Dredging Sought To Lower Dread Gravel, Silt Buildup In Waterways Needs Scooping, Some Say, But They’ve Got A Fight On Their Hands

Log by log, cedar shake by cedar shake, John Carney has been piecing together his home up Latour Creek Road since 1980.

He and his wife fashioned their gleaming counter tops from a giant cedar log that they pulled from the creek.

The porch will soon have burl-adorned support posts. Carney made the front door handles from family heirlooms - a hatchet and an ax.

So to say that it would be “awful” if their home washed away in a flood is a gross understatement, they said.

Just a few hundred feet upstream from the handcrafted home is a crumbling dike along Latour Creek. The February flood and subsequent spring runoff a week ago ate away at the old dike, leaving it just a couple of feet wide.

“If that washes out, that would take the road, the house and everything,” Carney said.”I can’t afford the loss. It’s too late for me to start over again.”

The Natural Resource Conservation Service is helping repair the dike, but it’s only one of many such problems along North Idaho’s streams and rivers. As many locals see it, the only way to solve the problem of repeated flooding is to scoop out the gravel and silt that’s building up in the waterways.

That would give the waterways more room to hold the runoff, and, some think, bring back dwindling fish habitat.

Longtime residents fear that flooding will become more frequent and more disastrous if the current “bed-loading” trend continues.

“We’re seeing less and less water cause more and more damage,” said Harold Van Asche, Shoshone County’s disaster services coordinator, at a recent meeting of government workers and officials.

“We’re very concerned that, because of life and property, that we be allowed to do something about this,” he said.

Something like dredging.

“This county has pushed very hard to have the federal and state agencies allow us to dredge these rivers,” said Jack King, Shoshone County commissioner. “I know environmentalists get upset with this, but the bottom is getting higher than the sides.”

Up Latour Creek, Kootenai County officials are proposing to dredge the creek, then crush the gravel and use it to raise the perennially flooded road.

Whenever it floods, the Carneys and about 75 other families are trapped. Their only escape is by rowboat.

But the conventional wisdom that calls for dredging has clashed with science. The solution is a lot more complicated than it appears, the experts say.

Many of them acknowledge that the sediment is building up on the river and stream bottoms. A few years ago, measurements in Pritchard Creek showed that the elevation of the stream bottom had increased 30 inches from historic levels.

“In the headwater streams, there’s been a lot of erosion,” said Ned Horner, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

Horner believes the loss of fish habitat from gravel buildup has contributed to the depletion of fish in the Coeur d’Alene River system.

While the St. Joe River has 400 to 800 fish per mile, along the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River scientists have counted less than 100 fish per mile.

In some places, they’ve only counted 10 fish per mile, Horner said.

“Fish need deep pools,” he said. “They need streams that have lots of woody debris that create pools.”

Dredging isn’t the best way to create the pools. Instead of dredging, Horner and other experts suggest that the streams be protected with good forest practices at their headwaters, and allowed to run their course in the flood plain.

“You start playing with dredging and you start playing with fire,” said Mike Beckwith of the USGS. “Rivers tend to go where they want to go … If you do something in one place, usually they’ll react somewhere else in unforeseen ways.”

For instance, he said, increasing the channel capacity can cause more erosion downstream.

Further complicating matters in the Coeur d’Alene River around Cataldo is the heavy metals washing down the south fork. Dredging is expensive to begin with. Properly disposing of the metal-contaminated sediment may make the job prohibitively expensive.

Doing anything that stirs up the metals causes concern.

“Dredging is such a non-politically correct thing to do,” said Gary Davis, state coordinating officer for the Bureau of Disaster Services. “You just don’t touch it.”

Besides, Davis and others say, it’s only a temporary solution.

The root of the problem is “100 years of abuse,” as Van Asche describes it. All development - roads, logging, mining and housing - have contributed to the dilemma.

The Coeur d’Alene River drainage includes some areas with extremely high road densities. Where roads are not properly built or maintained, erosion wreaks havoc.

The additional surface area caused by roads, clearcuts and development increases the amount of runoff into the creeks, which in turn causes more damage downstream.

“The problem is ongoing,” said the Idaho Conservation League’s Scott Brown at a recent meeting of agency representatives. “We’ve got clearcuts planned for the North Fork and other parts of the watershed. We’ve cut the heck out of the watershed.”

Jim Colla from the Idaho Department of Lands responded that much of the flood damage had natural causes.

“We found a number of situations where the slide started up the hill and the road became the victim,” he said. “It wasn’t the cause, it was the victim …

“It’s simplistic to think that by doing one thing we’re going to solve all the problems.”

Carney, a log hauler, doesn’t believe that logging is to blame for the flooding problems. But he and his wife know something needs to be done to protect their property.

“Something I think the government needs to do in these situations is place the people above the fish and birds,” Carney said.

Until something changes, whenever the water rises, the Carneys will do what they always do - stock up on groceries, get out the rowboat, and keep a close eye on the dike.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo