Sometime in the late 1990s we picked up a private sector client in St. Louis. Our first project for him involved a commercial development just southeast of St. Louis airport, and not too far from the then little known but now infamous locale of Ferguson, Missouri.
I’d never worked in anything remotely like this place. Sandwiched between Interstate 170 and a residential subdivision, it was a surreal island of un-natural nature. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of cars went right by it at high speed every day, and yet I’m pretty sure that hardly anyone except the neighborhood kids knew it was there. Covering several acres and elongated in shape, an urban stream meandered through it, 20-foot deep canyons of hard brown silt with scrubby trees on top of the banks. It was badly eroded, and at some point in the past someone had poured concrete over the edge in a few places. Not in an orderly manner, rather they’d backed the truck up to the edge and let the concrete run randomly down the slope. Upstream it was all fed by culverts and ditches. Downstream it ran into large box culverts and large engineered concrete ditches built as part of the interstate highway. Most of the time flow was gentle and water shallow; all evidence suggested that a typical summer thunderstorm could briefly turn it into a raging torrent.
The stream was so entrenched and so badly eroded that we started over. When the entire development site was graded flat, so was the stream, water briefly went through a bypass pipe, and then a wider, shallower, gently meandering channel was constructed away from the future buildings. A wooded buffer was planted on either side. At the lower end a relatively small flat concrete structure was designed to maintain the channel base level and prevent it from once again eroding too deeply.
We had to make the local contractor do the concrete structure over, they tried to modify the design without asking and got the elevations wrong. Once fixed, the system looked deceptively pleasant. There was no hint of the brown scar on the landscape that had once been. The gentle banks were soon lush and green, and the slower flow allowed a thin layer of clean fine gravel to accumulate in the bottom instead of being instantly scoured away downstream where it could clog the highway box culverts.
The goal was limited to reducing peak flows and minimizing erosion, and it accomplished that quite nicely. The regulatory agencies didn’t even ask for anything beyond 1:1 replacement, since it was clear that almost anything we did would be an improvement.
Overall it was a relatively simple and fast paced project. If not for the urban location and the almost otherworldly pre-project appearance, it might not have been nearly as memorable.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Mahon Slough
Several months into the Suisun Marsh project, another one kicked off; this time, in San Rafael.
The first look at the site was a little surprising. What I’d seen of San Rafael up to this point had been typical upscale Marin County. Yet this site, although it was only blocks from downtown, was in a light industrial neighborhood. Auto repair shops backed up onto Mahon Creek, with old cars and trailers parked within feet of the water. A brownfield site, a former coal gasification plant, was across the street; a large vacant lot in appearance, contaminants were held in by a retaining wall and a clay cap.
The creek floodplain had been filled long ago, and pre-project it was a steep-sided tidal ditch with impervious clays on either side. Once, trying to take a soil sample, I had to run to the hardware store to buy a hammer and chisel to break through the surface. Not surprisingly, the creek periodically flooded the surrounding neighborhood. Sometimes the floods were severe.
The overall project was an extension of what is now Andersen Drive; then it was an abandoned railroad right-of-way. There were enough scattered puddles that qualified as wetland to require a few acres of mitigation. Overall it was a small project, yet it had drawn considerable local collaboration. The mitigation site had been chosen with the help of two influential conservation organizations, and as a result the project had their support.
The first day into the mitigation site I had to crawl through a hole in a chainlink fence overgrown with weeds. Two small homeless camps were nestled back in the weeds, but I saw very little human presence.
The mitigation design evolved into a block-long excavation of fill material on either side of the creek, re-establishing the historic floodplain. A planting plan was developed with the help of a local firm, with typical salt marsh species on the lower elevations and a narrow fringe of high marsh at the transition to upland. The permitting process, while a bit more involved than the previous project because of different agency representatives, went smoothly. My colleague and mentor Janet O’Neill flew out from Virginia on one occasion to assist with agency meetings, to excellent effect. I learned quite a bit about how to move permits through the process efficiently.
Then I moved on to projects in other parts of the country, and didn’t have time to track construction. For some reason I thought it hadn’t been built. It later turned out that it had only been delayed for a few years; actual construction took place in 1997.
On a whim, I drove by the site in 2007. I’d been on nearby Rt 101, and was curious what had ever become of the area. I drove over the small bridge, and saw a tidy and aesthetically pleasing salt marsh in the midst of a thriving new urbanism neighborhood.
