restoration Archives -

20 Sep

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 2

The first thing to do after a blast is to make sure you still have all your fingers!

Visiting Canadian blaster counts his fingers.

Or maybe he’s just doing a conversion from metric?

Just kidding! The first thing to do after a blast is to wait a minute for everything that went up in the sky to come back down to earth. Then the Blaster In Charge goes up to the blasting site to do a safety check, looking for unexploded explosives, large rocks and/or logs precariously balanced in trees, deaf bears traveling at high speeds, that sort of thing. The rest of the crew follows when the ‘all clear’ is given over the radio.

Foreground: Blaster. Background: Cautious approach by crew.

Returning to the first blasting sites was definitely a bit shocking. We’re in a (coastal temperate) rainforest, everything is lush and green and there are trees and the whole roadbed is overgrown to the point that if you wanted to bring any sort of heavy equipment in you’d have to rebuild the whole thing, and then…

Oh! Hi, muddy brown trench that we just created.

The parting of the road bed

From green to brown in 60 seconds or less. Actually, it’s probably more like 60 milliseconds or less. And that’s a good thing — one split-second boom, a few seconds of thunder rolling in the hills, and the work is done. It’s quick, it’s cheap, and it’s green.

The alternative to explosives is, actually, to rebuild the road so that excavators (you know, the sort of yellow digging machines that little kids like to play with in the sandbox) can get up the end of the road and then start back, digging out the culverts as it goes. That would take a barge to bring in the equipment, fuel and oil to keep it running. Blasting brings the explosives in by helicopter, drops them where they’re needed, and the crew walks in and sets them off. After the blast, the explosives, and anything right next to them, have vaporized and disperses into the atmosphere. There’s no residue of any sort left in the forest – compare that to the inevitable grease trail left by heavy machinery.

Watershed coordinator contemplating stream bed.

After the blast, the main remnant was hunks of culvert. However, since they’ve been exposed to the explosives, the galvanization which was keeping them intact is gone. The crew made sure to remove the leftover culvert bits from the stream bed, but left them in the forest to rust away.

Removing the end of a culvert from the steam.

While more explosives would probably vaporize all of the culvert, the blaster in charge of the project, Rob Miller (also the Master Blaster for all the Forest Service’s operations in Alaska) has spent a fair of time and calculation to work out what is the minimum amount of explosive needed to get the job done. Many of the culverts are removed with $100-$200 worth of explosives – pretty cheap! More explosives could make a bigger hole, sure, but a big hole isn’t the point – the point is to make sure that instead of a narrow passageway under a road that could get plugged with rocks and dirt or possibly cave in, there is instead a free flowing stream bed that will be able to flow naturally and do its part for ecosystem function, and support the bigger streams downhill where there are salmon.

Run free, little stream, run free!

In the pouring rain, the mud washed away quickly, and the water turned clear. In another month, part of the crew will return to the sites to see how they’re doing. Next summer they’ll be back to take out the second half of the road. It’s probably a long shot, but I hope I’ll be able to go, too!

25 Aug

I have not been blasted

I am back from the trip to blow up culverts. We went 1200 feet away from all the explosives before setting them off, so I have all my limbs and digits, but no exciting explosion pictures. That’s okay, because I like all my limbs and digits as they are, i.e. attached to me.

Cappy the Blasting Bear

Here’s Cappy the Blasting Bear. He’s made out of used shot cord, which attaches to detonating cord which attaches to the actual bombs and explody bits. The shot cord makes up most of the 1200 feet separating people from the blasts, so there’s lots of it left over for art projects.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Prince of Wales, where I’ll be for about 36 hours, I’ll update more after that trip.

20 Jul

Scientific Translation

I’m working on a briefing sheet about a stream restoration project. Why am I getting paid to do this when the Forest Service already has briefing sheets on these projects?

Well, the briefing sheet on this particular watershed describes it thus:

Watershed condition indicators reflect concern for long term health and function of Aquatic Habitat and Riparian Vegetation. A high percentage of riparian area associated with alluvial wood-dependent channels has been harvested or roaded. Two condition indicators addressing In-stream Large Wood and Channel Shape/Function rate in the Class 3 range. Riparian Vegetation indicator also rates Class 3, due to historic riparian harvest level of 30%. The watershed hydrologic and fish habitat integrity is at risk due to high percentage (77%) of roads proximal to streams, which resulted in a Class 3 rating for this indicator.

Have you got all that?

After reading this and a few other source documents, I got down to business and wrote a few different chunks of text, including a timeline for work in the watershed, and sent it around to get feedback.

Let’s look at an example from the timeline.

I wrote:

Landslides change the course of Fubar Creek and cut off spawning grounds

After comments from a nonprofit partner, I changed it to:

Landslides from clearcut slopes change the course of Fubar Creek and cut off spawning grounds

And I’ve just received the suggestion from a Forest Service scientist to change it to

Numerous landslides aggraded Fubar Creek and the high volume of gravel sediments caused the stream to find an alternate route beneath the Hydaburg highway, essentially cutting off traditional fish spawning habitat.

Many scientists are able to communicate clearly with the general public, but there are enough who haven’t got the time or inclination to develop the skills to explain their work to people outside their own field. And then you need to hire people like me to translate from Science to General Public.

Also, bonus points if you can use “aggrade” in a sentence, besides the one above.

08 Jul

Restoration work: red alders

This week I spent some more time in the field, this time ~~helping~~ watching some folks put trees, a.k.a. large woody debris, into a stream. This makes for good habitat for baby salmon. Although it involved a lot of tromping around in the rain and a lot of no-see-ums who wanted to chew on me, it was fun because I had the right gear to be waterproof and I got to see what is involved in the restoration process.

All the trees added to the stream were red alders, a quick growing tree that takes advantage of disturbed ground in places where there were logging roads, or river bottoms that large logs were dragged through.

Red alders are tall and have white bark, and if I went by the minimal tree knowledge I had coming into this job with the Forest Service (where I have learned much about salmon, and a little about trees) I would have tried to tell you that they were birch trees.

However, once they cut a few red alders down and dragged them around, scraping off the bark, it became obvious that the inner layer of the bark is the color of a nosebleed, hence the “red” of red alder. And I don’t think you see that in a birch…

I thought it was pretty, so I took a bunch of pictures of it. In fact, I was photographing some scraped bark when they started calling my name, and suggested I leave when everyone else was walking off, so as not to leave me alone in bear country.

For the record, there was a bear spotted, but it ran off the trail before anyone but one guy saw it. I saw the tracks, but they weren’t super big.