Anger and Blame After

Deadly Flood in Northwest

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

The big rain fell with fatal efficiency those first few days of December. It washed mud from mountainsides and lifted logs into the Chehalis River, which rose to a historic high as it roared downhill. Bridges broke. Cows drowned. Helicopters plucked people from rooftops. The flood was devastating, and revealing, churning up once again the question that confounds the Pacific Northwest: How to balance people, water, fish, forests and farms? A month later, anger and blame accompany the giant dehumidifiers still being used to dry out houses.

“We’ve got to have a big public debate, and it’s got to result in action, not inaction,” said W. Jay Gordon, an organic dairy farmer who is executive director of the Washington State Dairy Federation. “Maybe this will finally provoke that public discussion. It’s not just logging. It’s not just farming. It’s not just development, and it’s not just environmentalists.”

The storm that caused the flooding has been linked to at least six deaths in the Northwest and the loss of hundreds of farm animals. It instantly updated local building codes that require new development to be above the flood line. It has also prompted competing accusations that logging contributed to the damage and that efforts to protect salmon habitat left the river full of destructive debris. “That’s part of it,” Pete Dykstra, a 64-year-old dairy farmer here whose 100 Holstein cattle drowned, said of the logging. “But part of it’s Mother Nature, too, and part of it’s the environmentalists.”

Mr. Dykstra and many other local residents attribute some of the damage to laws intended to protect salmon. “We can’t dredge it,” he said of the river. “And if a tree falls over, we can’t clear it out because that’s habitat. Tension has increased as more people move to this part of Washington, about 100 miles southwest of Seattle, bringing new development pressure and new ideas about how to use the land. Lewis County, which suffered much of the worst damage from the storm, had 59,000 people in 1990, according to the Census Bureau. Last year it had nearly 74,000.

While people still talk about the big flood of 1996, which inundated the region and closed Interstate 5, new retail development has been built in the flood plain since then, and some of the houses that flooded in December were under construction. Like many other places in the Northwest outside big cities, Lewis County is trying to make its way from a declining economy based on logging and mining to one that meets new needs.

What had been the largest employer, a coal mine operated by TransAlta, closed late in 2006, taking 600 jobs. But the timber industry, in steady decline in many other places in the Northwest, has actually grown here in recent years, and the county has also lured warehouses for big companies like Fred Meyer, a department store, and Michaels, the chain of craft stores. They like the access to Interstate 5, which goes right through Lewis County and connects to ports in Seattle and Portland while it runs the length of the West Coast. But just like in 1996, the Interstate flooded in the storm of Dec. 2 and 3. It was closed for four days. New flood-control measures were supposed to be a priority after the 1996 flood, but the projects have yet to be built. Now that Lewis County is more involved in the region’s global economic goals, local officials say flood control is even more critical. “This is not just about Lewis County,” said Bill Lotto, head of the county’s Economic Development Council. “It becomes a much broader thing when you can’t get goods from Mexico to Canada. Farther from the highway, however, many longtime residents are less concerned about connecting to the outside.

Many people who do not farm have jobs in logging. They emphasize their self-reliance, noting how people banded together to buy dehumidifiers rather than wait for government help. The Baw Faw Grange, a farmer’s group here in Curtis, has been feeding people in the area since the first days after the storm. The Curtis post office, which had been tucked into a corner of the Curtis Store until the store was inundated with eight feet of mud and water, is now run from a truck in the Grange’s parking lot. “We’ve got people in Seattle telling us how to live our lives, and half of them have never picked up a pitchfork,” said Barbara Soto, 41, stopping by the post office on New Year’s Eve.

Ms. Soto is among those who blame efforts to protect salmon for a buildup of debris that slammed down the flooded river. Others blame logging directly, and some cite a photograph published in The Seattle Times after the flood that showed big mudslides on a recently cut steep slope that drains into a tributary of the Chehalis. Studies have shown that clear-cutting increases erosion and mudslides. And not every advocate for limiting logging is a big-city environmentalist.

“If there had been more forest cover, the water wouldn’t have run off as quickly and been as destructive,” said Margaret Rader, a board member of the Chehalis River Council, a local volunteer group. “There’s no way that it couldn’t have had an impact. ”All sides agree that the rain itself was stunning, with 15 inches falling on parts of the Chehalis River basin. “Who do you blame for that?” said Bobbi Fenn, 54, who said she had lived in the area near Curtis for half a century and never before seen such flooding. “Sometimes things just happen. I’ve been thinking someone should write a book about it, but I wouldn’t want to read it.”

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Senin 18 February 2008, 14.11 siang)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.usnews.com)