It was perhaps the surroundings that surprised me more than anything. There was a shiny new office building next door, and a park across the street. There were people everywhere, many of them walking. There was a trail on one side of the mitigation site, as we has envisioned; now it had side paths to the office building, with landscaped gardens among the paths. There was no trash, which is unusual in tidal areas. Clearly, someone was maintaining the site, picking up every little scrap of debris.
The goals of the project had been modest, with the primary focus on increasing floodplain capacity. Habitat goals were limited to species typical of urban areas, because of the small size of the site and the surroundings, there had never been any illusions about use by rare species. Especially given the simple goals, the project had been remarkably successful.
The first look at the site was a little surprising. What I’d seen of San Rafael up to this point had been typical upscale Marin County. Yet this site, although it was only blocks from downtown, was in a light industrial neighborhood. Auto repair shops backed up onto Mahon Creek, with old cars and trailers parked within feet of the water. A brownfield site, a former coal gasification plant, was across the street; a large vacant lot in appearance, contaminants were held in by a retaining wall and a clay cap.
The creek floodplain had been filled long ago, and pre-project it was a steep-sided tidal ditch with impervious clays on either side. Once, trying to take a soil sample, I had to run to the hardware store to buy a hammer and chisel to break through the surface. Not surprisingly, the creek periodically flooded the surrounding neighborhood. Sometimes the floods were severe.
The overall project was an extension of what is now Andersen Drive; then it was an abandoned railroad right-of-way. There were enough scattered puddles that qualified as wetland to require a few acres of mitigation. Overall it was a small project, yet it had drawn considerable local collaboration. The mitigation site had been chosen with the help of two influential conservation organizations, and as a result the project had their support.
The first day into the mitigation site I had to crawl through a hole in a chainlink fence overgrown with weeds. Two small homeless camps were nestled back in the weeds, but I saw very little human presence.
The mitigation design evolved into a block-long excavation of fill material on either side of the creek, re-establishing the historic floodplain. A planting plan was developed with the help of a local firm, with typical salt marsh species on the lower elevations and a narrow fringe of high marsh at the transition to upland. The permitting process, while a bit more involved than the previous project because of different agency representatives, went smoothly. My colleague and mentor Janet O’Neill flew out from Virginia on one occasion to assist with agency meetings, to excellent effect. I learned quite a bit about how to move permits through the process efficiently.
Then I moved on to projects in other parts of the country, and didn’t have time to track construction. For some reason I thought it hadn’t been built. It later turned out that it had only been delayed for a few years; actual construction took place in 1997.
On a whim, I drove by the site in 2007. I’d been on nearby Rt 101, and was curious what had ever become of the area. I drove over the small bridge, and saw a tidy and aesthetically pleasing salt marsh in the midst of a thriving new urbanism neighborhood.
It was perhaps the surroundings that surprised me more than anything. There was a shiny new office building next door, and a park across the street. There were people everywhere, many of them walking. There was a trail on one side of the mitigation site, as we has envisioned; now it had side paths to the office building, with landscaped gardens among the paths. There was no trash, which is unusual in tidal areas. Clearly, someone was maintaining the site, picking up every little scrap of debris.
The goals of the project had been modest, with the primary focus on increasing floodplain capacity. Habitat goals were limited to species typical of urban areas, because of the small size of the site and the surroundings, there had never been any illusions about use by rare species. Especially given the simple goals, the project had been remarkably successful.
Friday, February 13, 2015
Interlude
I'm going to pause from the project commentary briefly and write about a much earlier influence.
My interest in the natural world dates back to around age five or six, when we moved from the inner city to the suburbs. Suddenly I had a vast new world to explore, one that seemed like a wilderness to a young boy even though today I understand that it was only a succession of old fields and remnant woodlands dominated by weedy species. The prairie and oak savanna was almost gone from that place by that time. Even so, I was fascinated by the larval tiger salamanders I found in a pond next to an old abandoned farmhouse in the path of relentless suburban growth.
By the time I was in second grade I'd devoured every book in the school library that had anything to do with wildlife. One of those books that my parents must have bought for me is in front of me now; a tattered copy of the Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians. The price, $1.00, is in the top right corner of the front cover and I need to handle it carefully to keep the pages from falling out.
The illustrations are crude, yet on page 141 is a drawing that I never forgot. A Pacific giant salamander and an olympic salamander perch atop a flat rock in a habitat very unlike where they actually live. I remember looking at these exotic creatures, at the range map showing a sliver of color on the west coast from northern California into British Columbia, and dreaming of these still unknown (to me) and far away places, 2,000 miles distant which might as well be in another galaxy from the perspective of a nine year old. Of course now I'm sitting within that sliver of color, and have seen lots of these no longer mysterious salamanders. A dream realized, I suppose.
