Opinion: When it Comes to Clearing Storm Debris Clearance, Less is Better

Federal taxpayers could pay as much $66 million for removing debris from county rivers. Let’s think about trying to save money — and river habitat.

Logjam on Little River created by a tree that fell during Tropical Storm Helene and due be cleared at the request of a property owner

CEDAR MOUNTAIN — Not to go all Bio. 101 on you, but in nature death begets life.

Trout and salamanders thrive in streams cooled by the shade of fallen trees. Cavities in their trunks are nests for owls, woodpeckers and bluebirds. Deadfall diverts flow into intermittent wetlands, aka factories of life, and slows that flow in channels, allowing fish to rest and feed, mussels to gain purchase on riverbeds.

In other words, our “debris,” is, for wildlife, habitat.

If we only had nature to consider, we might not have had to call the US Army Corps of Engineers into Transylvania County at all. Federal taxpayers could have saved as much as $66 million, the budget cap for clearing just waterways, just in our county. We probably wouldn’t have had to touch a single tree brought down by last year’s Tropical Storm Helene.

But people live around the river, and we’ve got to protect the property and — as some nearby counties showed during Helene — the lives that can be lost during epic storms.

And nobody disputes that at least clearing true logjams mitigates future flooding.

So the question is, how much so-called debris should the Corps remove, or, because this two-month project is pretty much done, how much should it have removed?

I’d say as little as possible and a lot less than the tens of thousands of cubic yards Corps contractors actually did cart away in their fleets of brimming, double-trailer trucks.

I’ll get this out of the way before I elaborate. It seems, after major public pushback, the Corps and its contractors have changed their ways, at least a little.

Unlike some of the landowners I talked to last month, a neighbor in Cedar Mountain told me this week he had personally requested the debris removal planned for the stretch of the Little River that runs next to his property.

He was able to talk to a representative of a federal contractor, who agreed to clear only the full-on logjams I saw on a tour of the land and the trees leaning precipitously over the river.

County and state officials also say communication with the Corps has improved, and the most destructive debris clearance seems to have happened weeks ago.

But, make no mistake, it was destructive. It was excessive.

Last month, Hans Lohmeyer, stewardship coordinator for the Conserving Carolina environmental organization, showed me a stretch of the Little near Cascade Lake Road with a freshly sawed trunk of a tree far above the channel and a bank left denuded by contractors. An earlier snorkeling excursion in these waters, he said, had revealed life-giving boulders crushed to rubble mixed with the broken shells of slaughtered, federally endangered mussels.

After a contractor’s representative made the claim that, basically, Lohmeyer hadn’t seen what he thought he saw — that the die-off was due to the storm, not heavy equipment rolling up and down the riverbed — Lohmeyer recently went back in the river this month and proved her wrong.

“The results were even more alarming,” according to a post about this second dive on the organization’s website. “Over 200 dead freshwater mussel shells were recorded including 72 that had been visibly crushed.”

Among the clear proof that the damage was due to the cleanup rather than the storm: still-living mussels with freshly broken shells and a dead one with tissue that would have been long gone if it had been killed months ago.

Overall, the post said, it was clear that these creatures, crucial for purifying water and stabilizing river beds, “endured not only a natural disaster but a human-made one.”

Environmentalists are not the only ones that have been advocating for more measured clearance.

Shannon Deaton, the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission’s habitat conservation division chief, described — in careful, bureaucratic language — the frustrations of trying to persuade the Corps to adhere to the Commission’s best management practice for debris removal, especially in stretches of the river such as the one Lohmeyer studied, designated as “high-quality habitat” (HQH) because of the presence of sensitive aquatic wildlife.

Yes, the Corps has looped the Commission in on calls about the clearance. Yes, contractors have access to Commission maps outlining this good and vulnerable habitat, which covers much of the French Broad and Little rivers in Transylvania.

But, Deaton wrote in an email to NewsBeat, the state isn’t in charge, the feds are.

They’ve told the Commission that the debris clearance is “mission critical” justified as “lifesaving activity,” and once the Federal Emergency Management Agency defines such a mission “there are not supposed to be deviations,” Deaton wrote.

“So NCWRC’s work to incorporate modifications to these missions to avoid HQH has been difficult.”

