Logging Roads and the Clean Water Act

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This summer promises to be a busy time for those working to protect rivers, streams and salmon from logging road pollution.

Logging roads are a major source of pollution in our rivers and streams. They push sediment into water, suffocating salmon and sullying drinking water sources when they are constructed, but they also divert sediment into clean water sources, particularly when being actively used by logging trucks. It seems only fair that this industry would have to comply with the Clean Water Act like so many other industries in America.

In May 2011, in a case called Northwest Environmental Defense Center v. Brown, the Ninth Circuit ruled that EPA regulations require Clean Water Act permits for polluted stormwater discharged from pipes, ditches and channels along logging roads.  The Clean Water Act's permit system regulates pollution so that we protect this finite resource for fishing, drinking and swimming.

The Waterkeeper Alliance’s Clean Water Act 40 campaign was designed to mark the law’s 40th anniversary by celebrating, activating and advocating around the central tenets of the Act: swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters for all.

The campaign is educating the public about the importance of the Act and empowering communities to influence national leaders from a policy and enforcement perspective.

In response to the NEDC v. Brown decision, EPA recently sent a draft notice of intent to regulate logging road pollution to the White House Office of Management and Budget.  Although details are not yet public, in a press release EPA stated that it "is considering flexible options including non-permitting options."

TAKE ACTION

Click here to email EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and ask that they ensure that industrial logging road pollution remains regulated under the Clean Water Act’s permit program. Tell them you oppose efforts to exempt the timber industry and logging roads from the Clean Water Act. 

Read on for more details about this issue

The Problem

Clean, drinkable water is a finite resource—increasingly important to preserve and protect, not only for agricultural, industrial, ecological, and recreational uses, but also for safe and healthy human consumption. More than 180 million Americans depend on headwaters from both protected and unprotected forests for their drinking water.

Sediment and other pollutants discharged from logging roads pose a problem because they threaten the health of endangered species and delicate ecosystems while also threatening the quality of clean public drinking water supplies. Sediment associated with logging is a well-documented threat to water quality.  On logging roads actively used for timber hauling, logging trucks grind up the gravel road surface, turning it into fine sediment that is often then transported by stormwater to rivers and streams.

Such chronic sedimentation has detrimental effects such as smothering fish eggs and increasing turbidity, which disrupts fish feeding, breeding, and migrating behavior (especially for salmon, many of which are at risk of extinction). Chronic sedimentation effectively chokes the life out of cold-water rivers and streams by decreasing dissolved oxygen levels, increasing temperature, and destroying essential habitat.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that each year over 2.7 million people participate in hunting, fishing, and wildlife watching in Washington State alone, contributing over $3 billion to that state’s economy. Across the West, the harm and reduction to fish could translate into a major economic loss for tourism, the fishing industry, state wildlife agencies, and the local communities that depend on these revenues.

In Oregon, based on information the state submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2006, sediment was the second leading cause of pollution in rivers and streams, accounting for almost 12,000 miles of streams threatened or impaired. While not all of this sediment was generated by logging roads, the roads are a major contributor of sediment in the West due to an enormous road system that is poorly maintained.

The Solution

The Clean Water Act’s NPDES permit program provides the right tool to address this problem. As Congress intended, the Clean Water Act is an extremely effective mechanism for reducing pollution and protecting clean water.  NPDES permits are proven, effective, efficient, and manageable by state and federal agencies.

EPA and the states have crafted workable permit solutions to handle many different types of pollutant discharge issues many times in the past, including dealing with complex municipal storm water issues, runoff from industrial facilities (including associated roads) and runoff from construction sites larger than 1 acre (including associated roads). Creating a specific permit to deal with logging roads should be no different. EPA and state agencies must move forward now to develop NPDES storm water permits for logging roads.

Logging companies should not get a free pass

The implementation of this ruling will include a cost to the regulated industry, but the process of regulating and monitoring pollution under a NPDES permit will not only create sustainable and local green jobs, it is also the only effective means to protect the public’s water supply and fisheries. A special exemption from the Clean Water Act for this industry would allow polluters to continue damaging our Nation’s waters and harming salmon and steelhead populations with little control or oversight. The failure to regulate storm water pollution from logging roads would also allow continued impacts to the drinking water supplies for millions of Americans throughout the country.

