Washougal River Restoration (Columbian Article 6 20 05)

Monday, June 20, 2005By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer
CAMAS - Tony Meyer steadied himself along a steep slope running from a railroad bridge abutment down to the Washougal River and pointed to an imagined landform in the middle of the water.
"This point of land extended half way out," he said.
That was more than 25 years ago. In those days, Meyer was a young teenager casting a fishing line from a shore that was 30 yards farther out from the Burlington Northern bridge abutment than it is today.
The river has steadily carved away the century-old fill material that supports the railroad and a parallel bridge for state Highway 500.
Meyer, now executive director of the Lower Columbia Fish Enhancement Group, intends to divert the main flow of the river away from the receding riverside while benefiting salmon and steelhead in the lower Washougal.
Using a $200,000 grant from the state's Salmon Recovery Funding Board, Meyer's group plans to have excavators begin placing boulders across the river at a spot just upstream from the railroad abutment. Meyer expects the riffle will stabilize the eroding bank while beginning to restore some of the natural function lost in a river now showing the effects of a century of filling, gravel mining, log drives and wildfires.
Combined with $50,000 in matching contributions from Georgia-Pacific Corp. and BNSF Railway, the nonprofit organization will build a pair of riffles through the lower river while creating off-channel rearing habitat at three nearby abandoned gravel mining ponds.
Once the project gets the final go-ahead from the National Marine Fisheries Service, workers will begin reconstructing an old gravel mining road from the yard of Concrete Products Co. Dump trucks and excavators, using the road, will then begin placing boulders into the Washougal.
The riffle will raise the river elevation by 3 inches near the railroad abutment, just enough to tweak the river's hydrology.
The main flow of the river will divert from the south, where it's eating away the artificial fill below the bridge abutment, to its old channel flowing past the outfall of Lacamas Creek on the north side of a 5-acre island. Salmon then will be able to take advantage of remnant gravel on the north side to spawn near Lacamas Creek. The riffle also will create a back-channel area to the south, allowing gravel and sediment to settle over time in a slack-water pool. An added benefit will be to shore up the bridge abutment, which is getting perilously close to the river's edge.
"The river's trying to cut this corner off," Meyer said.
After a century of man-made manipulations, the river may be exacting its own revenge.
Beginning a century ago, loggers in the upper part of the river basin constructed splash dams to propel their harvest down to the Columbia River and the sawmills beyond. The dams, combined with a series of forest fires beginning with the Yacolt Burn of 1902, robbed the river of naturally occurring log jams that normally capture sediment and gravel.
In the lower river, a braided network of river channels and floodplains was converted into a slow-moving slough due to diking and filling to accommodate the railroad, roadways and state Highway 14. At the same time, extensive gravel mining in the lower river continued until the supply was nearly exhausted in the mid-1970s. Because the river is starved of sediment upstream, the massive gouges scooped out of the river a half-century ago have never filled in with the gravel that salmon need to spawn successfully.
This summer's project is envisioned as a first step in a comprehensive river restoration plan.
The dry land atop the riffle will provide year-round access to the island, which contains Georgia-Pacific water wells now accessible only when the north channel runs dry in the summer.
"The fish wins, Georgia-Pacific wins, Burlington Northern wins," said Wilson Cady, union environmental representative for Georgia-Pacific.
The project will rehabilitate 10 acres of old gravel mining pits for use as off-channel habitat for salmon. Georgia-Pacific will contribute 80,000 cubic yards of clean fill material dredged from the slough near its paper mill, trucking it to three abandoned mining ponds just off the main channel upstream of the railroad bridge. The project will reconnect the ponds to the Washougal, allowing juvenile salmon to use the ponds as off-channel rearing habitat over the winter. A National Marine Fisheries Service biologist in Lacey is reviewing the project to make sure it fits within a universal permit acquired by the organization for habitat enhancement work under the Endangered Species Act.