Watershed policy to end "killing fields" on the Sitkoh

SITKA, ALASKA

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I guess another reporter would have actually found a way to do this story from a stream, but I didn’t catch up with Bob Gubernick until after he had spent two days on the Sitkoh River, sizing up the situation is there. Still, I don’t have to see it to understand why Gubernick believes the Sitkoh is in trouble.

“Where it is a fluvial fan that comes out of a confined valley. Anytime you have that situation, the river dumps its sediment and wood right there. And it’s really a tough place to do business, not recognizing those landforms which is sometimes difficult. And having harvest on there and roadbuilding, there’s not the big trees anymore to buffer and essentially stablilize the form. So the river just goes back and forth across there like a lawnmower, taking down the alder and it becomes a problem for fish that go up during the freshets to get out of the river cause it’s really honkin’ and once it goes down they’re trapped, and it ends up killing them. It becomes a killing field.”

Bob Gubernick is a forest engineering geologist. He works for the Tongass supervisor in the Petersburg office. In twenty-five years doing restoration work he’s seen a lot of Sitkoh’s, a lot of blocked culverts, a lot of damaged waterways.

The Tongass Land Management Plan was first developed in 1979. TLMP, as it is known, requires a one-hundred foot buffer between clear-cuts and fish streams. Gubernick says prior to TLMP foresters had a faulty understanding of timber – called “large wood” by biologists – and its role in stream dynamics.

“They used the streams as roads in some cases. The thought before the research was in was that the wood was holding back the sediment and creating fish barriers.”

Gubernick says biologists have since learned that exactly the opposite is true. Large wood controls sediment and creates deep pools for young fish. The Forest Service is now in the fifth year of a restoration project on the Harris River system on Prince of Wales Island. One of those creeks, called “FUBAR,” Gubernick says is now “Fixed” Up Beyond All Recognition.

“It was actually pretty amazing, after the first year of doing the work and putting the river back under the bridge, we had just a phenomenal run of pink salmon come up and use habitat that they used to get in there and it would kill them all.”

FUBAR Creek was a $1.5 million project done by a Sitka company more closely associated with road building.

Andrew Thoms, the executive director of the Sitka Conservation Society, one of the Forest Service’s non-profit partners on FUBAR, Starrigavan, and other projects, says restoration represents a good opportunity to put industry back to work in the northern Tongass.

“These projects are really perfect win-win scenarios where we’re putting people to work in blue collar jobs, doing research on the ground, and we’re helping the commercial, sport, and subsistence fishing industries. The contractors here have the skills to do that. Some of them have become expert in salmon habitat restoration, and in using their skills to make our forest, salmon streams, and ecosystems much better than they were after the logging practices that took place here on the Tongass.”

Thom’s invoking of fish and fishing is not a coincidence. Since August, 2009, when US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced in Seattle that habitat restoration, along with clean air and water, would become new priorities for the Forest Service, salmon have emerged as a catalyst – a way to connect the new policy vision with today’s economy.  But whether or not salmon push restoration to center stage on the Tongass, Bob Gubernick plans to stick around. He’s been at his same job more or less since 1985, with roughly a $2-million dollar annual budget, doing what he calls “small stuff” and “getting fish across roads.” He doesn’t consider restoration to be anything new.

“Management’s always cared about the environment and what we do, and this is just a part of the bigger program.”

Major work on the Sitkoh River is slated to begin in 2011.