The Clean Water Act turns 40

Forty years ago, Congress signed into law a historic piece of legislation that would turn the tide of our polluted waterways. Prior to the Clean Water Act’s enactment, the Cuyahoga River was burning, the Hudson River’s fishery was gone and Lake Erie was declared all but dead. This bold legislation put forward by visionaries in Congress returned control of our nation’s waterways to the citizens as part of the public trust. While this cornerstone law has helped us make progress in cleaning up our waterways, our streams and rivers remain threatened by a variety of pollutants, many of our fisheries are near extinction and some members of the U.S. Congress, pressured by polluting industries, are working hard to erode the protections of this important law.

The Waterkeeper Alliance’s Clean Water Act 40 campaign was designed to mark the law’s 40th anniversary by celebrating, activating and advocating around the central tenets of the Act: swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters for all.  To make the most of this opportunity, the campaign is educating the public about the importance of the Act and empowering communities to influence national leaders from a policy and enforcement perspective.

Thanks to Rogue Riverkeeper, Northwest Environmental Defense Center, CRAG Law Center and Washington Forest Law Center for their work on protecting our streams from logging road runoff.

Save our Urban Creeks

Save our Urban Creeks from Tualatin Riverkeepers on Vimeo.

Each time it rains, our urban creeks are hammered by polluted, erosive runoff.  The key to making these creeks healthy again is reducing the impervious cover, retrofitting storm sewers, planting trees and using green infrastructure, aka Low Impact Development.

Learn more about Stormwater Runoff and Urban Streams.

Learn details about various Low Impact Development Approaches.

Please support Tualatin Riverkeepers' efforts to bring urban creeks back to vitality with your gifts and your voice.

Sign up for our Action Alerts to add your voice to those calling for urban stream renewal.

Green Infrastructure Can Save Local Governments Money

With increasing urbanization comes an increasing area of rooftops, parking lots, and highways - hard surfaces that are impermeable to water. Rain that once soaked into fields and forests, now runs off these hardened surfaces in excessive amounts. This runoff flows untreated into storm drains and local waterways, carrying a variety of pollutants that foul our waters and cause health risks. The volume of runoff can be so high that it erodes stream banks and causes localized flooding.

A new joint report released by American Rivers, the Water Environment Federation, the American Society of Landscape Architects and ECONorthwest looks at how municipalities can save money by using “green infrastructure” for stormwater management.

This infiltration swale  is an example of green infrastructure.

Banking on Green  focuses on the economic impacts caused by polluted urban runoff, one form of stormwater, and the only significantly growing source of water pollution in the United States.   The costs created by stormwater, and the need to manage it, can often be offset or reduced by making different choices about how we build infrastructure. By choosing to include green infrastructure in efforts to prevent or control stormwater, communities and developers can reduce energy costs, diminish the impacts of flooding, improve public health, and reduce overall costs. Shifting to this new paradigm also creates more sustainable communities that are better able to meet future environmental challenges.

Green infrastructure approaches to clean water management include using rooftop vegetation to control stormwater and reduce energy use, restoring wetlands to retain floodwater, and installing permeable pavement to mimic natural hydrology.  These approaches prevent stormwater from flowing into surface waters or overburdened sewer systems.  They can be a cost-effective way of replacing or supplementing traditional stormwater management practices, often referred to as “grey infrastructure” because they rely heavily on concrete curbs, pipes and tunnels.  

Green infrastructure approaches improve air quality, increase habitat and green space, enhance human health, and reduce flooding. Communities that utilize green infrastructure have often found that the enhanced aesthetic experience of local residents has improved quality of life as well as property values. Local waters often provide healthier aquatic habitats and water supplies, resources that provide environmental and public health benefits to all residents.

Given the cost-effectiveness of green approaches across a variety of categories, green infrastructure should be an integral part of stormwater management strategies.  National policies that favor or stimulate the wider adoption of green infrastructure strategies may go a long way toward reducing both the infrastructure funding needs facing the nation, and the gap between these needs and available financial resources.

To read the full report, visit http://www.americanrivers.org/goinggreen

Reversing the Decline of Our Neighborhood Streams

Are there trout in your creek?

The stream that runs through your neighborhood likely was once the home to cutthroat and/or steelhead trout. In some places, at certain times of the year, you may still find an occasional trout, but most of our urban streams are too warm, too polluted, and too flashy to provide for the habitat needs of trout like they once did. Passage for the fish to get from feeding areas, to cool deep pools, or spawning gravels is often blocked by culverts or small dams that make ponds that cause the water to heat up. The food web that supported these fish is impacted too.  Twelve urban streams in the Tualatin Basin are listed by DEQ as being impaired for "biological criteria".

