I’ve just returned from three days in Humboldt Redwoods State Park (located in Humboldt County, California). Among the publications we picked up in the visitor center was a 32 page booklet entitled “The Killer Eel: A Pictorial Story of the Havoc Caused by the Christmas, 1964 Flood Disaster.” I’m not quite sure of the provenance of the publication, given that no date of publication was listed, but the last page did state that “The Humboldt Beacon” were the
“publishers of this booklet,” and, that “Our publisher is J. Dwight O’Dell, Fortuna.”
The booklet, although an excellent compilation of photos of the 1964 flood, made the rather astonishing assertion that the rapacious logging practices of the previous century had no relation to the flood. What’s more, the opening article of the booklet, titled “Where does a flood come from to become a record flood of disaster proportions?” (sic) seemed to cast aspersions on the motives and integrity of those who asserted such. To wit, the article opened by stating: “It might seem silly, but a good many people are trying to use both the 1955 and 1964 floods as reasons or guideposts for their own brand of thinking, how to blame the flood on something else than water.” The article also states: “Perhaps there were contributing factors, but rainfall, lots of it, and more and more of the same, were the main factors of the storm, abetted by the melting snows.”
On the next page — it’s not quite clear if this is a continuation of the article on the first page, given that the font changes, and that there is a boxed, bolded title (”They had a Flood in 1862, Which Many Believe to Have Been Actual Record; No Lumber Men to Blame Then” (sic)) — the motives of those who claim that poor land management greatly worsens the effects of floods are called into question again. The opening paragraph of this page states:
The much maligned lumbermen of the redwood region are finally finding themselves on the side of the Angels. But “those up there” are hard to attack so the forester is taking the blame for “excessive” damage caused by the current flood.
A few paragraphs on the article states:
But it is interesting … to note that there were other similarities between the current water rampage and the flood of 1862. Then, as now, not all people looked for someone to blame for a natural disaster — many went to work.
The article’s somewhat dour view of the character of those who question the region’s recent forestry practices’ long term viability would be an almost comical ad hominem attack were it not in a publication being sold in a California State Park visitor center. Attacks of this sort are, at the least, a classically demogogic diversion from the question of whethor, in fact, the rapacious devouring of this region’s resources, as executed of late by corporations such as Louisiana Pacific and Pacific Lumber / Maxxam, are either sustainable in the long term, or, given the poverty that appears to have resulted from the collapse of the northwestern timber industry, are in the interests of the community as a whole.
In the most severe analysis, this kind of misinformation, coupled with the tendency of the exhibits at state parks visitor centers in Needle Rock (Sinkyone Wilderness State Park) and Humboldt Redwoods State Park to gloss over the genocidal nature of Euro-American contact with indigenous inhabitants, amounts to a kind of collective amnesia; a denial, if you will, of the darker aspects of the area’s history. It is as if a museum at Auschwitz made mention of the curious folkways of the Jews, but failed to note the untidy events of not long ago. That this kind of mentality persists does not bode well for the changes in policy needed if areas such as Mendocino and Humboldt are to recover from the collapse of their once abundant, resource based economies.
The Humboldt Beacon in its contemporary form appears to continue to blame bearers of the message that mismanagement of local resources is unwise, rather than blame the mismanagers themselves. The excerpt below is from an undated article posted on its website (downloaded 4 August 2006) titled Judge to hear Eel River Sawmills settlement next month (byline: G.C. Duerden). Note that the article quotes the words ‘threatened species’, in reference to the Northern Spotted Owl’s listing by the US Environmental Protection Agency, as if the article’s author somehow didn’t believe that the owl is indeed threatened with extinction. Note also that, according to the article, “Lawsuits” cut back timber harvests rather than federal concern regarding species viability (dependent as they are on the 3% of old growth redwoods as yet unharvested), nor an unsustainably large timber harvest over the past century.
Eel River Sawmills, which was formed in 1958, has had a bumpy history. The 1964 flood destroyed the mill — the stock of cut timber and the entire log dock were washed away — and put owner Mel McLean into heavy debt as he literally encumbered everything he owned to rebuild the company. By 1973 the company had fully recovered.
Times were good through the 1980s, and the employee ranks swelled to 450 or so. The Northern Spotted Owl came to prominence as a �threatened species� under the 1990 Endangered Species Act, and that was the start of the spotted owl effect. The volume of timber from the forests was cut to one-third the volume of previous years.
Lawsuits cut timber sales back farther, in 1992, to about 11 million board feet. In 1993 sales dropped again to just over 5 million board feet. By 1996 it was back up to 10 million board feet. In 1999 it jumped close to 30 million board feet being sold annually.
Apparently, all evidence to the contrary, attitudes towards resource management haven’t much changed, despite that precious little “resource” remains to be managed.
Related Articles
Cumulative Watershed Effects: Caspar Creek and Beyond, Leslie M. Reid, Research Geologist, USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, Redwood Sciences Laboratory, 1700 Bayview Dr., Arcata, CA 9552. An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Coastal Watersheds: The Caspar Creek Story, May 6, 1998, Ukiah, California. Excerpt:
A standardized impact evaluation procedure could not be developed because of the wide variety of issues that might need to be assessed, so analysis methods were left to the professional judgment of those preparing timber harvest plans. Unfortunately, oversight turned out to be a problem. Plans were approved even though they included cumulative impact analyses that were clearly in error. In one case, for example, the report stated that the planned logging would indeed introduce sediment to streams, but that downstream riparian vegetation would filter out all the sediment before it did any damage. Were this actually true, virtually no stream would carry suspended sediment. In any case, even though timber harvest plans prepared for private lands in California since 1985 contain statements attesting that the plans will not result in increased levels of significant cumulative impacts, obvious cumulative impacts have accrued from carrying out those plans. Bear Creek in northwest California, for example, sustained 2 to 3 meters of aggradation after the 1996-1997 storms, and 85 percent of the sediment originated from the 37 percent of the watershed area that had been logged on privately owned land during the previous 15 years (Pacific Watershed Associates 1998).
EPA’s recent listing of 20 north coast rivers as “impaired waterways” because of excessive sediment loads, altered temperature regimes, or other pervasive impacts suggests that whatever the methods used to prevent and reverse cumulative impacts on public and private lands in northwest California, they have not been successful. At this point, then, we have a better understanding of what cumulative impacts are and how they are expressed, but we as yet have no workable approach for avoiding or managing them.
A Fallen Giant: Remembering Tim McKay, The North Coast Journal, 3 August 2006.
The California Wild Heritage Act is a California Wilderness Coalition campaign in favor of pending Federal legislation to extend Wilderness Act protection to a additional lands.
High Waters! The floods of 1955 and 1964 and The Bull Creek Watershed reshaped by timber tax
Friends of the Eel River page describing impacts of post-WWII logging boom on sediment load, habitats, species diversity, and stream capacity. From the same page, this pair of aerial photos from October 1947 and August 1954 shows the extent of the deforestation, and indicates the state of the watersheds just before the catastrophic floods of 1955 and 1964.
struck a glancing blow to one of the San Francisco Bay Bridge’s support fenders. The bridge was unaffected, but the Cosco Busan suffered a 40 meter gash 4 meters above the water line, which ruptured fuel tanks containing viscous bunker oil. Within an hour or so 220,000 liters had spilled into the bay, and within a day or two the oil had reached as far north as Bolinas lagoon (the mouth of which lies just below the northern most ridge visible in the bottom photo), and as far south as Hayward, a distance spanning 80 kilometers. 
