Logging Road Clouds Town’s Daily Routine Muddied Creek Spawns Boil-Water Order; Timber Firm Working To Mitigate Damage

Each day at the Fernwood Cafe, owner Barbara Ross turns on the tap, fills a water glass, then peers at it.

She’s looking for what scientists call “turbidity” - what most of us call cloudiness.

A messy logging operation has fouled Adams Creek, which supplies drinking water to 190 homes in Fernwood. Fernwood Water District filters and chlorinates the water to kill bacteria.

Fernwood is a town of several hundred people about 20 miles southeast of St. Maries.

The district has scheduled a town meeting at the Fernwood fire hall at 7 p.m. Wednesday. Officials want to update residents on the situation and hear their suggestions.

The first sign of a problem came in early October, when a worker noticed that water was muddy, even after being filtered. The filter is supposed to screen out silt, debris and some bacteria.

But if mud can pass through the filter, so can bacteria, said Lyle Misbach , a water-quality specialist with the state Division of Environmental Quality. And the muddiness makes it harder for chlorine to kill stray bacteria, he said.

On Nov. 3, the department issued a notice recommending that all Fernwood Water District customers boil their drinking water for several minutes. No one has reported any sickness, Misbach said.

The order likely will last until the ground freezes and erosion is less likely, he said.

Meanwhile, workers from the state Department of Lands traced the muddy water to a “poorly planned, poorly constructed and poorly maintained” logging road in the watershed, said Jim Colla, a department forester.

“The logging was fine,” Colla said. “The road construction was the big problem here. If they would have called us first, it’s something that certainly could’ve been avoided.”

The road was poorly drained, he said, with recent heavy rains eroding fill dirt into Adams Creek and a tributary. The silt ran down the creek - and into the water district’s intake. The Department of Lands ordered the St. Maries logging company, American Resource Management, to stop logging and fix the road. Colla said he couldn’t recall another case in which logging has fouled a municipal water supply.

“We’re going to do whatever we can to resolve the problem,” said Randy Mattson of American Resource Management.

Another principal in the company, Wendle Vannatter told the St. Maries Gazette-Record that his firm didn’t realize the creek was Fernwood’s water source.

“Had we known that, we never would have gone into that drainage,” he told the paper.

At the Intermountain Forest Industry Association, spokesman Ken Kohli said the group supports “full-scale mitigation work on this site and full-scale enforcement of the Forest Practices Act.” The state law regulates logging on private land.

“Obviously, we cringe when we see anything like this happen on the ground,” Kohli said.

Ross, the owner of the Fernwood Cafe, said she now boils the water for lemonade and iced tea. The restaurant shut off its ice-maker and now buys ice.

The boil-water orders are an annual event, due to heavy runoff during the spring thaw, said water district board member Henry Teal Jr. But now the logging road has worsened that problem, he said.

“When spring breakup comes, we’re going to be in a world of hurt,” he said.

Besides turning the drinking water cloudy, he said, the silt slows the filter from a maximum of 160 gallons per minute to 20.

That’s a problem, he said, because the town uses 40 to 50 gallons a minute.

State and local officials will meet today with the logging company to try to hash out a solution.

Colla said the logging company already has gone in and built “water bars” to divert runoff, and installed silt fences and straw bales.

“We can stop or prevent further sediment in the creek,” he said. “But in the meantime, there’s a lot of it moving through the system.”

One possible solution, he said, is to build a small sandbag dam on a nearby unnamed tributary. The dam would trap clean water and funnel it through 1,500 feet of plastic pipe to the filter plant. The district could use that system when heavy rains flush the remaining mud into Adams Creek, he said.

Cost: about $4,500, which likely would be paid by American Resources Management.

“American Resources has been very cooperative. I don’t think they have much choice,” Colla said. “They’ve got to get this fixed if they want to stay in business.”

, DataTimes