Upper Truckee River restoration to resume in June
By Kathryn Reed
A four-year project to restore a section of the Upper Truckee River is expected to start in June.
A major hurdle to make the U.S. Forest Service project a reality was overcome Thursday when the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board unanimously gave its approval.
Because there will be disturbance to stream environment zones and projections are the turbidity of the river will exceed normal levels, the board needed to grant these allowances to occur during construction.
The U.S. Forest Service will begin restoring a section of the Upper Truckee River this summer. Photo/LTN
The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency Governing Board must sign off on the project. That approval is needed because more than 100 trees greater than 14 inches in diameter will be taken out because they encroach on the meadow. It may be on the April agenda.
“The project is necessary to help rewater the meadow system,” Nancy Gibson, Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit forest supervisor, told the Lahontan board Feb. 14. “It’s one of the primary reasons we are pursuing this project.”
This is one of many projects along the river. Some are completed, others are in the planning stages, and others are just being talked about.
With the Upper Truckee River being the largest tributary to Lake Tahoe, it carries the most amount of sediment. The goal is to make the waterway flow more naturally like it did before it was disturbed for ranching, building the airport and other needs. This in turn will mean less sediment reaching Lake Tahoe because the banks of the river will be more contoured, thus allowing the water to go over the banks and flood the meadow. The fine particles in the future will be deposited in the meadow.
The Forest Service will be repairing what’s called reaches 5 and 6, for a total of 13,000 feet of channel. The project starting this summer and what has the regulatory approval is for Reach 5, also known as the Sunset Stables Reach. The Forest Service and California Tahoe Conservancy own the land that runs parallel to and directly east of Lake Tahoe Airport.
Sunset Stables will be the staging area. By not having it at Elks Club it allows the annual summer flea market to remain open.
What is planned:
• Year 1: New channel construction, approximately 4,000 feet.
• Year 2: Remaining new channel construction, approximately 3,300 feet; utility line relocation. South Tahoe Public Utility District’s backup treated effluent export line and water line will be relocated and buried.
• Year 3: Irrigation and seasoning; no active construction.
• Year 4: Construct channel tie-ins, floodplain grading area, and connect new channel to Upper Truckee River flows.
Extra dirt that is needed will come from a South Lake Tahoe erosion control project.
During construction it’s likely areas will be off-limits to the public for safety reasons. The whole project is expected be done in October 2016.
In other action:
• The Lahontan board approved amendments to the Lake Tahoe Basin Plan.
This area has not been modified by man and has no recent impacts that have caused increased sediment to the lake. This area has healed from any past disturbance, was not realigned and Not modified as part of the airport construction. No one has measured these impacts nor have any data to support this huge investment in restoration. This area has amazing wildlife, floods and currently treats sediment in the floodplain (yes floods), has the largest populations of the pearlshell mussel, best fisheries on the upper truckee river, amazing habitat and recreational use. There is no way man will be able to improve what is existing there now. Success will be measured by opinions and how much money was spent. Only water quality data will tell if they meet the goal of reducing sediment and yet no water quality measurements exist. Once heavy equipment is in that meadow The community will take issue and regardless of the environmental impact reports you have on this project demonstrating your opinion on the lack of function this reach has. This reach is pristine… Unmodified by man until the graders are allowed to grade the channel and floodplain. Then is will be modified by man. We will watch your man induced bank erosion and Disneyland channel you create. There is nothing natural about an armored channel and streams erode naturally. Granting exemptions is crazy and allowing agencies to pollute in an attempt to make things better. If past data has never showed these projects in degraded areas to ever meet objectives then how can one justify such huge investments and disturbance. We will watch this fail… And spend a ton of money at the expense of the lake. There are other areas we know that are highly impacted by use and chronic sediment producers. These include the mosier Reach below the airport and the marsh itself. If anyone ever collected water quality data you would see that the water quality in the sunset reach is Superior to anywhere else on the river. The same goals for this project can be reached using less intrusive methods and not creating a whole new river system. This is mans attempt to manipulate nature under the guise of restoration.
