Hey, what’s with all the tree stumps planted upside down and the other strange looking landscaping along Salmon Creek? It sure looks odd. Did my taxes pay for this?
— Anonymous walker
A.W., you’re obviously talking about LWD, placed by CPU with TLC.
That is, Large Woody Debris placed by Clark Public Utilities. With Tender Loving Care, of course. (Clark County has done some of the same sort of work along Salmon Creek, too.) Your utility rates probably helped pay for a tiny bit of it — but the lion’s share came from state Department of Ecology grants.
Jeff Wittler, the environmental resources manager at Clark Public Utilities, wrote in an email that large woody debris “is now a typical component of most stream restoration projects.” Nature, left to its own devices, tends to drop wood all around and within streambeds in a random and haphazard fashion, he said. “As stream restorationists, we try to do the same,” Wittler said. “Most ecologists now feel that large woody debris and material is just about as vital to stream health as the actual water in the stream.”
Wittler said scientists have estimated that streams “not impacted by European settlement” used to contain up to 700 logs and rootwads per lineal mile. “It’s one of life’s little ironies that since the early 1900s, LWD was intentionally removed from streams in order to ‘decrease’ erosion and allow ‘fish passage,'” he wrote. “It wasn’t until many years later that we really started to see a great deal of stream degradation due to the lack of structure that wood provided.”