This picture was e-mailed to me today from my sister in French Polynesia. I had not heard anything here locally about the big release of water on the Trinity. I checked in with a friend who lives on the river at Hawkins Bar and she said they watched several structures float past their house this weekend. Looks to be a pretty tough wade......
I was up there in the Douglas City area, and a tiny bit in the Bucktail area during the flow releases. It was interesting to say the least to see the water so high, watching large trees coming down the river at times. From what I saw and heard over the radio there were no homes flooded in the Bucktail area, but many had water VERY close to their home and there was certainly some "debris" from unattended items that were left far too close to the flood zone. Mostly just tons of wood coming down.
The interesting thing to me was seeing the waters start to recede and observing some of the affects of the restoration efforts. It certainly looks very promising from what my un-educated eyes could see, as well as from the comments from the various scientific community involved in various aspects of the project. In fact I heard several people commenting that it seems that each year the efforts have been more and more successful in their target goals. The higher water this year certainly did a lot more dramatic re-arranging, and depositing than any of the other high water flow studies I'd been able to witness.
I do realize that there is some controversy surrounding the whole effort, and I'll stay out of the political side of this, but from what I can see I'm inclined to be optimistic about the potential improvement for salmon and steelhead habitat in the coming years. With the many, many variables of these unique creatures it's always hard to make any accurate hard predictions of course. Improving spawning opportunities, creating backwater areas, instream cover for hatchlings, etc, seems to be one of the main opportunities that we do have to make a positive change to at least part of the situation.
I would not be at all surprised to see more higher water flow releases in the future years too; if they are able to negotiate them, as it seemed that all parties in the restoration project felt that these higher flows were a noticeable improvement over years with "high" flows in the 5-7K range.
Time will tell, hopefully we may start to see some positive improvement to future salmon and steelhead runs here. Keep your fingers crossed...
JB
Member
Trinity River this past weekend
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