Hmm, where to start with that one….
First, you need to provide something to support this statement: “This area has healed from any past disturbance”
Really? Are you sure the water table in the meadow is in a ‘healed’ state?
“No one has measured these impacts nor have any data to support this huge investment in restoration”
Are you sure about that?
I don’t believe uninformed citizen knows what they are talking about.
Lots of very vague criticism, no supporting data, no discussion on anything specific.
This project continuing is a primary example of how politics and personal interest overrides common sense and real concern for the environment within the US Forest Service. This project is nothing but a way for “qualified river moving people” to move a river and use up millions of dollars of taxpayers money that has been allocated to do so. I don’t think one person in the US Forest Service really cares about whether or not this project will do permanent damage with little no impact, they are just more concerned that they have millions of dollars of funding available to complete this project and they want to use it. Unfortunately, the general public doesn’t know that it needs to protect itself and its pristine mountain environment from the wiles of the US Forest Service; the public just trusts the US Forest Service to do the right thing when it comes to making decisions like this one. If this project is allowed to continue, ten years from now the public will be hearing the “We are sorry for the damage we have done speech” that will be imminently coming and the public will only have itself to blame for not heading the warning about this program. The Upper Truckee River restoration project is a tragedy for Lake Tahoe and if it resumes in June, then it will truly show how greed is more important to the US Forest Service than truth, honesty, accountability or any concern for sustainability whatsoever.
Thing fish, could you post some links to the analysis in the NEPA docs that describes the existing condition? I tooka quick look for it but didn’t find it immediately.
Just to clarify, Lahontan Board approval on Feb 14th was for Reach 5 only, including approximately 7,330 ft of new channel construction. TRPA Board approval has not yet been received for the Reach 5 project.
For more information about the project, please visit the LTBMU website at the following link
http://www.fs.usda.gov/goto/ltbmu/UpperTruckeeRestoration
Hah.
Marla is another uninformed, disinformation Pipe Club goon.
Go look at the Pipe Club’ analysis of the research on river science. It is somewhere between amateur, and fraudulent. Notice how Marla is discussion a matter of science and not using any science at all. Typical Pipe Club nonsense.
Go find the docs yourself, I don’t do peoples homework on here anymore. I’ve read all kinds of documents and talked to the scientists. Meadow/stream restoration works. The Upper Truckee river was used as an example in a focus group at a conference I went to. The channel is too deep, the water table is too low. It is pretty obvious.
I bet the first poster and Marla are the same person.
I bet thing fish is intimately involved in with this project. It’ll be interesting to watch this project happen and measure its success. There are many that will be watching and be prepared to have the media and public involved as its guaranteed to be contentious. I am not Marla but do hear her frustration…
Thing Fish, river restoration is complex and many of the standard approaches fail.
I direct you to Dr. Matt Kondolf’s website, one of the most noted geomorphologist in the world and professor at UC Berkeley.
http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/ced/people/query.php?id=66
He is not a Pipe Club member, but one of the top scientist in the world on river restoration. I suspect his learned professional opinion is quite different from what was adopted. Unless he finds this project well thought out (and I suspect he does not- but admittedly do not know for sure) and reasonable, I tend to agree with those that oppose this effort.
See for example an abstract from one of his scientific papers, I believe illustrates the problem.
Among the most visually striking river restoration projects are those that involve the creation of a new channel, often in a new alignment and generally with a form and dimensions that are different from those of the preproject channel. These channel reconstruction projects often have the objective of creating a stable, single-thread, meandering channel, even on rivers that were not historically meandering, on rivers whose sediment load and flow regime would not be consistent with such stable channels, or on already sinuous channels whose bends are not symmetrical. Such meandering channels are often specified by the Rosgen classification system, a popular restoration design approach. Although most projects of this type have not been subject to objective evaluation, completed postproject appraisals show that many of these projects failed within months or years of construction. Despite its, at best, mixed results, this classification and form-based approach continues to be popular because it is easy to apply, because it is accessible to those without formal training in fluvial geomorphology, and probably because it satisfies a deep-seated, although unrecognized, cultural preference for single-thread meandering channels. This preference is consistent with 18th-century English landscape theories, which held the serpentine form to be ideal and led to widespread construction of meandering channels on the country estates of the era. The preference for stability in restored channels seems to be widely accepted by practitioners and funders despite the fact that it is antithetical to research showing that dynamically migrating channels have the greatest ecological richness.