Culverts carry erosive runoff from street to stream.

Most storm drains in the Tualatin Basin carry pollutants directly from street to stream. Pollutants that  enter streams from streets include copper from brake pads (toxic to fish), oil and gasoline, tire dust, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, sediments that consume dissolved oxygen in streams, and other detritus of urban life.  

Rapid runoff from streets can change stream flows, increase flooding, endanger private and public infrastructure, erode stream banks and channels, and destroy fish habitat.  The combined impacts of hydrologic changes and water pollution can be disastrous for streams and rivers in urban areas.

Reducing erosive, polluted runoff is something we know how to do using "Green Infrastructure" aka Low Impact Development Approaches.  The City of Portland has acres of ecoroofs that reduce runoff.  Porous pavements allow water to flow through then where they recharge groundwater after soil microbes can break down pollutants. Roadside rain gardens filter out pollutants and slow down rapid runoff that causes havoc in streams.  Infiltration bioswaless allow filtered rainwater to percolate into the groundwater system that feeds our neighborhood streams in the dry season.

 

Green Street in Tigard handles polluted runoff.

As old streets are rebuilt, we can break the street to stream connection and restore urban streams to health with roadside rain gardens and other sustainable stormwater techniques.  For over a century, development in the Tualatin Valley has relied on a "drain and pave" agenda.  In the past decade, low impact development demonstration projects have shown that sustainable stormwater techniques are effective, practicable and economical even on the slow draining soils of the Tualatin Valley.  As we rebuild our highways, streets, and parking lots we can reverse the damage to our streams by using sustainable stormwater techniques that filter, infiltrate, store, and evaporate stormwater. 

DEQ is in the process of renewing the municipal stormwater permit for the urban parts of Washington County.  This permit will specify what the cities, county and Clean Water Services must do to protect our neighborhood streams and the Tualatin River from polluted urban runoff. Sustainable stormwater practices like roadside rain gardens are key to restoring our neighborhood streams to health.  We think that these stormwater permits should require that Low Impact Development techniques are used for new development and re-development.

There are several ways that you can help make this important change happen.

1. Sign up for Tualatin Riverkeepers' Actions Alerts to stay informed and weigh in with the right agencies at the right time.
   
2. Sign up for Clean Water Services' stormwater survey and urge them to reduce polluted and erosive  stormwater runoff by retrofitting the drain and pipe storm sewer system with green infrastructure.
   
3. Donate to Tualatin Riverkeepers to keep our program of watershed advocacy strong.

Wilma's Story

Last summer, I asked our members to tell us their stories about things they saw that impacted their neighborhood creeks and the Tualatin River.   I got this e-mail from Wilma, one of our long-time members:

Storm drains in streets carry polluted runoff directly to the nearest stream.

Hi TRK:

The two stories that come to mind from my house is first, seeing friends and neighbors putting dog waste down the storm drains since the are " sewers". I don't know how prevalent this mistaken idea is but there should be some education going on in schools, etc. even signage along each storm drain.   Some drains now have a logo and that helps.

Second, all around town I still see rug cleaners and cement trucks cleaning their tanks into the storm drains when they think no one is watching.    

-  Wilma      

Wilma witnessed what regulators call an illicit discharge.  Storm drains were designed to drain water from the urban landscape, but they carry so much more:  toxins, bacteria, trash, oil, heavy metals directly from the street to the nearest stream.  Whatever goes in the street ends up in the stream. What Wilma witnessed was bad behavior, but it was enabled by a problematic storm sewer system.

CWS Green Street in Beaverton facility keeps polluted runoff out of storm drains and creeks.

Tualatin Riverkeepers believes that we as a community can do a much better job of protecting our river and streams by changing from a drain & pipe storm sewer system to systems that intercept rain and eliminate runoff: rain gardens, green streets, ecoroofs, porous pavement, rain gardens and cisterns that collect rain for later use.

Now that Low Impact Development Approaches are tested, readily available and often less expensive than the stream-damaging "drain & pipe" storm sewers design standards and building codes should require elimination of runoff.

Protecting Streams and Trout from Heat and Runoff

Water quality standards for the Tualatin River and its tributaries were first established by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) in 1988. Every 5 years or so, DEQ reviews these standards for revision. These standards, called Total Maximum Daily Loads or TMDLs.

This fall DEQ released proposed revisions to the Tualatin TMDLs that were designed to accommodate the growing population of Washington County by allowing treated sewage effluent to be discharged from wastewater treatment plants in Hillsboro and Forest Grove.

