A Southwest Washington salmon habitat restoration nonprofit broke ground Thursday on a large restoration project on and around the South Fork Toutle River, stemming from effects of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.
The two-year project is being led by Lower Columbia Fish Enhancement Group and is located about 10 miles from the mountain in Cowlitz County.
The project proposal states it will help federal endangered chinook, coho, and steelhead runs by restoring 215 acres of floodplain habitat around the South Fork Toutle River’s headwaters, as well as 4.1 miles of the river itself. The goal is to get it closer to its pre-eruption landscape.
The work is funded with $10.7 million from the Washington Department of Ecology and the state’s Salmon Recovery Funding Board.
“Since the mountain erased the forest that was growing in the floodplain, there's no wood of any substantive size growing in the floodplain,” said Brice Crayne, restoration program manager for the group. “And without wood in the floodplain, the river can go wherever it wants.”
That unrestrained and varying path allows the river to wash out and destroy salmon spawning grounds, he added.
The project centers around replacing logs that would have been in the river if they hadn’t been swept away by the 1980 eruption. The work will slow the South Fork Toutle and reduce erosion, working with beavers to reshape the river so it’s better for salmon life cycles.
“Healthy stream beds can increase salmon habitat,” said Washington Department of Ecology spokesperson Brittny Goodsell. “And this work will get us closer to restoring these waters to the original way they are meant to interact with the landscape.”
The group will get needed logs from a nearby state Department of Natural Resources timber sale, Crayne said. To install those water features, they’ll use a combination of heavy machinery and a helicopter.
The South Fork Toutle River had robust runs of the targeted fish before Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption. This project would be one of a handful the restoration organization is doing to restore that, according to the Regional Fisheries Coalition.
Toutle’s North Fork has also continued to face significant impacts from the eruption, sometimes requiring costly infrastructure investments.
The South Fork project must do all its in-water work between July 16 and Sept. 15. That’s to make sure the work doesn't disturb young salmon at a point in their lifecycle when they couldn't swim away from the work, Crayne said.
“We're going to be staging the wood,” Crayne said of the project’s next month. “So that we can start to build the structures in the river as soon as we're allowed to, because we got a lot of work to do.”
