Sunnyside Wetland

One of my projects made the front page of the Yakima newspaper. Since the paper tends to paywall these things in short order, I thought the blog would make a handy archive.

The picture here is from the project site. The retaining wall in the picture was placed by the county in order to keep the road apron from impacting what was presumed from USFWS-NWI reconnaisance mapping to be a jurisdiction wetland. That mapping plus the observed standing water and the wetland vegetation seemed to the county to be proof positive that clearing the land was a violation of the county critical areas code. It wasn't.

Published on Monday, September 10, 2007

County learns lessons from fight with farmer
By PAT MUIR
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

SUNNYSIDE -- Don Young didn't think his neighbor's irrigation water leaking into his property should qualify it as wetland, and after a yearlong fight, Yakima County agreed with him.

The saga, which Young documented in a meticulous inch-thick file he says makes him feel like an attorney, cost him about $6,000 by his count and kept him from using the land until last month. It also forced county leaders to rethink the way they apply the county's Critical Areas Ordinance. The ordinance, which has been under review for five years and is nearly finished, still will be enforced as mandated by state law, county Public Services Director Vern Redifer said.

"But where you can construe the law in the favor of property owners, we'll construe it that way," he said.

That's good news to Young, a self-described "stubborn old farmer" who believes he might not have prevailed in his dispute if he hadn't had the money for a consultant to make his case.

"This is a story that needs to be told, not for my benefit but for the taxpayers and the public," the 73-year-old retired rancher said.

The whole thing began when a county road crew spotted Young pulling up vegetation on the edge of his property. The county issued a cease-and-desist order in May 2006, about seven months after Young bought the 4-acre property south of Sunnyside. To his thinking, the Russian olive trees and other vegetation he removed were just trash like the piles of tires and garbage that were also on the property.

Thinking he was actually improving the land, Young took umbrage to the county's order, which included the possibility of $1,000-a-day fines.

"Nobody ever said anything about it being a wetland," he said.

He also didn't like the way county staff treated him when he disputed the matter. It was clear enough to Young that the land in question wasn't a wetland because the only source of water was the neighbor's irrigation runoff, or what his hired consultant labeled "water trespass." But he couldn't get the county to see it that way.

"The heading of their letter is 'public services,'" Young said. "I told them they need to change that, because there is no way in this world that they are serving the public."

The county's opinion on the matter didn't change until Young received a report he'd commissioned on the matter by wetlands delineation expert Phil Small of Spokane. Small's report, written after a visit to the property during which he drilled holes to measure groundwater levels, found there was no source of water other than the irrigation runoff. The county considered it a persuasive argument and in a July 31 letter lifted the cease-and-
desist order.

"What I want to know," Young said, "is why didn't the county have to hire him to prove it was a wetland instead of me having to hire him to prove it's not."

In the county staff's defense, the property did have signs of being a wetland, such as reeds, bulrushes and the Russian olive trees, Redifer said. The staff was simply following its procedures as laid out in its own policy and didn't err in that regard, he said.

County officials tried to work with Young along the way, planning manager Steve Erickson said. But the county's suggestion that Young "wait and see" if his property was a wetland based on whether groundwater returned even without irrigation runoff didn't fit into Young's schedule, Erickson said. That meant Young had to hire his consultant to force the issue, but that was up to him, Erickson said.

Where things might have been done differently, and will be in the future, is in the way county staff deals with people in such disputes, Redifer said.

Comparing it to baseball, in which "ties go to the runner," he said if there are questions about whether to act on a possible wetland scenario like Young's, the landowner will be "the runner." That is in line with the Yakima County Commissioners philosophy of a more user-friendly Critical Areas Ordinance application, which they have espoused during deliberations on the ordinance.

Staff also might call people in the future or knock on their doors, rather than sending formal letters specifying possible fines.

"I think (the letter) made him feel like a big lawbreaker, and that certainly wasn't the intent," Redifer said.

"That's another lesson learned -- how we go about engaging someone with a potential violation," Erickson added.

While he would be happy to see such changes, Young still isn't sure the county has done right by him. He's contemplating filing a claim to recoup the money he spent fighting the initial ruling. In the meantime, though, he's working the land for the first time in about a year.

