Uncategorized admin | 01 Jul 2007 08:30 am
Westport Slough
Clatskanie: When 79 year-old Mervin Palomaki was a teen-ager, salmon used to run thick in Westport Slough. It’s difficult to imagine now: The upper slough is a mossy float of muck barely fit for bullfrogs. “It stinks like heck,” Palomaki said.
Sometime this week, a contractor will scoop out the last pile of dirt levee that slackens the slough. And then, when the tide rises and water runs under Point Adams Road for the first time in 62 years, the slough that Palomaki remembers will start its long comeback.
Until 1938 , Westport Slough was one connection between the Clatskanie and Columbia rivers. It was such an important route for migrating salmon and steelhead that commercial fishermen trolled its length. But the slough that carried salmon from below also carried floodwater from above.
In the late 1930s, a series of Columbia River dams were just starting to appear upstream, and flood control in the rich farmland was a high priority. So was finding work for a nation stuck in the Great Depression. and, said lifetime resident Margaret Magruder, “We didn’t count fish as much back then.”
When the Corps plugged the slough nine miles upstream from the Columbia, fish could still get into the Clatskanie by swimming farther up the Columbia, but their preferred route was blocked.
While the slough’s closure is just part of a complex problem, today’s weak fish runs around Clatskanie can’t compare to Palomaki’s youth.
In the past week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with the help of a contractor, has been undoing its earlier work for the sake of salmon. The Corps is paying three-fourths of the $300,000 cost to lay a 90 foot length of huge culvert and rebuild the road on top, while the Columbia Soil and Water Conservation District will pay the remaining 25 percent.
Magruder is coordinator of the Lower Columbia River Watershed Council, a partner in the project. Her grandfather, Richard Brooke Magruder, was responsible for building many of the early 1900s agricultural dikes that shield the area’s farmland from regular flooding, but the Corps’ dike was a later development.
To comfort the diking districts on the slough’s lower reaches, the Corps welded massive steel gates to the 8-by-12-foot culvert mouth. During floods, local officials can lower the gates to cut off the flow.
In the years since the Corps severed Westport Slough from the Clatskanie River, the upper slough slowly filled with silt with each tide change. Small tributaries help keep the lower slough cleaner and some salmon and steelhead continue to dart into Graham and Plympton creeks to spawn.
The running water should flush silt out of the slough, although the Corps project manager Steve Bredthaner doesn’t expect the waterway to regain its historic 20-foot depth. Neither he nor Magruder would predict just how much the project would help salmon. “From all that we know it will, but we’re going to find out.” Magruder said.
Said Bredthaner, “I would say ultimately there will be some (salmon) moving back through it. When, I couldn’t say.”
From the Daily News: Eric Apalategui.
Slough looking East
Slough looking West
