeking protection for his shoreline property.

“It’s one thing to regulate a man’s work,” he said. “It’s another to regulate his fun.”

Schlepp doesn’t think county commissioners could stand the political heat they’d get for limiting boating in the popular stretch of river from Lake Coeur d’Alene to Cataldo.

Like a lot of sportsmen, Jeff Smith enjoys cruising up the river to fish in the small lakes that adjoin it. He sees limited options for dealing with the erosion.

“One would be no boat traffic; that would go over like a lead brick. Another would be no-wake, but would pretty much eliminate use. It’d take you more than all day to idle up to the lakes,” said Smith, who sells fishing equipment in Coeur d’Alene.

“Restricting the size of boats definitely would help. But where do you set the limit. At 20 feet? Anybody with a boat bigger than 20 feet would have a cow.

“People like me with boats less than 20 feet, we’d think it was great. You wouldn’t have those huge cruisers up there throwing all that water, which I think does the most damage.”

Everyone seems to have a different theory about which boats cause the most damage, and at what speeds.

The speed limit now is 35 miles per hour on the river. There’s a no-wake zone within 100 feet of shorelines, but much of the river is 300 feet wide.

Boating restrictions are such a political hot potato that the idea was avoided by scientists and residents who wrote a Lake Coeur d’Alene management plan.

Instead, they recommended such things as writing pamphlets to educate boaters about the erosion problem, and charging boater fees that would be used to stabilize the banks.

Despite the unpopularity of boating restrictions, Liming would like the waterways board to recommend them to county commissioners.

Other board members don’t think they should even deal with environmental issues.

“The assignment we have really relates to safe boating and access,” said board chairman Sandy Emerson.

The issues are interrelated, Emerson acknowledged. All around Lake Coeur d’Alene and along the St. Joe River, people are asking for no-wake zones to limit both the danger of collision and erosion caused by the exploding number of boats.

John Nigh, who manages a state wildlife area near Harrison, can document that explosion from his home above the Coeur d’Alene River.

“Last Sunday, I counted 45 boats an hour,” he said. “There was a brown band stirred up for 30 feet on either side of the river.”

When scientists see that brown sediment, they think about the metals it contains.

Rock and dirt laced with the toxic metals poured into the river from the Silver Valley starting in the 1880s. It was 80 years before the government required upstream settling ponds to capture the sediment.

Cleanup has only just begun. The effort is largely focused upstream. If tailings aren’t removed from the headwaters, the thinking goes, then toxic sediment will continue to wash down and be deposited downstream.

The metals can cause nerve damage, or sicken and kill humans and wildlife in other ways. Eventually, much of pollution settles to the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene. The zinc, soluble in water, can travel all the way to the Columbia River.

But what about the sediment that’s already along the river, and is sending metals downstream into Lake Coeur d’Alene?

Should it be dug out and replaced with “clean dirt”?

Should it be covered with rocks? If it is, will that keep the metals from seeping into the water when the water level behind Post Falls dam drops each fall?

Putting rock on the shoreline could cause the river to dig more deeply at the river bed, which is more polluted than the banks.

“You could spend $8 million and riprap the thing from end to end. The river would probably undercut the armor in time,” said Geoff Harvey, a state water analyst involved with the Coeur d’Alene Basin Restoration Project.

Scientists know that erosion has increased in the past 15 years, right along with boat use. But they don’t know how much erosion is caused by the wakes; how much by natural flooding; and how much by the damrelated fluctuations.

The mining industry, which will probably have to pay for the work, recommends a site-by-site approach. The companies have written a plan that would reinforce parts of the shoreline, and excavate other parts to get the worst pollution away from the river.

If toxic soil is scraped off, a safe place must be found to store it.

“It may be heresy, but the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene may be better than some hillside in the Coeur d’Alene mountains,” said Harvey.

If that’s true, the scientist said, it may be best to let the erosion continue. Then he joked: “Maybe you should have speed races up and down the river.”

Property owners might not see the humor in that.

“My soil is disappearing,” said farmer Schlepp. “I still pay real estate taxes on land that’s down at Harrison.”

, DataTimes