He's put manure down and hopes to have the whole thing seeded for pasture by the end of September.

"I lost the production of that land for a year already," he said. "Over a year."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

Soils and its role in a changing climate

Roger Pielke Sr., over at his research group's climate science blog, has been holding forth on land use change and its impacts on long-term near surface temperature. His position is that the role of land use must be further emphasized within the climate change framework. Search for "soil" and "land" for a long list of supporting posts.

This goes beyond deforestation and urban heat islands. Dust and alterations in atmospheric water content play unknown roles and interact with albedo in sometimes counterintuitive ways. For example, irrigation warms rather than cools the land. Evaporative cooling is insufficient to drive net cooling of irrigated regions. Soils darkened by moisture absorb more heat than dry soils and re-radiate more heat during the night. This results in warmer nights and warmer average temperatures.

Current climate models are not sensitive to changes in land use. Neither are they sensitive to the soil's role in affecting atmospheric carbon levels.

Soil organic matter, at roughly 1500 GtC, is the single largest compartment of carbon in the active biogeochemical cycle. At 60 GtC annual flux (in either direction), it is 10 times larger than the 5.5 GtC flux due to burning fossil fuel. Yet soil is the component of the carbon cycle that we know the least about.

Most soil scientists agree with the unvalidated concept that soil carbon levels will likely decline in step with temperature increases. Higher biological activity will result in more decomposition of organic matter. One certainly sees a similar relationship between soil carbon and temperature when comparing the effect of elevation, aspect and latitude. That we have yet to validate it is telling.

Current climate models mostly ignore the specific role that soil microbes play in the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The information they do include is often based on assumptions that have never been tested in the field, and may be wrong or overly simplistic.

Our climate models are telling us we need to become far more efficient and more conservative in managing our planet's carbon, soil-wise and fuel-wise. But our scientific understanding will never be adequate for crafting our full response to climate change.

The fact is that our climate is infinitely complex. The models climatologists use to predict the future are incredibly sophisticated, yet blunt instruments. Scientists can never account for all the variables involved - indeed, no one has successfully come up with a mathematical equation to describe the formation of a single cloud. And scientists are often woefully out of their depth in the real world. History is littered with lives and regimes that were wrecked when science was allowed to drive policy with no thought to humanity. Tearing down the global carbon-based economy to - in theory - replace it at a later date with unproven and undeveloped technologies would be a similar folly. It is only by tempering science with economics and the market, which is the most efficient arbiter of humanity's wants and needs, that smart climate policy can be made.

Science and the market are partners of longstanding. Economic necessity, as the mother of invention, has been driving the advance of science for as long as science has been an identifiable pursuit.

Distorted Vision
Originally uploaded by uaezlulu.

Technorati Tags: climate+change land irrigation soil+science research politics

My 2007 Field Season Begins

This week I field validated my hyporheic confinement hypothesis for a site I have been working on.

I had been out mapping wetlands and characterizing a system of ditches and stream-like features. Lucky for me, a chinook was blowing: soil thawed sufficiently to be observed each afternoon. With not-normal effects on vegetation and soil chemistry from seasonal saturation by a nearby irrigation ditch, I suspect these two particular wetlands would delineate smaller, jurisdictionally speaking, come the growing season in March. But I don't know for certain. The combination of river and irrigation induced hydrology can be confounding.

Many of the stream-like ditches used at the site to accommodate irrigation water and return flows were dry. For the ones that had flow I had a devil of a time getting into them safely to measure their cross sectional profile. Prior to my client's purchase for a residential/golf course project, the property was used to run a cow/calf operation. Much of the lower ditch (15 - 30 feet across) has 20 plus inches of anaerobic mud and manure, a sure recipe for disaster for the hip wader approach. The occasional gravel bar saved me from having to pontoon for my data.

The ditches are running with mostly hyporheic/phreatic Yakima River water. I say mostly, because some snowmelt was running in a small ditch onto the site from the upland terrace onto the floodplain. The Yakima is 1000 feet away and was running near bank-full. The ditches are running a few inches below the ordinary high water scour line, and I feel certain the two hydrologies are connected.

