Keep it on topic, boys....



In case anyone is still wondering about the source of the silt, this be it... scarred timberlands bleeding BAD in to the south fork of the Chehalis.

For more pics,

click here

We will be dealing with that mess for a while.

Fishing in the Harbor is gonna be pretty sketchy in a few years...

Fish on...

Todd

This is the color larryb was talking about.

Saw this photo and article in the Seattle Times today. Says Weyerhauser hired a geologist to survey the unit before cutting and gave it his thumbs up......this on a slope of 50+ degrees in places with fine soils. I'd hate to see what it would take for him to give a thumbs down.

Of course, the state OK'ed it based on the geologist's report

Ya know......we can't avoid logging. Tree products encompass every aspect of our lives but there's got to be a better way or some middle ground on cutting slopes of this magnitude. Problem is most of our forestland is sloped albeit not always this steep.

This really sucks for the Chehalis Basin (and the people of the upper valley who live there). I believe the waterway in your photo is Stillman Cr, a trib of the S. fork Chehalis(according to the Times article). Without a doubt this is a major player in the lower Chehalis still being horribly off-color. Maybe an inch of vis.

I think it will be a long, slow, painful recovery. That hillside could bleed sediments for years.

Maybe this will help logging practices change in our region. It is possible to harvest timber without de-noding large tracts of land.

Yes but it is more expensive hence the reason they just clear cut.

Did you read the quote at the end of the article,

Angry Weyerhaeuser employee. Rod Rector whose home was flooded attacked state rules that require standing trees to be left alongside streams and some logs left in them. The slides and floods then carried some of the wood downstream.

The unit in the first picture was logged using a yarder, and due to the lack of lift to get the trees off of the ground when hauling them in the area where that biggest slide started took a hell of a beating. It probally had a lot to do the slide starting. Looks like Weyerhouser took a hell of a beating from this storm. Their tree farm on the north Oregon coast has huge losses as you've seen from other pics. Maybe they'll make some changes. Maybe the state of WA should sue for poor logging practices. Larger buffers along the creeks and rivers could have decreased the amount damage caused from the slides. imo.

The "Forest and Fish Plan"..... Yep, its working.

For the "tree growing company". Now pan to the feel good TV commercial with the fake biologists and clipboards.

What a crying shame.

By the looks of the stream upriver from that big slide, they did a great job examing other sites upstream as well

From the picture above, What's wrong with logging only the top 2/3's of that site and leaving a whole 1/3 at the bottom to help mitigate and diffuse slides of that magnitude?

My hope is that incidents like this will act as a catalyst towards the changing of logging practices. Larger buffers zones and independent Geologist studies on these sites need to occur.

OMG I cant believe it!!!!


What part of this subject has been hashed over do you not understand??????

I can't wait to see this end up in court. The geologist should be held responsible. I wouldn't be suprised if that slope would have failed under lesser conditions. To bad he will likely get to argue that this was an event outside the design criteria outlined by the City of Chehalis or Lewis County. The State may have a different view of this being the discharge is a major waterway. This will likely set precedence in this area for a long time.

What a mess.

Just like everything man has managed to screw up, we are going to be dealing with the after effects of this one for a long time. This is going to destroy runs that have been in the river sytems surrounding the Chehalis and the Chehalis itself for years and years to come. Too bad people can't see this and realize that we need to make a dramatic change in the way we do business. Or we are going to get a serious slap in the face from mother nature herself. Those are some pretty disheartening pics.

i'd guess the fact that it effected the chehalis would make it federal/navigable water thing but that is a nonissue as the fed has their own way of dealing with minor to them or their contributers problems that effect us common folk
the red color of that decaying basaltic flow from about 40 million years ago is a bit of a strange site though with so much of this part of the state being alluvial type deposits

Wow,
That is terrible, I am a former logger and there are other ways to keep harvesting without ruining streams, fish and wildlife habitat and of course without ruining peoples lives. I wish I still had a self loader, I would be up there hauling loads away everyday for cash baby !!!!
Hopefully they will get in there and replant with some native grasses and weeds to hold the soil until the new trees they will plant can hold the ground, but until then look for everytime it rains the chehalis to blowout real easy, this just sucks along with all the reds that most likely got silted in and suffocated, big changes I am sure to our harbor regs.

Peace
Fly

I guess there won't be many allocation battles going on for the Chehalis Basin, Joe... there won't be any fish to argue over. Can you say Tier ZERO?

For one that clearcut is bigger then it should have been and to close to water..
Look to the top left of the picture..See the slides where timber is present..
With the weather we had that froze the ground and dumped snow then the temps jumped 20 degrees thawed everything and the ground that storm set us up for some desasters with clearcuts or not...

Not to minimize the severity of those slides, but it's probably fortunate that they're on a South Fork trib and not the mainstem Chehalis. There's not a lot of mainstem spawning downstream of the South Fork at least until Oakville. The river gradient is too flat, and a lot of sediment will settle out there - contributing to future flooding problems. The preponderance of Chehalis mainstem spawning is in the main fork upstream of Rainbow Falls and even Pe Ell. Of course, if Stillman Creek was a decent coho spawning and rearing trib, it ain't no more.

If that slope was going to be harvested, it should have been selective cut with no dragging allowed for yarding. But those kind of restrictions likely would have made it unprofitable to cut at all.