Search this Chehalis River Council site!Thursday, January 20, 2005
By Brian Mittge, bmittge@chronline.com
Editor's note: Today, The Chronicle begins a two-part series about urban creeks of Centralia and Chehalis with a look at China Creek. Heavy rains this week sent the creek out of its concrete channel, but flooding is nothing new in what some dismiss as "China Ditch." How did Centralia end up with a brook running underneath its downtown district, and what is the future for this slice of nature which both splits and unifies the city? Coming Friday: a look at Dillenbaugh Creek, which runs through the Chehalis Industrial Park, and offers its own mix of urban troubles and promise.
Long, prickly blackberry vines shoot from the bed of China Creek into the yard of the home where Carl Noyes has lived for 48 years.
Anyone taking a leap off the porch of his tidy white Magnolia Street home would land in the concrete and gravel channel at its first extended open section after emerging from a dark trip underneath downtown Centralia.
After running hundreds of yards in a smooth-sized culvert, the creek explodes into a tangle of swamp weeds and young trees.
Noyes, 77, remembers when the creek seemed alive with eels, crawfish and chum salmon. During one flood, a river otter even swam up from the Chehalis River to frolic in the new pond his back yard had become.
"Now it's got so polluted, I don't think there's anything in there," said Noyes, a retired Centralia fire chief.
Still, the creek is powerful.
On Tuesday morning, after a night of pounding rain, Noyes watched nervously as the creek seemed to rise fast enough for the naked eye to track, until it lapped at the edge of his home's foundation.
He pulled out sheets of thick plastic to seal the entrance to his half-basement, where his 1920 house's furnace is kept.
"It's getting worse each time," he said of the floods. "When it starts coming up, you don't know when it's gonna stop, so you've gotta prepare for it." He blames filling and development for what he says are increasing water levels, and says the city should resume its old habit of scraping the channel clean each year with machinery.
If only it were so simple.
Scott Brummer, a Chehalis-based habitat biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said salmon somehow squirm under Interstate 5, making their way through piles of trash and dark stretches of tunnel to spawn in downtown Centralia and more natural stretches of the valley above it.
"It's amazing that adult fish do migrate, that they are able to make it past all those obstacles and through those dark underground box culverts," said Brummer, who has walked most of the length of China Creek.
He describes salmon-friendly gravel areas near the school bus barn on the bottom of the creek and in the valleys above town.
He said there are a few spots in the creek where a buildup of sand should be removed, but he believes the true problem with flooding is that the box culverts constraining parts of China Creek will carry only so much water.
"We want to keep it down to only what's legitimately necessary, what's really going to make a difference for flood control," Brummer said of neighbors' requests to dredge the creek.
In truly big floods, such as the February 1996 deluge that swamped much of the Twin Cities, China Creek escaped its banks above downtown and flooded Tower Avenue. Farther downstream, the Chehalis River rises so high that China Creek has nowhere to go, and backs up to form a lake.
Centralia Mayor Tim Browning said the problem is simple: too much water with no place to go.
During the 1996 flood, he owned a building just across the street from China Creek, and watched water fill his basement.
"I can fix China Creek if I had $300 million, but we don't have $300 million. We probably don't have $20 million. We may not have $3 million that people want to spend on it," the mayor said. Not only does the city have a difficult problem with China Creek flooding, the city also is facing the daunting cost of replacing about 20 bridges over the creek.
The city replaced one, on Maple Street near City Hall, in 2002, causing distress to some local businesses that said they lost two-thirds of their customers during the work.
Theoretically, the city could expand the capacity of the creek by widening every one of those bridges, but the task is so daunting that no city leaders are seriously considering the idea.
Many downtown buildings, including City Hall and The Chronicle's offices, are also built over the top of the creek.
"There's so much water flowing through there in such a small period of time, that an extra foot or two on each side wouldn't help much," Browning said.
Another idea to reduce flooding is to build pipes to pump some of the excess water across north Centralia to the Skookumchuck River during heavy rains.
Whatever the city decides to do, it will be on its own. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has a plan to reduce flooding on the Chehalis and Skookumchuck rivers, but said its cost-benefit analysis doesn't allow spending federal money on local flooding such as that caused by China Creek.
The creek burst out of its banks as far back as 1917 and 1933, flooding downtown businesses in the new and growing city, according to a 1977 flood report on the creek.
That report recommended dredging and careful land use planning.
"The results of past flooding often are not remembered ... Planners and developers may only guess where such hazards may exist and what effect a planned development may have on flooding," the report reads.
Centralia city planners have certainly lost a lot of institutional knowledge about China Creek. Most of the city's community development staffers are new within the past year.
