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Find a working-class bar in an old logging town, and you’ll hear hopeful talk that the end of the Roadless Rule can restore the good old days of public lands logging: full employment, prosperity, improved public services, and reduced wildfire.
It’s a beautiful story. Nostalgia generally is.
Of course, it’s been big-city business leaders and politicians, not rural working folk, who wove this nostalgic yarn into a kind of mythology. The opening of 2 million acres of Oregon’s national forest to road-building testifies to how politically compelling this mythology has become. When myth becomes fact, politicians promise you the myth.
Lookout reporter Ashli Blow’s fine article about Drain and the BLM’s canceled Blue and Gold timber project in its watershed got me to thinking about all this. There’s a bitter irony in this story that has gone unremarked, though. It has to do with public water supplies. Logging myths and good drinking water, you see, don’t mix.
Municipal water in western Oregon comes from creeks, lakes and rivers — not from deep aquifers or groundwater wells. Walk up a gated logging road on public land at the end of rainy season and you’ll see a portion of the larger network of brooks and creeks that eventually becomes public drinking water for perhaps 75% of Oregonians.
However, stumps don’t lie, as the saying goes. Stumps and the presence of logging roads indicate that the land you’re seeing, public and private, has probably all been logged and replanted at least once in the last 80 years. It’s subsequently been sprayed with herbicide and fertilizers. The toxin-loaded soil shaken loose by heavy equipment and subsequent rain ends up in the groundwater.
Drain, and neighboring Yoncalla, draw their drinking water from places exactly like that, specifically from small, hydrologically delicate creeks — Bear Creek and Adams Creek, respectively — in the larger Elk Creek watershed, of which only 24% is public land. The BLM’s controversial Blue and Gold project area includes these very creeks.
If reinstated, that project would almost certainly send muddy run-off into Bear and Adams creeks. Such runoff reduces stream flow, raises water temperatures and clogs reservoirs. Chlorine water treatment can interact with organic sediments — such as forest runoff — to produce byproducts that are carcinogenic. Finally, if the logged parcels are replanted, young sapling thickets will consume more groundwater than established forests, potentially reducing stream flows.
The more logging and road-building upstream, in other words, the less good water in the creeks and the more water treatment downstream. Worse, new water purification plants are costly enough to strain small-town budgets, compromise the quality of life there, and even threaten their very existence.
The damnable thing is that none of those outcomes is hypothetical. Oregon has repeatedly seen them happen to small northwest Oregon towns.
Rockaway Beach, Wheeler, Corbett, Yachats, Arch Cape, Oceanside, Lincoln City and others have seen such outcomes. Rockaway Beach, population 1,500, had to build a new $1.7 million water treatment plant to address logging land runoff over a decade ago. The tiny town of Wheeler, population 428, saw upstream logging wash massive amounts of silt and gravel into its reservoirs, necessitating $1.1 million in expenditure for a new plant. In Corbett, east of Portland, when the town’s primary water supply was swamped with gravel and sand in 2019, water manager Jeff Busto warned residents that they might “not be able to live there.”
My takeaway is unavoidably pessimistic. Whatever the fate of BLM’s Blue and Gold project, Drain, Yoncalla and a slew of other small Oregon towns, including even prosperous-seeming beach towns, will still find themselves pinched between the sweet dream of prosperity and the sour reality of ecological damage, decreased stream flow, increased turbidity and costly water treatment plants. In rural Oregon, the little towns dreaming of a timber boom might not survive a boom any better than they have the bust.
And that is one bitter irony.
