Category Archives: streams

I’ve hiked around, fished on and waded in dozens of streams over the years, from the Snake River near Grand Teton National Park and the pre-dam Teton River in southeastern Idaho to the Rio Grande in New Mexico, Otter Creek in Vermont, and Nescopeck Creek in the valley where I sit today. Ive seen what happens to water quality when parts of a watershed are lost to agriculture or development, and have witnessed just how quickly a stream’s water quality can be lost when a dam is built or a riverbed is dredged or channelized.

Dams are particularly egregious devices.

When a barrier is put across a river, the ecological conditions change dramatically for some distance upstream as the aquatic system essentially switches from a river to a lake. Deposition of fine sediments on to the original river substrate can result from the reduction of flow rate behind the dam, write Paul S. Giller and Bjorn Malmqvist in their fine book The Biology of Streams and Rivers.

This can have dramatic consequences for the populations of all sorts of freshwater species, from native fish to mussels, and aquatic insects and their larvae, the authors note.

Theyre too nice. Its tough to find a waterway anywhere around these parts that hasn’t been affected in some fashion, from human development, within its watershed. This is what’s happening to the upper reaches of Nescopeck Creek, where sediment washed off construction sites has smothered much of the in-stream rocky substrate native fish like brook trout need. On the other hand, the small creek flowing across State Game Lands 141 on Broad Mountain (a Lehigh River tributary) is fairly clean and biologically healthy and whole. Thats because its watershed is forested and largely undisturbed by development.

I mentioned the Teton River in Idaho a moment ago and here’s a follow-up. My status, in the early 1970s, as an undergraduate journalism student at Idaho State University, meant that I was eligible to participate in outings run by the campus outdoors club. One of those outings amounted to a trip down the Teton River, in rubber rafts, well north of the city of Idaho Falls.
Toward the halfway point on the rafting trip, we floated past the future site of Teton Dam. Huge scars on the granite rocks above the stream  channel showed where engineers had been blasting test samples in their ultimately failed attempt to find the exact best spot to place the $100 million earthen dam.

Only a year after my graduation, in 1976, the completed dam collapsed as its reservoir was being filled for the first time. Baby boomers like me may recall the post-dam-collapse in newspaper headlines. In any case, 11 people downstream were killed and 13,000 head of cattle were lost when the whole thing burst apart. The federal government ended up paying more than $300 million to settle damage claims and total damage costs soared past $2 billion. The dam, a flood control project like the F.E. Walter Dam near White Haven, was never rebuilt.

Other rivers and streams across the continent have been ruined or degraded by the building of dams and in many cases native fisheries have been severely harmed. Especially hurt were anadromous fish species like Atlantic Salmon in the Northeast and dozens of runs of fish species like Chinook Salmon and Sockeye Salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Ladders for migratory fish have been installed on dams along the Snake and Columbia rivers in the Northwest; results have been spotty at best. And four especially awful dams on the Columbia River have been cited again and again by conservationists and fisheries professionals as main culprits in the loss of salmon runs. The Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania has suffered terribly over the decades from pollution, sedimentation and the tainted runoff from highways and parking lots, but at least it was saved from further degradation when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said no to the placing of low-head dam at Wilkes-Barre.

It is obvious that stream-living species cannot be protected other than through protection of their habitats,note Giller and Malmqvist in their book. There are strategies to accomplish this. An obvious one would be to preserve sites which are known to accommodate rare or endangered species. But this is not enough as we have come to realize that running waters are open systems and that they are influenced by their upstream sections and catchments, including those that are disturbed by man. They explain, as well, that real conservation, as opposed to slogans, means looking at a streams entire watershed and protecting same.

Across the region, local governments should collaborate, to the fullest extent possible, in prserving still-healthy creeks and runs and their watersheds. And a region-wide “association for native waterways” or such would also help in restoring degraded streams that still have a chance.