Is this work really “lifesaving?” Certainly we shouldn’t forget that Helene brought tremendous misery and tragedy. But it’s not clear this can be prevented by debris removal, especially not indiscriminate debris removal.

As I previously wrote, a recent study by researchers at North Carolina State University found that the benefits of clearance are “largely anecdotal in nature.”

The computer models they ran to generate actual data showed blanket removal results in minimal flood mitigation, leading to a recommendation that this activity should mostly target obvious logjams.

With that in mind, any money going for work beyond such focused clearance starts to seem like a premium we’re paying to damage the environment.

And, wow, what a premium!

I don’t know for sure that $66 million is more than anyone has ever paid for anything in Transylvania, don’t know how much money could have been saved with more care.

But I do know that potential sum dwarfs both the assessed value of the county’s most expensive building, Transylvania Regional Hospital, and the estimated price of what is likely to become its most expensive building, the planned new courthouse. It also almost precisely matches the amount budgeted for the most ambitious transportation project in recent county history, the planned widening of Wilson Road.

Of course, federal spending always seems to exist in a different realm, and Bobby Petty, a Corps public information officer, listed several reasons debris removal in rivers is especially expensive: mobilization costs, specialized equipment, the use of pricey biodegradable lubricants.

But the Corps also pays for each cubic yard removed, and a former worker for a debris removal company in Mitchell County I interviewed last month said he was under constant pressure to cart away the maximum amount of material to help his employer realize maximum profit.

“It was a money grab,” he said.

Petty said earlier that the Corps provides regular (and regularly ignored, said the guy in Mitchell County) training, as well as tight (actually, pretty much non-existent, the former worker said) monitoring of removal:

“Over-clearing is not tolerated.”

Okay, but one of Petty’s subsequent emails suggested the Corps is judging the clearance pretty much the same way contractors do, by the amount of stuff removed. The more the better.

Citing cubic-yard figures, he wrote that a recent pause in the use of heavy equipment in riverbeds had led to a precipitous “drop in debris removal productivity.”

If that’s the Corps’s measure of productivity, it helps explain the agency’s long and robust history of jobs completed at mind-boggling expense and with minimal evidence of human benefit, minimal concern for the environment.

In fact, the Corps projects most often cited as doing good for ecosystems are the ones undoing environmental disasters it previously created.

A couple more of Petty’s statements to highlight.

“Understand: Helene was a once-in-2000-year flood event in North Carolina,” he wrote.

So that means we’ll never see the likes of Helene again, that this cleanup is probably just a one-time deal?

I don’t think so.

First of all, Helene was not such an epochal event in parts of Transylvania, including in Rosman, where Helene’s total rainfall didn’t even surpass the amount that fell during a series of storms in 1964.

More to the point, all those frequency predictions are based on data from our former, relatively benign climate, not the rapidly warming, Jekyll-and-Hyde beast we’re dealing with now.

Adjusted for inflation, storms doing at least a billion dollars worth of damage have become three times as common nationally as they were decades ago, and Transylvania’s location as a rain magnet for moisture from a warming Gulf of Mexico leaves us especially vulnerable to such “extreme” events.

The remnants of Tropical Storm Fred, supposedly a hundred-year storm, hit three just three years before Helene. Does anybody really think that’s just our rotten luck?

So, more bad storms are coming. Of course nobody knows how bad or when, but we probably won’t be able to spend $66 million to clean up every one of them.

Maybe instead of trying to change nature, we ought to adjust development patterns to, as much as possible, stay out of its way. And because some counties that directly supervised contractors reported less indiscriminate clearance, Transylvania should probably take that approach in the future.

Finally, let’s look at another of Petty’s statements.

“There’s hope in the axiom, ‘Life finds a way,’ ” he wrote.

To be fair, he was talking not about damage done by contractors but the likelihood that “unique species” washed away by Helene’s flooding had found new homes downstream. And it’s certainly true that nature is resilient, that some of the recently disrupted aquatic wildlife in our rivers will return in time.

But, no, life doesn’t find a way, not without good habitat. And increasingly, wildlife is not finding a way. Witness the plunging populations of birds and insects, the growing number and credibility of researchers predicting mass extinction.

So, sure, life can find a way. But only if we give it a chance.

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com