Siskiyou County Supervisor's Public Meeting: Testimony of Miner and Lambie Mar 25, 2008

7 MR. MINER: Mr. Chairman, members of the Board

8 of Supervisors, members of the public, it's a pleasure

9 to be here in the midst of a hornets nest of controversy

10 today. I don't think there was any way out of it, Frank

11 wouldn't let me. It's nice to see you all tonight.

12As Frank mentioned, our firm Brownfield Partners,

13 has worked with the County before on issues of complex

14 environmental valuation. Frankly, our principal area of

15 activity is redevelopment of contaminated real estate. We

16 also do some work associated with the environmental

17 valuation and mitigation in risk management all dealing

18 with the way in which environmental contamination affects

19 property.

20 Frank and I have talked about this project on and

21 off a couple years. During that time I told him, Frank, I

22 have an understanding of the County now, I've done a lot

23 of research on this very thorny issue, but I'm not a

24 sediment guru. So Frank said, "Go find a sediment guru,

25 Stuart." So I have brought along with me a protege of

1 mine that I've known over 15 years, John Lambie. John is

2 a Pacific Northwest resident up here in Portland Oregon

3 John did studies at MIT in sediment mechanics, and John

4 and I have had a chance to very briefly look at some of

5 the materials that have been put together here.

6 I should stress this is, kidding aside, a

7 considerably complex issue of natural and cultural

8 resource conflicts. We're frankly, I'd like to think,

9 fairly dispassionate with respect to this issue. I

10 understand many of the people here are and I certainly

11 tan understand why. But our charge from the County was

12 to in a very, very short time period look at a couple of

13 the key documents and frankly give Frank some feedback

14 on some of our scientific thoughts as to what we saw and

15 what we took a look at.

16 I can add some of my thoughts to that, but

17 frankly I'd like to turn it over to John who can speak a

18 little more authoritatively on sediment than I can.

19 MR. LAMBIE: Well, I had the good fortune of

20 knowing Stuart when he needed a sediment expert. I got

21 asked last Wednesday if I could look at this with him. I

22 said yes, I could. As he said, we've known each other

23 quite a while.

24 I did, in fact, do my master's degree on sediment

25 mechanics at MIT, and done a number of studies. All I can

1 tell you at this point I've had a chance to look at the

2 file and found there are indeed 13 sediment studies that

3 have been done. I've had a chance to look at them

4 preliminarily and form some opinions. As to whether

5 they're sound science, they are not. I'll hold on passing

6 any judgment on that and see what questions the

7 supervisors have.

[Introduction of panelist Jim DePree, retired Natural Resource Specialist Siskiyou County]

9 SUPERVISOR OVERMAN: Thank you.

10 And with that, Supervisor Armstrong, would you

11 start off the questioning, please.

12 SUPERVISOR ARMSTRONG: I certainly would want

13 to hear what Mr. Lambie has to say. What are the

14 potential long and short term risks of dam removal and

15 sediment removal to downstream infrastructure, private

16 property, fish invertebrate, wildlife habitat, increased

17 flooding. What have we got here?

18 MR. LAMBIE: You have a complex system. I

19 wouldn't be prepared to answer all of those questions.

20 The dams themselves as hydraulic measures are not

21 terribly large features, they don't offer a lot of

22 storage. As to flooding events, I don't see --some

23 people have done studies as to what they do. I'm not

24 one to pass on that. There are more expert folks than I

25 on that particular topic. By and larger they don't

1 provide any large flood restrictions. So the

2 protection, therefore, to infrastructure isn't large.

3 The actual release of the sediments from the dams

4 seems to be a subject of some controversy. There's

5 several of these studies that go back and forth. There's

6 essentially two groups of studies. One is done by

7 PacifiCorp, but a primary study done by JC Headwater how

8 much sediment is there, what the characteristics of it

9 are, and then additional studies done by the California

10 State Coastal Conservancy looking at the quality of the

11 sediment and the quantity of sediment further by taking

12 some samples in the reservoir.

13 Those studies brought by the conservancy then

14 propagated studies of how should the sediment be thought

15 of to be released behind the dams. And in summary, I

16 think the thing to say is they really only looked at one

17 alternative. That's a fairly rapid and sudden release of

18 sediment from behind the dams. And it's not clear that

19 that's an advisable approach.

20 As an engineer, licensed here in the West

21 Coast, the proper thing to do is a feasibility study of>

22 what are the ways one would do that if that's the

23 approach taken, the dam removal scenario. Taking a

24 further step backward, nobody has actually done a

25 feasibility study of the dams stay, dams go, some of the

1 dams stay. Seems to me on a decision this large, that's

2 an criteria you would look before you leap and look at

3 the cost benefits of what these things will do, with

4 sediments being one compound of the whole picture.

5 SUPERVISOR ARMSTRONG: Do they have the

6 potential that you saw of potentially hurting anything

7 downstream?

8 MR. LAMBIE: Well, river sediment mechanic

9 around dams is fairly simple and yet complex. Rivers

10 and systems do either one of two things. They're either

11 an abrading system or degrading system. Abrading means

12 it's putting sediment in and depositing it actively.

