Your water supply source just burned down - now what?
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Friends of Confluence West –
Until a few years ago, the assumption was that catastrophic wildfires would never be much of a concern for western Oregon (land of banana slugs, remember?)
Then last year, on Labor Day weekend, the Holiday Farm fire blew through the McKenzie River watershed. One person died, 400 homes burned, a world-class dry-fishing river was wrecked, and the downstream utility was faced with devastation in the sole source of their water supply.
Now, not only is the watershed being rapidly restored, but the water utility and their partners are forging new ground, including FEMA funding and new approaches for long-term resiliency planning, land acquisitions, and ecosystem restoration.
Karl Morgenstern, with the Eugene Water & Electric Board and the lead for the watershed restoration work, comments: “We never really knew what resiliency looked like until this disaster.” Read more below.
For the West,
Kimery
P.S. Why? Why support Confluence West? This is why: In this time of the climate emergency, we bring new allies and new solutions to the table – creating water supply resiliency all over the American West. Learn more: www.confluence-west.org and please support our work.
“It's setting up the systems that help you mitigate and be resilient to disasters and then setting up the landscape scale changes needed to start reversing the effects of climate change and pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.”
- Karl Morgenstern
The Eugene Water & Electric Board has had, and continues to play, a significant role post- the 2020 Holiday Farm wildfire. A recommendation for other utilities?
For those utilities with a source water protection program in place with partnerships, it's preparing that partnership to respond to a disaster. This is very different from the work we do when we're not in disaster mode. For those that don't have a drinking water source protection program, it's time to get started. The reason that we were able to respond the way we did and so quickly is because we've been investing in drinking water source protection for almost 20 years.
Post- the Holiday Farm wildfire, what do the benefits of this partnership now look like?
Because the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) has spent two decades in this partnership, our Board immediately approved one-million dollars for the emergency response phase, which is about the right amount for our watershed. Those funds allowed us to hit the ground running from the moment the fire was put out.
We never really knew what resiliency looked like until this disaster. So for us, the lessons learned and the things we're now putting in place is that, first off, collaboratives are an amazing resource in an emergency because everybody already knows each other and can act quickly. We also had a lot of things already built – ArcGIS, water quality data, collection stations, gauges - all that stuff can be leveraged to respond to an emergency.
What if a community or utility doesn't have an emergency fund?
Other communities often have to wait around for someone to pay for a response. We're getting reimbursed by state and federal entities, but that's taken months.
We're thinking about establishing a fund, one-million dollars or so set aside, for responding to disasters in the watershed and one we can tap into immediately. Then that money gets reimbursed at some point by FEMA or other agencies, and you can replenish the fund. But having access to funding as soon as you can get it is critical.
Another important thing we've learned is putting large contracts in place for the work that we'll need to have done in the future. We'll just keep renewing these contracts every five years. This way, we already have everything in place for the next disaster and can quickly get the heavy equipment on the ground.
Please quantify some of the actual post-wildfire results.
I think the biggest accomplishment was being able to raise a lot of state and federal money. EWEB also passed a $3 per meter fee, which will raise $12 million over the next few years. In addition, we've applied for $7-8 million from FEMA. So, we estimate there's ultimately about $30 million that's coming into the watershed over the next four years to restore it.
Again, the key was that our utility approved the emergency response plan and made the initial one-million-dollar investment in the emergency work.
How is the partnership coordinating the restoration work?
We've basically taken the lead running the watershed recovery task force embedded in Lane County (Eugene) Emergency Operations. And so under that designation, we were all able to then engage on a much better level to coordinate not only what we're doing in Lane County, but with Oregon’s emergency management, with FEMA, with other emergency managers looking at these longer-term restoration efforts.
What's been your experience dealing with FEMA?
It's been somewhat maddening. Right off the bat, FEMA told us, "Well, you can't do that work. You [the task force/partnership] don't have any authority." At that point, the Lane County Health Department gave us that authority, but then FEMA didn't recognize that because it wasn't at a high enough level for them. So, we went round and round. We ended up doing a workaround where now everything we submit to FEMA goes to Lane County, and it comes from Lane County, not from us, and then FEMA was fine with it. But see, there's these little roadblocks. There's always a way around it, but they don't make it easy.
If we can start cracking the FEMA nut and get down an efficient system of going for FEMA money, it could open up a whole new channel of hazard mitigation and watershed resilience funding that we haven't seen.
We're going to hit our heads against this FEMA wall for as long as we need to break open this theoretical flood of cash they throw out after these disasters.
How is the utility planning for long-term climate resiliency and water supply protection?
We've got what we call our three buckets: risk-based, resiliency, and strategic.
Post-wildfire, we're seeing more opportunities for accelerating our climate resilience work. We started a lot of this work before the fire – now we've got the money coming in to go to scale.
We'd already started doing large-scale floodplain restoration projects - getting the river and the creek out of the incised channels from berms and old logging roads, and then reconnecting the river with its floodplain. This spreads out flow, drops out sediment, attenuates the metals, nutrients, and organics that roll off of burned landscapes upstream.
Before the 2020 fire, we did one big project. We've completed two this year, and we got three, four in line to continue this work. And as you know, when you spread out flow, you're keeping more water in the landscape that helps with drought, that helps mitigate knock-down flood flows.
We saw what's possible from one project we did in the watershed before the Holiday Farm fire hit. During the fire, this one restored wetland was like an oasis. Because of that wetland, birds and wildlife took refuge there as the fire blew over them. We know this because of the wildlife cameras in there.
Other "bucket" components?
Another component of resiliency is that the Holiday Farm wildfire opened up opportunities for us to make large-scale landscape acquisitions.
We're also developing a carbon sequestration plan on a scale that we've never seen, at least here in the Pacific Northwest. We're partnering with the University of Oregon to make carbon sequestration a cornerstone of what we do and do it in a resilient way to fire and climate change. So basically, it's maximizing how you sequester that carbon and securing it. Our EWEB power traders will then turn that into a product line.
It's setting up the systems that help you mitigate and be resilient to disasters and then setting up the landscape scale changes needed to actually start reversing the effects of climate change and pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.
At the core of this work is the collaborative partnerships that have been strengthened and expanded because of the disaster and are now primed and ready for the next disaster.
So, we've got the systems needed to respond to the next time and to build climate resiliency for our community and watershed.
Karl Morgenstern
Karl Morgenstern is the Watershed Restoration Manager with the Eugene Water & Electric Board and is the lead for the post-wildfire recovery work in the McKenzie River watershed. Over the past 12 years, he's been in several different roles at EWEB, including Environmental Management Supervisor. During his tenure at EWEB, he's been responsible for developing and implementing a drinking water source protection program to safeguard Eugene's sole source of drinking water - the McKenzie River. Before EWEB, Karl spent ten years at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and seven years as an environmental consultant managing high-priority cleanups at abandoned hazardous waste sites and responding to hazardous material spills. Karl is on the Board of Directors of the East Lane Forest Protection Association, serves as Vice President on the Board of Directors for Cascade Pacific Resource Conservation & Development, is President for the Oregon Association of Resource Conservation & Development Councils. Karl is a Confluence West Board Member.