Search this Chehalis River Council site!Friday, January 21, 2005
By Brian Mittge, bmittge@chronline.com
Editor's note: Today, The Chronicle's look at urban creeks of Centralia and Chehalis concludes with Dillenbaugh Creek, which snakes through woods, farmland, city neighborhoods and the Chehalis Industrial Park, and crosses Interstate 5 three times. It has been the site of unpermitted flood control bulldozing and mysterious toxic contamination, but is also seen as a major hope for local salmon populations.
The series began Thursday with a look at China Creek, downtown Centralia's unruly drainpipe and surprising home to the occasional sturdy salmon.
Tall towers of timber mills and a power plant rose in the distance as Pete Bèzy and Glen Unzelman walked through the metal gate at Unzelman's south Chehalis farm Thursday.
Unzelman, who has lived his entire life within a mile of his Jackson Highway ranch, once owned 81 acres, but sold 50 to the Port of Chehalis for factories and retail distribution centers.
The rest is for sale, the rancher said, at the right price.
On this overcast morning, his bull was locked safely away in the barn, and Unzelman shut his dog out of the pasture as they walked toward Dillenbaugh Creek.
"There's fish down there," Unzelman said, referring to salmon poisoning disease for dogs. "Those dead salmon don't work very well." A month or two ago, he could hear salmon splashing in the creek as they spawned. His grandson loves to fish from these banks, he said.
Bèzy eased through the strands of a barbed wire fence and began to click a metal counter as he tabulated a collection of saplings planted along the edge of the rolling, spring-fed creek.
A few of the knee-high trees grow at crazy angles after a chomping by a beaver or deer, but many of the cedars, firs, alders, willows and dogwoods are head-high and growing quickly.
Bèzy, a real estate broker who lives just upstream, is also chair of Lewis County Flood Control District 1. The entity collects taxes on 365 acres in and around the Chehalis Industrial Park, including Unzelman's ranch and Bèzy's own Christmas tree farm.
The flood district supervised the planting of these trees alongside Dillenbaugh Creek about four years ago, using, in part, $50,000 in environmental mitigation money from Chehalis Power. The Belgian-owned company generates 420 megawatts of power at a natural gas plant half a mile to the south.
The trees are intended to help shade Dillenbaugh Creek to make it friendly for salmon along a new flood channel bulldozed a few feet south of Dillenbaugh Creek's main channel.
Bèzy had to ease along a section of rocks put in to stabilize the flood channel, and proudly said the project has kept water from overtopping Jackson Highway (and flooding around his century-old house) since it was installed in the late 1990s.
"If we hadn't done this work, I know for a fact my place would have flooded," Bèzy said.
He has lived along Jackson Highway since 1971.
Another flood control project on the Dillenbaugh in 1991 and 1992 may have cut down on high waters in the industrial park, but it also caught the unwelcome attention of state regulators.
"The original work that was done was unpermitted. They basically took a Cat and made a nice big wide flat stream. The problem was the stream flowed at about an inch and a half deep through the summertime in that stretch," said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Scott Brummer.
A 1995 report by the Lewis County Conservation District said that project's removal of vegetation on the south bank made the stream warmer during the summer, and thus more hazardous for cold-water loving fish such as salmon and the rainbow trout that live in the creek.
"The first phase got started before permits were in place," Bèzy said, but noted that state agencies were on board with the later work.
Brummer said he has issued permits for flood trenches in the industrial park, including one behind Hardel Mutual Plywood Co. that drains into Dillenbaugh Creek.
"When they're done right and designed right, they're fine," the Chehalis-based biologist said.
A salmon's journey Fish migrating from the ocean via the Chehalis River have a lot with which to contend before Unzelman's grandson can fish for them from these banks.
The Dillenbaugh empties into the much larger Chehalis River near state Route 6 after flowing under Interstate 5 and two ramps at exit 77 from the freeway.
Salmon swimming upstream would pass by swamps surrounding the Chehalis Thorbecke's FitLife Center, which is a healthier neighbor for them than the toxic waste site that sat there until it was cleaned up in the mid-1990s.
