Makes Progress With Flood Control

New Defenses

In Place In Time For Flood-prone Seasonbordering

WAITSBURG - Like many residents of the Touchet Valley, Phil Monfort has lived through two floods. So he gets worried when the weather patterns start to look like they did in 1964 and 1996.

Walla Walla County emer­gency management officials said last week that the com­ing

winter could be the worst in more than half a century, potentially generating the kind of snowfall, freezes and sudden thaw that contributed to the floods.

Monfort, who owns land

the Touchet River in Waitsburg, wonders if his community is any better prepared or protected than it was in those catastrophic winters. And he wonders if enough is being done to keep the waterways - the Touchet and Coppei Creek - clear and deep to prevent their banks from overflowing. "I have listened to stories of past flood experiences by several old-timers, long passed on," said Monfort, who moved to Waitsburg about 65 years ago. "Their recollections noted that the river channels were deeper, runoff was less rapid. Gravel bars were removed and used for road construction. Timber along the streams was cut away for fuel. Fears of natu­ral calamity were more acute within the local population, but individuals took more responsibility for control of the resources."

Things have changed since those days before World War II. Now it's up to the city to make sure everything that can be done is being done to keep the rivers within their banks. The question of what "can be done" by the city is partly a function of money, partly of time and partly of govern­mental regulations. "Waitsburg is making lots of efforts to be prepared," said Gay Ernst, director of emergency management for Walla Walla County.

City officials said a num­ber of initiatives should pro­vide much better protection against high water levels.

"If there is flooding, it wouldn't be as bad as in 1996 because of the work that has been done," Waitsburg City Clerk Randy Hinchliffe said.

If a long, denuded berm around the Fairgrounds is any indication, the city is making progress in improving its flood control infrastructure. Initiated under the adminis­tration of former Mayor Mar­keeta Little Wolf and the city council at the time, and sup­ported

by the new mayor and council, the city contracted to raise and reinforce the levee around the race track and toward the Coppei. The proj­ect followed collaborative research between Waitsburg Public Works Director Dan Katsel and the U.S. Corps of Engineers.

The Coppei was the big­gest problem in 1996. Its shorter run filled it quickly and unpredictably. Blocked in part by a shallow stream bed under the Coppei bridge, it overflowed its east bank and threatened to inundate the east part of town when it breached the weak levee south of the Fairgrounds until city officials decided to release the pressure by letting the water run down Coppei Avenue. The new levee is about two feet higher and armored with 500 yards of rock to form the south wall. City crews removed all the trees. Contractor Clyde Burdine of Alpine Industries is still waiting for a new utility pole to replace the one that now blocks his completion of the project, which cost the city about $25,000.

In the summer of 2008, the city dredged under the new Highway 12 Coppei bridge constructed in 2006. Since environmental impact studies were already done for the bridge engineering work by the Washington State De­partment

of Transportation, the city could piggyback on those preparations to get its dredging permit, a bureau­cratic

feat that may otherwise take as long as a year or more for, say, the Touchet River.

Even then, it was very dif­ficult to get the attention from U.S. Fish Wildlife to sign off on the permit, Little Wolf said. "They were impossible to deal with." But now that the channel has been deepened under the bridge and the armored Fairgrounds levee is in place, it should eliminate one of the biggest threats to the city.

"If we can stop the Cop­pei, we eliminate 90 percent of the potential flooding," Hinchliffe said.

The city's next big push is clearing trees and brush off the south levee (left bank) on the Touchet River from the Highway 12 bridge down to­ward and along Bolles Road. This is critical to keep the river from filling up with loosened trees whose root balls also leave behind big gashes in the banks that erode the levee. The city has another year to do the clearing or it risks getting its Touchet River le­vee decertified by the Corps of Engineers. That in turn could raise flood insurance premiums for those with property in the flood zone.

But for Monfort it couldn't happen soon enough, corps requirement or not.

Dredging is a challenge under modern Fish Wild­life restrictions on disturbing fish habitat, and it's an effort that would need to be re­peated often, Hinchliffe said. But Monfort argued that's precisely why old timers used to treat the river as a resource, regularly removing the gravel. "We need to farm it," he said. "Even if that means dredging it every year." If there are now too many government restrictions, Waitsburg needs to exercise its unique sovereignty under its territorial charter and seek exemption for its own protec­tion against flooding, said Monfort, who started circu­lating a petition five years ago to do just that. "Our elected (officials) must legislate and grant the city of Waitsburg and persons acting in concert with the city permanent authority to do what is necessary to prevent or lessen the flood damage created by Coppei Creek and the Touchet River for health, safety and welfare of its citi­zens'

property," according to the petition signed by more than a dozen residents at the time.

Little Wolf said she isn't hopeful any such revived petition effort, if it were at­tempted again, would bear fruit. Dredging the Touchet, she said, isn't the only or perhaps not even the best answer, since it could create other problems, such as erosion that weakens the levee. "It isn't the be all and end all," Little Wolf said.