Rick
Hi Rick. I am glad you posted. I don’t have a lot of time right now but I will check that out.
Here are my initial thoughts:
Are they creating a ‘new’ channel? or redirecting the river into an old channel which is capable of decreasing the cut bank and raising the water table? I think it is the latter. Go look at an aerial photo. They are using old channels that aren’t even old enough to be obscured.
I really need to go back in my notes, because a few months ago I was learning some hydrologic model modeling and mapping software, and one of the case studies was Ward Creek. And the researcher got lucky, and had the channel mapped out and verified before a major flood event a few years ago, and then used updated data to quantify the effect of the restoration. And the findings were overwhelmingly positive.
“These channel reconstruction projects often have the objective of creating a stable, single-thread, meandering channel, even on rivers that were not historically meandering,”
No need to take it from me, open up Google Earth and look at the historical imagery. The Upper Truckee River is historically meandering. As most middle reach rivers are in an alpine environment, which follows the River Continuum Concept. Oddly enough, I am currently staying a few miles from the research group that published the RCC.
Let’s keep it simple. The problem is easy to identify, the water table it too low in the surrounding meadow, and the channel is too deep. Forget all the biodiversity, aesthetics, sediment loading. By measure of depth to water table and cut bank depth, the system is not healthy. If the only result of the realignment decreases the depth to the water table, the project will be a huge success.
The system isn’t healthy, or even close to normal.
Dear uninformed citizen. You are the same person as ‘discouraged and informed citizen’, right?
So you have obliviously just posted on the same article using 2 aliases. Your writing styles are identical. And they are very similar to ‘Marla’. Try harder. It is pretty obvious.
As for your criticism.
Your criticism is that my opinion is suspect because I am involved in the project.
Do you see how stupid that ad hominem attack is?
Let’s expose it for everyone.
If I were intimately involved in the project, that would instantly make me far more knowledgeable than you. Which isn’t even an issue, because you aren’t even intellectually capable of raising a scientific objection to this matter of science, You only have an issue which is obvious based on a political ideology.
Let me dumb this down for you. You just said ‘this guy knows more about the project than I do, so you can’t trust him on this matter of science’
Try harder Tyler.
I am almost more offended by how you misrepresent the philosophy of the novel that inspired the name for your disinformation group.
You post under multiple aliases. Why? Because your message is not strengthened by reputation and accountability. No respectable scientist is involved with your organization. None ever has been involved, none will ever be involved. Nor will any respectable scientist allow their name to be affiliated or connected in any way to your organization.
I am not intimately involved with the project. But I have been to the meetings, read the planning documents, have volunteered to do monitoring. No part of my employment is even remotely involved with the project, and it never has been. I am intellectually curious, i read scientific research papers for fun (something you obviously can’t even do based on your website), and I just happen to be very interested in meadow/stream/river restoration. Which is very convenient now as I expand my knowledge of the software I am working with.
I have spent dozens of hours gathering raw data to run hydrologic models and countless more learning the software. For fun.
For fun, you make graphs that lie and misrepresent scientific research.
gfys.
Did the Upper Truckee river ever drain into the wetlands area which is now the Keys?
This is one stinky fish… Thanks for you crude Uninformed opinions.. I would spend time posting information but you are not even worth the time it takes to type this.. It appears you are more interested in offensive and controversial dialogue than the issue itself. We don’t need another pseudo scientist mucking up our rivers. Perhaps you should join pipe club. Hiding behind aliases and stirring the pot serves you well. Please change your alias as your fish is getting stinky…