Until 1983, American Crossarm and Conduit operated a mill on Chehalis Avenue that used a variety of strong chemicals to treat wood. A Nov. 25, 1986, flood washed those chemicals into the surrounding neighborhoods, and out to the wetlands and Dillenbaugh Creek.
The federal government helped clean up the site, eventually opening it for development such as the fitness center with the requirement that an 18-inch layer of clean capping soil never be disturbed.
A salmon swishing onward would pass back underneath Interstate 5, past Stan Hedwall Park, and begin encountering long, straight, shallow ditches where farmers, engineers and industrialists rerouted the curving Dillenbaugh into flood drainage trenches.
Most of the rain that falls onto Chehalis ends up in drainage ditches, such as those running behind W.F. West High School and the Snively neighborhood, which drain into the Dillenbaugh here.
The salmon comes back to Interstate 5 a final time at Labree Road. The creek passes underneath the freeway just north of the intersection. The state Department of Transportation has to figure the stream, and its fish, into its plans to build a new set of exit ramps at Labree Road in 2007.
Instead of a culvert, the DOT will build a bridge for one of the new freeway exit ramps, so the salmon don't have to swim so far in the dark, cramped tube.
After passing under the freeway, a spotted red coho would swim behind Hardel Plywood and up into the Chehalis Industrial Park.
On Maurin Road, work continues for an expansion of the Fred Meyer distribution center. Some of that work includes filling an old drainage ditch that runs diagonally across the development site and replacing it with a new one next to the road.
Bèzy said the flood control district cleaned out many of its ditches several years ago, and he said the results have been dramatic. Companies such as Cascade Hardwoods, located along the banks of the Dilly Twig, a small tributary of the Dillenbaugh, are better protected from flooding now that water can drain out of the streams more quickly, he said.
The ditches, instead of being choked with brush and trees, are generally now sloping trenches with a few cattails growing alongside.
He dismissed worries that dredging these drainage ditches would harm salmon migrating through the area.
"We get that argument from Fisheries a lot," Bèzy said. "What we're doing in this area is minimal if you look at the whole picture. What are you going to do, stop progress?" The wild edge of the city Kirk Johnson was recently given an unusual choice: Did he want to be in the city of Chehalis, where he could build up to 30 homes on his five acres, or keep his property in unincorporated county land? The choice was simple for Johnson, who works as Braun Northwest sales manager after moving from Seattle to Chehalis in 1987 with his wife Mary to rear two daughters on their wooded Sanderson Road property.
He stayed out of the future city boundary, but the city's urban growth area now comes up to the edge of his property, giving him a unique perspective on the creek that is gradually tamed after it runs out of his land.
The coho salmon that make it from the ocean through the city and passes by Johnson's property might just stop and hang out for a while.
Many of those salmon were hatched from eggs in a simple black plastic barrel Johnson has operated for the past 17 years.
The Pacific Salmon Trollers Association maintained the remote site incubator when he bought the property, and Johnson has kept it up over the years.
"It's nice to see fish come back to the creek," Johnson said.
Old-timers have talked about hauling fish out of the Dillenbaugh with pitchforks, but Johnson said the creek was effectively dead for years.
He brings eggs down from the state's salmon hatchery on the Satsop River, and within three months after he dumps them in his barrel, the fish have hatched and wriggled down into his two rearing ponds.
Years later, when the adults migrate back up, they head straight back for those ponds, but can't get back up the pipe. They generally wait around about a day, then head on upstream to some high-quality gravel beds up in the woods, Johnson said.
State wildlife experts counted 14 salmon egg nests, or redds, this year, Johnson said, sounding a bit surprised and pleased with the number.
He doesn't think the fish population is out of danger, however. Another neighbor repairs trucks along the stream bank, and chemicals could wash into the water during floods, Johnson said.
Johnson, once an avid fisherman, said he hasn't even purchased a fishing license for the past few years. He just enjoys knowing the salmon are there.
"It's nice to have a creek with salmon in it," he said. "Not everyone can say that."
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
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