Building official L.G. Nelson started in April, and said Tuesday's minor flooding was a major education for him.
He talked with retired city officials, and learned to trek upstream to watch where the creek's water level is relative to certain landmarks.
One is the railroad bridge just northeast of downtown, where on Tuesday the water was about a foot below a major support beam.
Experienced old hands offered him a lesson, Nelson said: "If the water is hitting the beam, you might as well evacuate all of downtown."
Despite its propensity for flooding, China Creek is a vital part of the city's storm water and flood control system.
Street drains in most of the downtown area are piped directly into China Creek — but when the creek fills up, those drains have nowhere to go. In some areas, such as the corner of Iron and Magnolia, the intersection is actually lower than the creek's high water level, so the surging creek leaks into the street.
"If we could raise the whole city of Centralia by three feet, we could probably solve a lot of these drainage problems, but that's not really a feasible option," said Kahle Jennings, Centralia's new assistant utility director.
A veteran of the state's Department of Ecology, Jennings is helping coordinate a new storm water utility for Centralia.
The city is looking for volunteers to serve on an advisory board that will look for solutions to storm water problems, Jennings said.
One solution could be applying for state permits to dredge part of China Creek, Jennings said, but only if close study shows that it would actually solve the problem.
Centralia last dredged part of China Creek in 1996, after the devastating floods of that February.
Centralia Street and Storm Water Operations Manager Paul McFadden said the city is looking at removing vegetation from the creek again, but he doesn't think grass and trees do much to impede water compared with the constriction of the culverts.
"It's just more water coming out of the Little Hanaford Valley than what the tributary could hold," McFadden said.
Ecological view Lisa Carlson, in her sixth year as biology professor at Centralia College, leads a group of students who descend into the creek every fall to pick up trash. They bring out an average of a half ton of garbage each year, she said.
"My students have pulled out all kinds of bizarre things," she said, such as car batteries, a high chair, a weightlifting set and a street detour sign.
Walking through the creek, which stays wet all year, offers a different perspective on the city, she said.
"In some stretches you're walking under streets, in some you're walking between people's back yards," she said.
Centralia College, which sits on some of the more wild stretches of the downtown creek, hopes to enhance the area's ecology in coming years.
To help cut down on storm water rushing off parking lots and buildings, the college wants to build wetlands along or near the creek to catch and slowly release water to the creek.
The plans are in the early stages, and would be built along with the college's new science building.
"We're pretty excited about talking about some of the new options for working with nature rather than against nature in controlling floodwaters," Carlson said.
Brian Mittge covers politics, the environment and Lewis County government for The Chronicle. He may be reached by e-mail at bmittge@chronline.com, or by telephoning 807-8237.
The origin of China Creek is one of the original mysteries of Centralia.
Centralia founder George Washington kept his original four-block settlement well south of where China Creek is now.
Some think there was a small, trickling creek in the area.
Others believe it was only a marshy area called "Muckla" by the American Indians of the area and the "China Seep" by current Mayor Tim Browning.
All agree that the long, diagonal line of today's creek is not the original course of whatever waterway was there in the 1800s.
"It's definitely channelized. I don't think it ever really goes into a natural stream bed," Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Scott Brummer said.
The original outfall was also moved to just north of the Mellen Street interchange when Interstate 5 was built, he said.
A 1976 Chronicle story said the creek was named after Chinese laborers brought in to extend the Northern Pacific Railroad from Kalama to Tacoma in 1872.
Some say those Chinese immigrants also dug the creek that bears their name.
Backwaters of the creek northeast of downtown were used as mill ponds, and some say the creek was dug to transport logs back and forth to the Chehalis River.
The 3,800-acre watershed of the creek extends about five miles from the Chehalis River back into the hills above Centralia.
Browning believes a lot of the runoff from the Little Hanaford Valley originally drained directly into the Skookumchuck River, but development of the railroad and the need for more water in the timber mills eventually directed more water into China Creek.
The creek largely goes dry in the summer, although there are pockets that stay wet.
In past years the creek would often "churn merrily along" year-round, according to the 1976 Chronicle story. For years, the creek's summer flows were augmented with leaks from the Seminary Hill reservoir and overflow from the city's old gravity-fed lines bringing in drinking water from the North Fork of the Newaukum River.
Both those structures have been abandoned, the reservoir after bursting in 1991.
At one time, the creek also had a healthy salmon population.
"Before The Daily Chronicle building was constructed in 1947 on the west side of the city hall, keen-eyed firemen always watched the stream in the fall for upstream bound salmon," the 1976 story reads. "A quick lift of a hayfork at dawn often gave the firemen a salmon menu for dinner."
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