The concept that hyporheic/phreatic hydrology can reach this far is a challenge for most folks, including my fellow project team members. How can river groundwater hydrology be feeding it when the ditch is higher than the river? The answer lies in subsurface gravel filled channels. Rivers lose and gain the same water repeatedly. In losing reaches, water drops out of the bottom into permeable gravel filled channels. Where these channels are covered with less permeable material, confinement can result in a considerable buildup of gravitational head. Where the gravel channel reaches to the margin of the floodplain, confined water can upwell at considerable distance from the river, and can be confused with irrigation derived groundwater.

In the Yakima Valley, with its 500,000 irrigated acres and its network of leaky canals, irrigation induced seasonal wetlands are common. In the floodplain, upwelling hyporheic/phreatic river water can be masked by irrigation induced hydrology, but only while the canals are full, or recently so. During this January visit, long after irrigation diversions have ceased, there was no mistaking the dominant river-induced hydrology at the site. Especially telling was the water level in an existing stream-like ditch compared with the newly constructed closed ditch intended become its replacement. Closed at the upper end, the upwelling river derived groundwater flowing in the new ditch was higher by 14 inches than the water flowing in the adjacent, topographically upgradient, closer-to-canal, older, connected, irrigation district return flow structure. 14 inches is also consistent with seepage on the bank of the older ditch structure. In the photo these are separated by only 60 feet.

These 2 ditches provide the strongest validation I've seen in the 20 years I have been observing and puzzling over hyporheic confinement and upwelling.

Tech Tags: sample soil scientist wetland consulting hydrology yakima water drainage environment irrigation regulation

Dilution is the solution to pollution

Land treatment of industrial waste water can save energy. Mechanical aeration for treatment demands large quantities of electrical power. In land treatment, this is replaced by passive aeration. The energy cost reduction can be well in excess of the payments needed to purchase the land. A disadvantage of land application of waste waste is that it can contribute to ground water salinity.
Crops and soil treatment do little to remove mineral salinity from applied waters. How much salinity in ground water is too much? Salinity doesn't threaten health as much as it taints taste. This creates a dilemma. Environmental regulators are challenged to defend enforcement limits based on aesthetics with the same vigor as criteria based on human health. They are particularly challenged when the industries contributing to groundwater salinity are valued employers contributing to rural economies. But defend water quality standards they must.
Salt load in land applied waste water is considered by many to be the single most important challenge facing the industries which use land application to treat waste water. Particularly sensitive to this issue are briners, cheese processors and some electronics manufacturers. Among waste water spray field management advisers the consensus is that saline waste water spray field operations should avoid sites where the discharge can't be diluted by substantial rainfall and/or groundwater flux. In short, dilution is the only practical solution when it comes to salts in waste water. If the operation is located in an area that does not enjoy the benefits of natural dilution, the brine portion of the waste water stream can be segregated and transported to an area that does. Not an easy task but not unprecedented. A municipal waste water treatment plant discharging to a substantial body of water is a logical choice for receiving the brine.
These comments are prompted by a news article today in the Sacramento Bee (free registration required): Hilmar faces more pollution rules. Cheese factory agrees to give water quality board more authority.
[follow-up comment from Chris Bowman, Sac-Bee: The brine collected from the reverse osmosis filters is hauled to an East Bay MUD treatment plant.]

Tech Tags: Environment news article government regulation permit

Tallahassee waste water sprayfield nitrate concern for Wakulla springs

I have been following news on a 2600 acre sprayfield on the edge of Tallahassee, Florida. It is suspected of causing environmental problems 10 miles away in Wakulla Springs State Park and the Wakulla River. A recent 1000 Friends of Florida report (pdf) ties excessive hydrilla plant growth to nitrate from the sprayfield. The news this week is that the city, USGS and Florida DEP will be conducting dye tests to better understand how the groundwater beneath the sprayfield moves down gradient. I am reading the report. Striking is the relatively low (1.0 mg/l)nitrate-N needed to control the situation.

Image source: Tallahassee Democrat

Tech Tags: science farm irrigation soil edaphology eutrophication environment karst groundwater quality nitrate TMDL USGS government news