Fanno Creek in Tigard Oregon

Tualatin Riverkeepers expressed some concerns to DEQ about these proposed revisions, particularly about the increase in temperature in a stretch of the river where small salmon grow up. TRK also raised significant issues about how the TMDLs are not protecting urban streams.

DEQ lists 12 urban streams in the Tualatin basin as being impaired for "biological criteria". Based on surveys of fish and macroinvertebrates (aka bugs), these streams have significantly less biodiversity than they once did.

Numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies document the impact of urbanization on the biodiversity of streams. These studies are the basis of the Healthy Streams Plan published by Clean Water Services in 2005. Urbanization is characterized by impervious cover (streets, sidewalks, parking lots, rooftops) and storm drains connected directly to the nearest stream. This puts a lot of pollution, both chemical and physical in our local waters that impacts bugs and fish.

Tualatin Riverkeepers asked DEQ to address the biologically impaired streams with limits on Effective Impervious Area. We also asked DEQ to regulate runoff from large impervious areas, such as commercial parking lots, with permits under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.

Believe it or not, people used to catch trout in our urban streams. One of the reason this seldom happens any more is that our streams are too warm. Tualatin Riverkeepers documented the increase in temperature casued by one small dam on Summer Creek and cited other research that shows these small top-flow dams consistently raise temperatures in streams and impact fish populations. We asked DEQ to address the temperatue impacts of these small dams in the TMDL revisions.

We also asked DEQ to hold forestry and agriculture more accountable for their impacts on streams and the river. To read all of our comments on revising the Tualatin TMDLs click here.

Advancing Smarter Solutions for Clean Water

Polluted stormwater runoff is one of the largest pollution sources of our country’s streams, rivers, and lakes as well as a major cause of flooding and sewer overflows. Unfortunately, the most commonly used treatment and management approaches have failed to significantly reduce these impacts. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to modernize national stormwater regulations, presenting one of the best chances in years to make major progress towards clean water in urban and suburban areas nationwide. EPA is on track to propose new safeguards in Fall, 2011 and finalize them by November 2012.

Tualatin Riverkeepers is part of a broad coalition, Clean Water for Healthy Communities, promoting a set of core principles for new EPA regulations:

• Control onsite generation of stormwater using an objective performance-based standard for clean water and promote the use of Low Impact Development (LID) and Green Infrastructure approaches.
  
• Require significant existing stormwater sources to reduce their impact by decreasing impervious areas that create runoff. Meaningful reductions can be achieved through phased planning and implementation that meets feasible performance.
  
•  EPA must require all dischargers to do their fair share to control pollution and protect watersheds. New regulations should target areas of new or expected development, critical or sensitive watersheds and impervious areas that cause or contribute to water quality problems. 

Coincidentally, while EPA is working on national guidance, DEQ is working on a new municipal stormwater permit for the urban areas of the Tualatin Basin.  If this permit looks anything like the permits issued to Portland, Salem and other large urban areas in Oregon last year, there will be a greater emphasis on Low Impact Development Approaches that reduce runoff.

Transforming our urban landscape to reduce runoff will take some time.  In the past few years we have seen some demonstration projects that are beginning to reduce the impervious areas that cause runoff.  Tigard’s Burnham Street project is one good example, using roadside raingardens to soak up runoff and pollution.

But while we engage in the slow steady process of reducing impervious area in older urban areas, we must take extra care to prevent damage to streams in newly developing areas like North Bethany.

Runoff from developed areas of Bull Mountain blew
 out this tributary to the Tualatin River.

Metro has proposed bringing more land into the Urban Growth Boundary.  It will be very challenging to do this without increasing stormwater runoff.  Tualatin basin soils drain slowly, requiring special design considerations for Low Impact Development.  Of particular concern is the possibility of urbanizing areas of Cooper Mountain and Bull Mountain.  Shallow slow draining soils on slopes make it especially difficult to stop runoff.  Clearing of trees for development will only increase runoff.

What can you do to help our urban streams recover?

·         Talk to your city councilors and county commissioners about Low Impact Development.

·         Urge your Metro councilors to avoid expansion of the urban growth area on areas of slopes and shallow slow-draining soils.

·         Ask Metro and your city council to require forest protection, reforestation, and 100% onsite stormwater retention when new areas are brought into the Urban Growth Boundary.

·         Call Senator Merkley and Senator Wyden and ask them to support a strict EPA post-construction stormwater rule that prevent runoff from new development.

For more information, check out www.tualatinriverkeepers.org/advocacy