I met many of the authors of those early books once I'd begun my professional career. They were aged gentlemen by then. When I had the opportunity to meet this particular author (the prolific Hobart M. Smith) I'd just found the tattered old book on a visit to my parents house, and tucked it in my pocket. I told Dr. Smith the story above as he smiled and signed the worn old page.
All of this is actually just a way of leading up to my real point. Along with a few illustrations and maps and words, I was drawn to this mysterious amphibious world by even earlier written accounts, authored by a previous generation of gentleman naturalists. They were mostly deceased before I ever read their words, so I never had the opportunity to meet them. Yet I was fascinated by their more flowing and elaborate and less formal writing style, common before the days when every scientific paper became dry and technical and rational and laden with statistical analysis. Those earlier accounts tapped into primal emotions at least as much as they recited scientific fact.
I'll cite two relevant examples. The Handbook of Frogs and Toads, by Albert Hazen Wright and Anna Allen Wright, was first published in 1933. After each species account it included excerpts from field notes. Here I read about pine barrens tree frogs in New Jersey, assorted chorus frogs in the swamps of Florida and Georgia, and leopard frogs in north woods lakes. One day I would have my own journals of notes from road trips; these much earlier ones helped spark that interest. I read them over and over again, and I was not disappointed when I finally was able to visit a few of the same places many years later.
The other example I didn't read til many years later. E. R. Dunn's Salamanders of the Family Plethodontidae has plenty of taxonomic detail in the species accounts. Yet the 1926 original work, and my 1972 reprint not acquired until two decades after that, included many passages like the following one in the forward:
"Yet it is the places that stick in my mind, which I had not seen but for Desmognathus or Oedipus. Cedar Rock in the rain, when the face of it was a waterfall a thousand feet high and a half mile wide, water pouring out from the spruce forest on top, and spreading out over the great dome and down with a mighty roaring to its hidden base. The cliffs of Lost Cove and the escarpment of the Blue Ridge down which we went all one long day, with our senses of direction clean gone, and dark came on, and we followed trails in the woods which ended blindly, until across three ridges we heard a cow bell and the bark of a dog. The silence of the spruce forest on White Top, and the thick moss on the ground there."
It's only three pages in the front of the book, yet it so eloquently captures some of my own feelings while pursuing Aneides or Desmognathus or Plethodon in that same Blue Ridge region more than 60 years after Dunn wrote his words. I doubt I could convey it half as well as he did. Again, he helped inspire new trips out into the wind and the rain and the night for long hikes over rugged terrain.
Those trips still happen. Today we too often take ourselves so seriously or just get too busy and forget to write about those less tangible things which for me at least, are a big part of the reason to undertake such adventures.
My interest in the natural world dates back to around age five or six, when we moved from the inner city to the suburbs. Suddenly I had a vast new world to explore, one that seemed like a wilderness to a young boy even though today I understand that it was only a succession of old fields and remnant woodlands dominated by weedy species. The prairie and oak savanna was almost gone from that place by that time. Even so, I was fascinated by the larval tiger salamanders I found in a pond next to an old abandoned farmhouse in the path of relentless suburban growth.
By the time I was in second grade I'd devoured every book in the school library that had anything to do with wildlife. One of those books that my parents must have bought for me is in front of me now; a tattered copy of the Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians. The price, $1.00, is in the top right corner of the front cover and I need to handle it carefully to keep the pages from falling out.
The illustrations are crude, yet on page 141 is a drawing that I never forgot. A Pacific giant salamander and an olympic salamander perch atop a flat rock in a habitat very unlike where they actually live. I remember looking at these exotic creatures, at the range map showing a sliver of color on the west coast from northern California into British Columbia, and dreaming of these still unknown (to me) and far away places, 2,000 miles distant which might as well be in another galaxy from the perspective of a nine year old. Of course now I'm sitting within that sliver of color, and have seen lots of these no longer mysterious salamanders. A dream realized, I suppose.
I met many of the authors of those early books once I'd begun my professional career. They were aged gentlemen by then. When I had the opportunity to meet this particular author (the prolific Hobart M. Smith) I'd just found the tattered old book on a visit to my parents house, and tucked it in my pocket. I told Dr. Smith the story above as he smiled and signed the worn old page.
