The waters were rising around my Rochester home back in the flood of 2007.
When NOAA’s forecasting graph suddenly updated the level that the Chehalis River would crest at two additional feet, I rushed out to move even more of my belongings and then help my neighboring farmer friends.
Cars, tractors and trucks had already been removed to higher ground. For the longer term, I decided to raise my house another 32 inches higher, having raised it after the 1990 flood.
Now, it’s back to the future, as floods washed across my community again. Some folks leave early to avoid being trapped by water on the roads. Some stay to move things to higher ground as needed. We’ve all raised our homes, and many have created high shelves, too high for normal use, in our garages or barns to store equipment.
With the new year, the media spotlight has moved on. But we are still here, protecting the river, working to clean up the damage and rebuilding in ways that I hope will keep and move more people out of harm’s way while letting the river do what it does best — muscle its way to the sea.
All this while out of touch politicians and wealthy developers push a dam on the upper Chehalis River. They say it will protect communities, but what they really mean is it will protect their ability to build more big box stores in the floodplain.
That’s not a solution for our community, for our salmon runs or for our future. It’s short-sighted, incredibly expensive, and won’t help with floods like the New Year flood of 2022, which was driven in large part by water running off the Cascade foothills.
It won’t stop landslides that send logs into the river during floods, landslides that could be prevented by reforms to industrial logging practices. And it won’t do much to reduce flood damage downriver from Lewis County.
And what a cost this proposed dam would inflict: devastating a critical spawning area for salmon, particularly spring-run Chinook which we are in danger of losing. The upper river, while far from pristine after decades of intensive logging, remains mostly undeveloped and has enormous potential for fish habitat restoration.
Conservative estimates put the proposed dam’s cost upwards of $2 billion with no good plan to pay for it. Building this concrete boondoggle would siphon taxpayer money away from solutions that work, that protect more people and land, bring our salmon back and honor our treaties with the Tribes.
Here’s what I’m for: protecting clean water, fish runs and communities with solutions that work with the river. Last month’s historic flooding across Western Washington clearly demonstrated the folly of thinking we can control Mother Nature.
The hard truth is that if we had spent the years since 2007 getting people out of harm’s way, instead of pouring resources into a mega-dam boondoggle, we’d be in a very different place today. But it’s not too late. Let’s pivot to what works.
Betsie Woode
Rochester
