“If you have hot streams, you don’t have fish,” says Jeffrey Wittler, Environmental Resources Manager for Clark Public Utilities. “When the stream is flowing really hard, it’s really hard on the fish, especially the juveniles,” said Wittler.
Wittler is one of three influential employees who have worked beside hundreds of volunteers each year to recover the Salmon Creek Watershed. The mission of Clark Public Utilities Stream Team for the past 25 years has been to cool the waters and to provide resting ground, food sources and breeding area for salmon in Salmon Creek.
“Our forefathers were very industrious,” Wittler says of the architects of Vancouver. “They could move streams over hundreds of feet.”
Although that was an impressive feat, they forgot one thing: a clean, straight stream bed doesn’t serve fish, bugs or plants in the stream or in the end waters. Decades later, Wittler and other Clark Public Utilities (CPU) employees, contractors and hundreds of volunteers have dedicated their efforts toward stream restoration, creating what they call “channel complexity.” They have done so by planting trees beside the streams and adding other elements, such as large logs (24 to 38 inches in diameter), to lock the channel structure in place and to provide this “refugia,” diffusing some of the stream’s energy. One thousand volunteers participate annually in the potting and planting of trees that will someday take over and naturally create the original conditions necessary for a healthy stream.
The person who started this effort in earnest was Judie Stanton.“There were a lot of reasons the utility began focusing on the natural environment in Clark County in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” says Stanton. “Our first big public involvement effort was the Stream Team, which identified Salmon Creek and its tributaries as a special area of emphasis. At the time, all of the wells supplying the PUD’s water utility were in the Salmon Creek basin.” Cleaning up the source of water was critical to good water quality for public consumption.
“In 1990, in honor of the 20th anniversary of Earth Day (April 22), I was part of an executive committee that planned our local events,” explains Stanton. Partners with Clark Public Utilities at that time were with Clark County, the City of Vancouver, Gifford Pinchot National Forest (U.S. Forest Service), BPA, and the WSU Extension. “We organized the first Salmon Creek trash clean-up day. It was the first use of the Stream Team name and of a logo,” recalls Stanton.
The Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board identified limiting factors for salmon, and the biggest one was side channel refugia. In the summer the fish need off-channel refugia, places where the water is cool and places where they can lay their eggs upstream. In the winter they need side channel refugia with slack water (calm water) so they can rest.
“Our ultimate goal was to bring the salmon back to the creek, as that would be an indicator of the improved health of the stream,” Stanton says.
Volunteers and employees started with trash collection, planting willow saplings along the banks and painting warnings at storm drains to let people know that whatever went down the drains dumped into a stream.
Stanton went on to be a county commissioner and co-chair of the League of Women Voters of Clark County.
Enter Dean Sutherland, a construction electrician who became a State Representative and then a State Senator. After fourteen years in the legislature, he was keen to devote the next part of his life to natural resources.
“It was the beginning of an era of these kinds of activities,” recalls Sutherland, who saw the community transitioning out of a consumptive mode in regard to the environment and into a “contributing mode.” He saw himself poised to aid the program because he knew all the players and had the passion. He was brought on to Clark Public Utilities as a consultant to assist with improving water quality and quantity.
“Salmon Creek at that time was in degradation,” he says. Old septic tanks were leaking; cattle, llamas and horses were walking in the creek; and there was clear-cutting to the edge of the creek, causing erosion and siltation in the water. The water temperature was higher than it should have been. “People were struggling with how to monitor the water and what to do first,” he says. There was an agreement that Clark Public Utilities would monitor and report their findings to the agencies involved: the Department of Environmental Quality, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and others.
“CPU purposely chose a different course than other utilities,” Sutherland says. Instead of buying the land, they chose to work with land owners to do enhancements. And then along came Stanton. And then Sutherland. And, finally, Wittler, who occupies the position now and has introduced Eradication Nation and the other programs.
Sutherland takes more of a global view of things now. “It’s a small world,” he believes, from the deck of his 50-foot boat that he and his wife have been cruising on for a year. Work that is done by volunteers on the streams in Clark County “has a profound effect locally, and collectively impacts everything downstream from them,” Sutherland continues. He believes every tree planted has a ripple effect. People take that good feeling and stewardship with them. And it’s having an impact: “I think there is global awareness.”