All of this is actually just a way of leading up to my real point. Along with a few illustrations and maps and words, I was drawn to this mysterious amphibious world by even earlier written accounts, authored by a previous generation of gentleman naturalists. They were mostly deceased before I ever read their words, so I never had the opportunity to meet them. Yet I was fascinated by their more flowing and elaborate and less formal writing style, common before the days when every scientific paper became dry and technical and rational and laden with statistical analysis. Those earlier accounts tapped into primal emotions at least as much as they recited scientific fact.
I'll cite two relevant examples. The Handbook of Frogs and Toads, by Albert Hazen Wright and Anna Allen Wright, was first published in 1933. After each species account it included excerpts from field notes. Here I read about pine barrens tree frogs in New Jersey, assorted chorus frogs in the swamps of Florida and Georgia, and leopard frogs in north woods lakes. One day I would have my own journals of notes from road trips; these much earlier ones helped spark that interest. I read them over and over again, and I was not disappointed when I finally was able to visit a few of the same places many years later.
The other example I didn't read til many years later. E. R. Dunn's Salamanders of the Family Plethodontidae has plenty of taxonomic detail in the species accounts. Yet the 1926 original work, and my 1972 reprint not acquired until two decades after that, included many passages like the following one in the forward:
"Yet it is the places that stick in my mind, which I had not seen but for Desmognathus or Oedipus. Cedar Rock in the rain, when the face of it was a waterfall a thousand feet high and a half mile wide, water pouring out from the spruce forest on top, and spreading out over the great dome and down with a mighty roaring to its hidden base. The cliffs of Lost Cove and the escarpment of the Blue Ridge down which we went all one long day, with our senses of direction clean gone, and dark came on, and we followed trails in the woods which ended blindly, until across three ridges we heard a cow bell and the bark of a dog. The silence of the spruce forest on White Top, and the thick moss on the ground there."
It's only three pages in the front of the book, yet it so eloquently captures some of my own feelings while pursuing Aneides or Desmognathus or Plethodon in that same Blue Ridge region more than 60 years after Dunn wrote his words. I doubt I could convey it half as well as he did. Again, he helped inspire new trips out into the wind and the rain and the night for long hikes over rugged terrain.
Those trips still happen. Today we too often take ourselves so seriously or just get too busy and forget to write about those less tangible things which for me at least, are a big part of the reason to undertake such adventures.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Suisun Marsh
In 1993 I was asked to take over a California wetland mitigation project. The woman who had barely started it had transferred out from one of our east coast offices, but had clashed with the engineer who ran our Concord office. After only a few months and with one completed project in the northeast corner of the state, she had left for an opportunity in Atlanta. As the only other ecologist in the company with previous California experience, I was asked to take over the permitting and mitigation design, and as a result I worked about half time from Concord over the next year or two on this and another project.
The project involved the widening of SR 12 through Suisun City, in Solano County. The decision had already been made to mitigate the filling of a roadside ditch through wetland re-establishment on the adjacent Hill Sough Wildlife Area, and an agreement to that effect had been negotiated with California Department of Fish and Game. The outlines of the concept were in place; the deep, straight ditch would be replaced by a meandering brackish and tidal slough. There would be about nine acres of adjacent seasonal wetlands, and the mitigation site would be separated from the Wildlife Area by a dike. We weren't happy about this last part, but CDFG insisted upon it.
My role was to help work out the final design details and then to obtain the permits. We brought out a hydrologist and designed a weir to keep a small area of fresh water below the outfall (the upper segment of the stream was underground in a residential neighborhood) as pond turtle habitat. I modified the elevations and some of the channel contours to minimize "islands" of upland that might serve as weed traps. I worked with a local landscape architect to develop a planting plan, after first educating him on why non-native ornamentals were not an option (he learned quickly and ultimately did well).
Then I got the permits. These were almost too easy. The Corps of Engineers was quite cooperative. There were no issues with the dreaded Bay Conservation and Development Commission, it was the first time I'd dealt with them and I didn't know any better. Possibly stopping by their San Francisco office to meet staff and ask to use some of their publications for research helped.
The project was built in the fall of 1994, and I visited every couple of years for a while. At first it was fairly successful. We met the permit requirements at the end of year five (Caltrans did the monitoring, I visited on my own time).
Then they walked away. After 1999, no one did anything to manage the site. After another 10 years, the trail had cracks in the pavement and the interpretive signs were too faded to read.
The interior of the site still looked pretty good, still met performance criteria. This included the new channel and the nine acre seasonal wetland, so actually most of the site looked pretty good. The problem was the upland buffer between the channel and the road. It was pretty weedy. Only an acre or two, but still.
