By Peter Rice

Pilot staff writer

When Dallas Ettinger moved into his house on Pioneer Road 36 years ago, the neighborhood had a bit of a wilderness flavor.

"You could hear frogs croaking all the time and it was just kind of a marshy area," he said.

But over the years, more people moved in and developed their properties, especially up the hill eastward. And with this development, Ettinger noticed a substantial increase in the amount of storm water that came washing by his house and through his garden, which this week boasted several flowering blueberry bushes and a new apple tree.

"I'm not complaining. I've got the greatest neighbors in the world on all sides," he said. "It just kind of runs off a heck of a lot faster."

Ettinger's situation may not be more than a passing concern to him, but when multiplied by all the streets, driveways, parking lots and roofs in Brookings and Harbor, all the extra runoff created by development threatens the very survival of area salmon and steelhead runs – especially as development continues.

The problem centers on water, and the kinds of surfaces it can or cannot soak through. The forest floor, according to Frank Burris, who is on the faculty of Oregon State University's extension campus in Gold Beach, can soak up about 10 inches of rain per day without any significant runoff. Lawns, by comparison, can soak up about a half inch of rain per day. Pavement and rooftops, of course, soak up practically nothing.

Everything that doesn't get absorbed eventually ends up in area streams and rivers, and that creates several problems for fish.

More water than usual can create erosion in the river and stream beds, Burris said. The natural human response to this is to reinforce the banks, but that only causes the river to cut deeper into the ground, rather than flow to less shallow floodplain areas.

For fish, "Those are great feeding areas," Burris said.

If the extra water is a problem, so is the gunk that comes with it. Sediment and dust collects on impervious surfaces such as roads, and that washes away with rain. Ditto for fertilizers applied to lawns or crops.

Visit a big busy parking lot and take a look at the oily black pavement.

"All that stuff ends up in a tributary someplace," Burris said.

Some of the runoff is also probably warmer than ideal as well – think of the temperature of that parking lot just before the fall rains.

"I'll bet you that water is in the 80 degree range or higher," Burris said. "The temperature at which salmon start to do less well is 64."

And finally, all the extra water in the streams represents water that doesn't soak into the ground and then leak out into the rivers over a long period of time. That means less water, and higher water temperatures, during the hot and dry summer months.

The good news for fish is that much of the watershed area of Curry and Del Norte rivers is public land and not slated for the sort of development that would bring on these problems. The Chetco River drainage area, for example, includes the roadless Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

The bad news is, that even if most of the river isn't going to be affected by development, the critical area around the mouth could be.

The estuary – the area where salt water mixes with fresh water – is prime habitat for salmon and steelhead. The areas around estuaries are also especially popular places for people to live and develop property.

Chinook salmon depend especially heavily on estuaries, according to fisheries biologist Jim Waldvogel, who works at the University of California's Del Norte extension campus. They spend two to four months there getting their bodies used to the salt water before heading out to sea. Other species, such as coho salmon and steelhead trout, he said, spend less time there.

Either way, a growing mass of polluted and warmer-than-average water in the estuary is not going to promote fish health. But when does development and the new impermeable surfaces it brings start to hit wild salmon stocks hard?

There is a tipping point, said Todd Confer, the district biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Gold Beach, but, "the problem is we really don't know where that is."

Cushioning the blow

Some local govenments around the country are taking steps to protect fish from the problems associated with excessive runoff. The basic idea revolves around the same principle that reigned before all the development happened: Get the rain into the ground.

"There are things that can be done," said Mary Wahl, who works for the Bureau of Environmental Services at the city of Portland.

Consider a street. Normally, every inch of rain that fell on it would drain into a local stream. But if the water went into a small holding pond, it could have a chance to soak back into the ground. The water would get back to the river more slowly, Burris said, and the soil would filter out many of the harmful pollutants.

The trick is constructing those small ponds, called swales.

Portland and King County, Washington, have been actively installing swales on the sides of streets, Wahl said. It's not even terribly expensive if incorporated into future development, but retrofitting an existing street does cost more.

The same principle can be applied around homes. Around Portland, Wahl said, 44,000 homeowners have voluntarily redirected their gutters to spill out onto lawns and gardens.

"That's a billion gallons of storm water a year that's managed one house at a time," Wahl said. "These things add up real fast."

And while that particular scheme might not do well during a heavy coastal rainstorm, the principle still works.

"The idea is to handle as much rain on-site as possible," Burris said. "We can just start to back up the clock with impervious surfaces."

Curry County and the city of Brookings are in the process of updating their plans for dealing with storm water, and city Public Works Director Don Wilcox said such fish friendly storm water management is on the agenda.

"It's highly desirable and there's new federal as well as state regulations requiring it," he said.

Proponents of the new measures, meanwhile, are very optimistic that they can improve water quality, and by extension, the odds that wild salmon will still be swimming coastal rivers in 100 years.

"We're positive that it'll work," Burris said. "It's been shown in a lot of different areas to have major impacts on tributaries. ... If these projects are incorporated I can guarantee you it will have an effect on the Chetco River estuary."

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Reach Peter Rice at price@currypilot.com.