Redwood Reader

Today I got my first comment on my blog, sixteen months and a hundred and fifty posts later. I have received some emails about it but this is the first person to use Bloggers comment system, but then he posts anonymously. He/she had a couple of good points and let ignorance shine even as he/she yelled about mine.

“Mr. McGuiness shows his ignorance of the road construction standards followed by Palco and the road upgrading that is mandated under the Habitat Conservation Plan. Palco's road upgrading far exceeds the scope of the Good Roads, Clean Creeks program because it is mandated as a cost of doing business, rather than a project that depends on a series of negotiations with individual landowners and erratic funding sources. Also, even a cursory look at a map of ownership within the Mattole watershed will show that Palco's ownership is not in proximity to the estuary as Mr. McGuiness claims.”

I am aware of Palcos road building and upgrading to a large extent, because I have taken Private Ranch and Logging Road seminars put on by Mattole Restoration Council with Bill Weaver of Pacific Watershed Management around ten years ago. I have had roadwork done by Bob Angelini, a private contract logger who works for PL. They did our road in Bridgeville before rolling dips were recognized by the State, and those roads have remained in relatively good shape for ten years now. I am also aware of the huge impacts of roads from walking devastated landscapes with Richard Geinger and Jack Munschke.
To my mind Good Roads Clean Creeks is machine work across multiple ownerships in each tributary, and one of only a few watershed wide restoration that can make an impact, along with revegetation and stream channel improvements. The program only covers roads currently in use, and so vast amounts of work remain to return to even pre 1940 conditions after the program has moved to other streams.
Why would I be so interested in failing roads? People bought destroyed land after the 1964 flood ruined the landscape and many people moved away, or were bought out, like the Bull Creek Watershed. Previous logging and road building has led to as many as ten miles of unimproved road or skid trail for every square mile of land. Couple that with over a hundred inches of rain a year, some years two hundred inches, and we have vast amounts of runoff that should be being at least slowed and absorbed. Roads concentrate runoff in swales that nature optimally designed. We can fix it as we go but only if we are aware, otherwise we will get cumulative impacts from more water sources (any amount over the absorption rate), especially where it collects and concentrates from drainage diversion and vegetation removal.
DFG came out to see my property, which is creekside. The entire watershed above us is impaired and fault lines and undercut toes of entire hillsides, together with artificially steep banks meant there was nu guarantee of endurance or stability for restoration or improvement projects. We are dealing with what is left, and they tell us current science and laws based on it are inadequate to address these issues. DFG said there wasn’t enough money in the world to fix Middle Creek correctly, and even then it would be geologically unstable due to faults and heavy rainfall.
One thing DFG requested was a sediment inventory, and we also established baseline data for Middle And Westlund Creeks to measure over a period of years. The sediment inventory established the fact that every swale between the road and the creek was delivering sediment to the stream, and that new construction had rerouted a large amount of water causing massive gullies and slides on property below them. Good Roads Clean Creeks has no hope of fixing all these things, done in the name of industry and jobs back when. It can reduce sedimentation from publicly used roads (still in multiple landowner mode, to the detriment of reality) through reshaping and culvert upgrades. It can do little for the other disturbed drainages, artificially steep slopes and seemingly endless skid and fire trail remains. And it is all we are going to get at the current rate.
I have been receiving International Erosion Control Associations Erosion Control magazine for several years. In it we see ads for all kinds of silt and sediment retention devices for streets and building sites in populated areas. Humboldt County would benefit from many of these practices, some are on the books for developers but not natural resource management. There was a good article about the 101 culvert replacement in Standish-Hickey several years ago. We see mycorhizzia has made it to the advertising section but somehow is still left out of regulatory discussions since its role in soil aggregation was unknown at the time. This is the critical importance of the discovery of glomalin. We sure would like to see research get serious about this so we can go on to rebuilding the fisheries without worrying about our back.
Perhaps PLs land is pristine. Road building then is a real source of concern. Maybe the roads have been in for years- lets see what they did right. The last statement about the estuary shows a complete lack of knowledge of what happens in heavy rain on scarred ground. The answer is that the sediment will travel into the stream and collect in the drop out zone. Since the area is so steep, the sediment drop out site is the main stem of the Mattole and since they are close to the mouth, that is where the impacts will occur. Everyone upstream working on fisheries and habitat knows the estuary is already full of silt and is nearing unsurvivability for juvenile salmonids in the heat of the year. With the entire watershed working on fisheries recovery for twenty years, all of these impacts are foreseen. Comments like this will not serve to objectify the problem or reduce impacts.
Watching the Freshwater/Elk River fiasco we have suggested both sides take a long look at the science reported since the HCP was signed in 1992. The people here are used to clean creeks because there was little activity in these watersheds when people moved in. PL has done nothing to reduce public friction by announcing an investigation into new revelations about sedimentation caused by deaggregation of soils and increased mobility of those deaggregated soils due to reduced vegetative resistance. Logging rules are like telling a kid to clean his room, no matter what he does you see what he didn’t get to. In this case, all of that free moving sediment.