I learned the importance of long-term management. I also learned not to place mitigation sites contiguous with roads, if at all possible. It hadn't been a choice in this case, we'd pressed as far into the Wildlife Area as we realistically could.
Overall, the mitigation site is a big improvement over pre-project conditions. I'd always like to see better, however I've got to acknowledge that we met the stated goals even without long-term management. We'd provided additional habitat for two listed species known on the adjacent lands, Suisun shrew and salt marsh harvest mouse. We'd eliminated habitat for non-native gobies documented in the ditch before the project. We'd removed a considerable amount of compacted fill which had encroached into the margin of Suisun Marsh, the largest estuary in the western U.S. And I'd gained California project and permitting experience. More on that in the next post.
Although I disliked working in the suburban car culture that is Concord… it was faster to get in the car to go to lunch than to walk across the six lane street, which was dangerous… I did very much enjoy the project area. Often I'd drive down to the end of Hill Slough Road, past the golden treeless hills and the endless marshes. In the evenings I'd eat in Fairfield or drive over to Berkeley and browse bookstores after dinner. One weekend I drove up to Tioga Pass, making snowballs at 11,000 feet after crossing the baking 100-degree central valley. I took full advantage of the opportunity to expand on my earlier experiences in Southern California, San Francisco, and Mendocino County.
The project involved the widening of SR 12 through Suisun City, in Solano County. The decision had already been made to mitigate the filling of a roadside ditch through wetland re-establishment on the adjacent Hill Sough Wildlife Area, and an agreement to that effect had been negotiated with California Department of Fish and Game. The outlines of the concept were in place; the deep, straight ditch would be replaced by a meandering brackish and tidal slough. There would be about nine acres of adjacent seasonal wetlands, and the mitigation site would be separated from the Wildlife Area by a dike. We weren't happy about this last part, but CDFG insisted upon it.
My role was to help work out the final design details and then to obtain the permits. We brought out a hydrologist and designed a weir to keep a small area of fresh water below the outfall (the upper segment of the stream was underground in a residential neighborhood) as pond turtle habitat. I modified the elevations and some of the channel contours to minimize "islands" of upland that might serve as weed traps. I worked with a local landscape architect to develop a planting plan, after first educating him on why non-native ornamentals were not an option (he learned quickly and ultimately did well).
Then I got the permits. These were almost too easy. The Corps of Engineers was quite cooperative. There were no issues with the dreaded Bay Conservation and Development Commission, it was the first time I'd dealt with them and I didn't know any better. Possibly stopping by their San Francisco office to meet staff and ask to use some of their publications for research helped.
The project was built in the fall of 1994, and I visited every couple of years for a while. At first it was fairly successful. We met the permit requirements at the end of year five (Caltrans did the monitoring, I visited on my own time).
Then they walked away. After 1999, no one did anything to manage the site. After another 10 years, the trail had cracks in the pavement and the interpretive signs were too faded to read.
The interior of the site still looked pretty good, still met performance criteria. This included the new channel and the nine acre seasonal wetland, so actually most of the site looked pretty good. The problem was the upland buffer between the channel and the road. It was pretty weedy. Only an acre or two, but still.
I learned the importance of long-term management. I also learned not to place mitigation sites contiguous with roads, if at all possible. It hadn't been a choice in this case, we'd pressed as far into the Wildlife Area as we realistically could.
Overall, the mitigation site is a big improvement over pre-project conditions. I'd always like to see better, however I've got to acknowledge that we met the stated goals even without long-term management. We'd provided additional habitat for two listed species known on the adjacent lands, Suisun shrew and salt marsh harvest mouse. We'd eliminated habitat for non-native gobies documented in the ditch before the project. We'd removed a considerable amount of compacted fill which had encroached into the margin of Suisun Marsh, the largest estuary in the western U.S. And I'd gained California project and permitting experience. More on that in the next post.
Although I disliked working in the suburban car culture that is Concord… it was faster to get in the car to go to lunch than to walk across the six lane street, which was dangerous… I did very much enjoy the project area. Often I'd drive down to the end of Hill Slough Road, past the golden treeless hills and the endless marshes. In the evenings I'd eat in Fairfield or drive over to Berkeley and browse bookstores after dinner. One weekend I drove up to Tioga Pass, making snowballs at 11,000 feet after crossing the baking 100-degree central valley. I took full advantage of the opportunity to expand on my earlier experiences in Southern California, San Francisco, and Mendocino County.
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