4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2017
Harvest: ‘This is very rare on the
Coast Guard helps
Oregon Coast to own your own watershed’ respond to Harvey
Continued from Page 1A
The watershed, the source
of Astoria’s drinking water,
is easy to find on a map. Sur-
rounded by private timber-
land 10 miles southeast of
Astoria, it is a rare, solid
swath of emerald in a land-
scape that is otherwise a
patchwork of brown clearcut
and green forest.
The water here once fed
the city’s booming canneries
and now supplies its brew-
eries. And the city owns the
entire thing: about 3,700
densely forested acres, 32
miles of stream and tributar-
ies, Bear Creek Reservoir,
Middle Lake and Wickiup
Lake.
“This is very rare on the
Oregon Coast to own your
own watershed,” Hayes said
as he stopped his truck and
looked around.
Full ownership pro-
vides a host of benefits,
but also poses unique chal-
lenges. While the city doesn’t
need to worry about activi-
ties upstream contaminating
drinking water, it does have
to be extra cautious when
pursuing any road mainte-
nance or forestry work.
truck drivers take corners
slow when they’re hauling
logs out and contractors know
they’re working within a dif-
ferent set of parameters.
“We’re making sure that
the logging that we do does
not affect water quality,” Nel-
son said. “In a normal for-
estry situation, they don’t
shut down when it’s raining
hard and we do that. We don’t
let them haul or do any kind
of logging in the wintertime.”
Astoria also entered a car-
bon-credit program two years
ago — the city was essen-
tially paid to not aggressively
harvest for the next 20 years.
Cook said the city received
$2.2 million and has since
sold an additional $40,000
worth of carbon credits. The
city is still able to harvest at
its normal rate, and already
harvests less than it could.
This money helped pay for
a new ladder truck for the
Astoria Fire Department. The
rest of it, along with money
from this year’s timber har-
vest, went into the city’s
capital improvement fund,
which is available for an city
department.
Though it looks somewhat
like a traditional clearcut
now, Astoria Public Works
will soon plant new trees in
the thinned parcels.
Coast Guard personnel
from Sector Columbia River
in Warrenton, along with Air
Station Port Angeles and
Sector Puget Sound, have
deployed in response to Hur-
ricane Harvey.
An MH-60 Jayhawk heli-
copter from Sector Columbia
River was sent to Air Station
San Diego to help cover for
aircraft deployed to Texas,
where the Coast Guard has
rescued more than 1,450
people. The Coast Guard has
20 helicopters in the region
conducting rescues, along
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Changes to come
Water quality, by neces-
sity, is at the heart of every
management action taken in
the Bear Creek watershed,
said Astoria Public Works
Superintendent Ken Nelson.
“A lot of the tools in the
normal forestry toolkit don’t
work here,” Hayes said. Log
with crews on land and
water.
“This is an all-hands
response that involves per-
sonnel and support from
across the country,” Capt.
Sean Cross, incident man-
agement chief of the Coast
Guard’s 13th District, said
in a release. “Our crews
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regardless of their home
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The Daily Astorian
BUY ANY 5
Ownership
Some Astoria residents
criticized the city after a
solicitation for bids for this
year’s harvest appeared on
the City Council’s consent
calendar in March, rather
than as an item on the regu-
lar agenda. Items on the con-
sent calendar are considered
routine — adopted by a sin-
gle motion — and are usu-
ally not discussed in detail
by city councilors. Items on
the regular agenda, however,
receive more of an airing and
are open for public comment.
In response, the City Council
asked city staff to hold a pub-
lic meeting to provide people
with more information.
The harvest is routine,
staff would later emphasize,
and necessary to building and
maintaining a healthy water-
shed. The city harvests at the
watershed every year under
high standards set by the For-
est Stewardship Council, of
which Astoria has been a
member for at least a dozen
years. Astoria harvests less
than 25 percent of the growth
in the watershed, staff said, a
very low percentage.
Astoria has enjoyed full
ownership of its watershed
since the 1950s and began
acquiring pieces of it as early
as the 1890s. Other coastal
towns and cities in Oregon
are trying to achieve the same
feat of full ownership, but
it’s a difficult and expensive
undertaking.
Earlier this year, Oregon
Public Broadcasting reported
that the state Department
of Environmental Quality
scrapped a report that linked
private industrial forests and
activities on such lands to
risks for drinking water qual-
ity on the Oregon Coast, fol-
lowing pushback by the Ore-
gon Department of Forestry
and the timber industry.
Rockaway Beach, a small
town of just over 1,300 peo-
ple south of Manzanita,
struggles with water quality.
Jetty Creek, the town’s pri-
mary source of water, flows
through industrial timber-
land. Most of the watershed
has been logged in recent
years and clearcut hills rear
up behind the town. Sediment
and debris tied to logging
operations often clog up the
water and can interfere with
the disinfection process. Res-
idents receive frequent alerts
about harmful chemicals in
their water, OPB found.
The city isn’t logging for
the money, Hayes said after
the thinning harvest was com-
pleted in August. He stood on
the road above where the thin-
ning occurred: A parcel now
open, dominated by piles of
snags, smaller logs not worth
hauling out and the remaining
trees. Harvests like this are
intended to open up the for-
est canopy and decrease the
threat of fire, creating a more
diverse — and, therefore,
more resilient — forest.
It is important work,
Hayes said. “Especially with
climate change, because we
don’t know what’s going to
happen here.”
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