13 Degrading means it's taking it away. Once you put a dam

14 in, what you do is artificially stockpile the sediment

15 behind the dam, and so the river naturally degrades the

16 area below it. So these rivers, as I saw evidence today

17 as we drove through on a beautiful day to see the river

18 valley. I should add, this isn't the first project I've

19 done on the Klamath and first time I've become aware.

20 I've done studies for the project area as to how much

21 water is available and where.

22 In short, the lower river below Iron Gate has

23 degraded its riverbed by several feet and that would be

24 refilled once a dam was to come out and sediment was

25 released. That would raise the base elevation of the

1 river closer to its natural flood plain. It has a fairly

2 broad flood plain down by 1-5. Most of the way it's

3 relatively narrowly constrained by the bedrock that

4 surrounds it in the area of the dams.

5 So I don't want to go on too long. It's a

6 complex system. It will reequilibrate once you take out

7 the dams. I think the issue I had with the dam studies

8 done is it really only looked at one way which you could

9 take the reservoirs down and begin to allow the sediment

10 to release. The normal course of action in one of these

11 is to allow the river to reaquire that sediment and take

12 it downstream. And it will dynamically reequilibrate in

13 the system.

14 SUPERVISOR OVERMAN: Thank you. Supervisor

15 Cook?

16 SUPERVISOR COOK: Then to reduce some of the

17 risk as this bed would rise, would it make sense to

18 remove that sediment and stockpile it someplace else?

19 You would also then stop it from paving, as it were,

20 using the fines to --that might destroy the

21 invertebrates in the river. Would it make sense to move!

22 that sediment or at least part of that sediment?

23 MR., LAMBIE: No. I did coastal studies when I

24 was doing my sediment mechanics of long shore flow. In

25 short, it's like moving grains of sand on the beach.

1 It's going to do what it's going to do. You may as well

2 work with those forces than having dump trucks which are

3 rather small compared to this river.

4 SUPERVISOR COOK: Thank you.

5 SUPERVISOR OVERMAN: Thank you. Supervisor

6 Erickson? --- 7 SUPERVISOR ERICKSON: I would like you to --

8 Mr. Lambie, that last statement having grains of sand do

9 what they will, are you saying that this is probably an

10 okay thing to let that sediment go?

11 MR. LAMBIE: Yes. It's how you let it go.

12 SUPERVISOR ERICKSON: It's how you let it go?

13 MR. LAMBIE: You can draft this thing down very

14 quickly and --it was running big today --take a whole

15 lot of sediment out in a hurry, or bring down slowly and

16 let it reaquire that sediment --

17 SUPERVISOR ERICKSON: What would be your

18 recommendation for that?

19 MR. LAMBIE: I would need to do a lot more

20 study with some people who are good at geomorphology to

21 work with me.

22 SUPERVISOR ERICKSON: You're using those words.

23 Also, I know that you've just had less than a

24 week to look at 13 of these studies supposedly. Would you

25 find them, as you've looked through them, to be impartial?

1 MR. LAMBIE: There's some fairly limited science

2 in some of them. They're overly simplistic, many of them.

>3 I don't want to overly generalize. The ones on river

4 takedown --dam takedown and sediment transport rates are

5 really based on some overly simple analyses. It's not

6 very hard these days to do fairly sophisticated analyses

7 of what the dynamics of it is. They look at basic

8 settling velocity of the sediment particle is a nice place

9 to start. The actual place it starts is the carrying

10 velocity and contents of the stream. I don't see any

11 analysis of that in most of these studies --in fact, in

12 >any of these studies.

13 SUPERVISOR ERICKSON: Thank you.

14 SUPERVISOR OVERMAN: Supervisor Kobseff.

15 SUPERVISOR KOBSEFF: What else did you find

16 that I guess might have been of interest to the rest of

17 us that I might not be able to ask the right question to

18 get the answer to?

19 MR. MINER: I'll note a few things I had

20 written down here in review myself. The 2006 damage

21 sediment study itself says the following: First, no

22 attempt was made to provide a final or comprehensive

23 analysis of dam removal on the project management

24 alternative. Second, it does not attempt to

25 characterize in detail any adverse effects of dam

1 removal. And third, as anybody who has read it sees

2 appendix J, six pages of additional studies that

3 recommends be done before a final decision is made. So

4 that's that report and that's what it says itself

5 directly. It's fairly easy to read.

6 MR. LAMBIE: I tell you one of the things that

7 struck me is, A, I don't see a complete set of the

8 quality of sediment information in the summary thesis of

9 the reports. I'll have to read through 1,500 pages of

10 lab data and assume it's there. In short, they sampled

11 for dioxin in three sediment samples and found it in all

12 three. And I have to say it's not a surprise because

13 I'm working on a number of dioxin problems. It's

14 commonly associated in this region with perchloric

15 phenol, the old wood preservative. When you made

16 perchloric phenol, you also made dioxin. There's many

17 release sites up the river system. It's there, it's

18 there at levels that some studies would suggest may be

19 injurious to the community, the living animals in the

20 mud at the bottom of the rivers, and some studies would

21 say wouldn't. So it's certainly not area that deserves

22 more thoughtful analysis before saying let's let that

23 sediment go wild.