Flood & farms: What's next?

The floods that swept through Eagle and Pine valleys earlier this month left behind — in addition to a muddy, bouldery mess — considerably more questions than answers.

Many of those questions were posed Sunday evening to Rep. Greg Walden during a public forum at the Eagle Valley Grange in Richland.

About 100 people attended the forum, said Mark Bennett, Baker County’s emergency service manager.

A chief concern, to be expected in a county where agriculture is the biggest industry, is how this worst bout of flooding in more than a quarter century will affect farmers and ranchers in the two valleys.

Widespread damage to irrigation equipment is the main short-term threat, Bennett said.

Floodwaters washed out sections of ditches, destroyed headgates and other diversion structures, flushed away topsoil and and pried loose measuring gauges.

A variety of options could be available, though, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Farm Services Agency.

Regardless of who foots the bill, the task will be complicated, Bennett said, by the presence of a fish: the bull trout.

It’s listed as a threatened species.

And most of the major streams that flooded — including Eagle, Pine and Clear creeks — are designated as critical habitat for the fish, said Jim Young, who lives in Pine Valley and is chairman of a group that’s been working for four years on a plan to reduce the risk of flooding on Pine Creek.

What that means, basically, is that the traditional practice of repairing flood damage by immediately bringing in heavy equipment to divert swollen streams back into a channel isn’t feasible.

Not the immediately part, anyway.

The Division of State Lands and the Army Corps of Engineers are responsible for issuing permits allowing such work in streams that are critical habitat for bull trout, Bennett said.

Generally, such work is allowed only during July and August, Young said.

However, he said the agencies could authorize in-stream work later than Aug. 31 in certain cases.

“There’s a lot of frustration with the fact that we can’t just run a (bulldozer) through there,” Bennett said.

He said officials from both the Division of State Lands and the Corps of Engineers are scheduled to visit Baker County on June 23 to assess flood damage.

Bull trout protections don’t affect ditches and other parts of the irrigation system that aren’t on the critical habitat streams, Bennett said.

In fact, he said some landowners who attended Sunday’s meeting told Walden they had already cleaned flood debris from their ditches.

Before the public meeting in Richland, Walden took a tour to see some of the flood damage, including an aerial view of the washed out sections of the Wallowa Mountain Loop Road northeast of Halfway.