HASKELL SLOUGH, WORSE THAN DOING NOTHING

by Kurt Beardslee

The public/private partnership for the habitat restoration project at Haskell Slough on the Skykomish River is being praised as a model for future salmon recovery efforts. At a recent public ceremony at the project site, Governor Locke, Senator Murray, various other politicians, state and federal appointees and the media fell all over themselves to celebrate the Haskell Slough project. Does Haskell Slough deserve all this praise? Or are our public representatives succumbing to an inviting delusion, rushing to applaud anybody for doing something, anything, to save salmon, no matter how futile or even counter productive the effort might be?

Far from being a model for future salmon recovery efforts, the project at Haskell Slough is an ill conceived plan that is being inappropriately promoted as habitat enhancement. It will not benefit wild salmon or steelhead in the Skykomish River. It will result in a net decrease in salmon spawning and rearing habitat on the Skykomish, and may just be an effort to bypass zoning laws and state permitting processes by sticking a salmon restoration label on a flood-plain gravel mine.

Its proponents claim that the Haskell Slough project will reclaim 1800 feet of critical salmon nursery habitat on the mainstem of the Skykomish River. They make impressive, but unsupported claims about increasing the river’s coho production by 10,000 fish. It is true that back channel areas in large rivers like the Skykomish provide important habitat for juvenile salmon, and that Haskell Slough, before it was diked and its wetland filled and claimed for farming, probably provided this type of habitat. But the details of the project create troubling questions about the motivations for this effort, and its ultimate results.

Plans for the project include artificially "hardening" 1800 feet of riverbank, scientifically unsound "engineered logjams," and two 50 foot deep gravel pits. The bank hardening and logjams are supposedly there to protect the restored habitat from the effects of flooding, but in reality seem more designed to protect the mining operation. Indeed, from the salmon’s point of view, flooding would probably be beneficial for Haskell Slough, and in any event, the bank hardening measures and the logjams will not create anything like a natural rearing habitat for salmon. But proponents claim that even the gravel pits will provide salmon habitat, even though a number of fisheries experts have criticized this claim, so the hardened slough probably does look good by comparison.

Support for this project has been portrayed as unanimous. It is praised as a win-win proposal, a plan that will allow commerce, protect property, and help salmon. It will allow a commercial gravel mine to operate within the Skykomish River’s flood plain, even though the landowner had previously been denied a permit to operate the mine. It may protect (at taxpayer expense) the mining operation and other private property from flooding. But it will not help salmon, and support for the project is far from unanimous. Biologists and environmental engineers from the University of Washington, the Tulalip tribe, Snohomish County, and NMFS have criticized this project, and fear it may actually prove harmful to wild salmon.

In fact, most technical experts who have reviewed the project seem unanimous in their criticisms. Time and again, the experts note that the flood control elements of the project will not only be detrimental to existing habitat on the Skykomish, but to the restoration effort itself. They note that flooding and channel avulsion is a natural dynamic in large rivers, that actually creates diverse, beneficial salmon habitat. Trying to protect Haskell Slough from the effects of flooding will create an artificially static environment that will not help salmon as much as the natural process the project is trying to prevent, while at the same time degrading existing habitat! They note that the proposed mining pits are being promoted as salmon habitat, even though the physical properties of these "lakes" make them inappropriate as salmon habitat, threaten the hydro-dynamics of the river, and will be counter-productive to the restoration of Haskell Slough.

Over and over, the experts criticize the specific design elements of the project as poorly conceived and designed. According to the experts, the "engineered logjams" are merely rock groins with some imbedded wood, and the "bank restoration" more closely resembles a dike. In the words of one University of Washington scientist, these features will not provide suitable salmon habitat, and can only be defended as an attempt to protect private property and a commercial gravel mine that is being dressed up as salmon restoration. He calls it "not a good use of salmon restoration funding."
That might be the biggest problem with Haskell Slough. We are face to face with our last chance to save salmon. We don’t have time to fool around or fritter away dollars. The salmon’s road to hell has been paved with ideas that sounded good, like trucking smolts around dams, or pumping genetically ill-equipped hatchery fish into rivers to make up for loss of habitat. We need to keep our eye on the ball, pay attention to the experts, and not rush to embrace every easy-sounding solution.

Haskell Slough started out as a worthy little restoration project by Northwest Chinook Recovery. They had the good idea of recovering some lost nursery habitat on the Skykomish. Unfortunately, it seems they’ve been flim-flammed, co-opted by other interests. It seems our politicians and watchdogs have been flim-flammed too, perhaps because they think doing anything is better than doing nothing. But this is worse than nothing.
Kurt Beardslee is the Executive Director of Washington Trout, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and recovery of wild trout and salmon in Washington State.

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