By SUE RYAN
News staff writer
March 24, 2007

The Middle Fork Irrigation District has begun the federal process required before they can rebuild one of their diversions that was wiped out last fall by floods in Hood River County.

The district supplies hydropower and irrigation water to users from three sources: Laurance Lake and the Coe and Eliot branch diversions. The two diversions direct a portion of the water coming off the Eliot and Coe glaciers on Mount Hood. The Eliot diversion was located where water comes off the Eliot Glacier and sent water over a three-mile distance to a settling pond then to Powerhouse 1.

“We are now in the process of working with our engineers and the Forest Service to figure out how far down we have to come to pick up the water again,” said Dave Compton, MFID manager.

The cost of the project is estimated to be $250,000 or more. The diversion can’t be rebuilt at its former location since surges and pulses of water and debris not only scoured the channel clean but changed the level of the streambed.

“Now the water is 15 to 20 feet below the diversion,” Compton said.

The district has hired Anderson Perry Engineering of LaGrande and is paying Forest Service employees to do the work for the federal requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Although Gary Asbridge’s primary duties are as a fisheries biologist for the Mt. Hood Ranger District, he was acting district ranger at the time of the flood event and is handling flood-related activities now.

“What it (NEPA) was basically designed to do was ensure that all federal agencies studied the environmental effects of an action and disclosed those effects to the public,” Asbridge said.

NEPA applies in the irrigation district’s case because the diversion is located on Forest Service land. Because of the district’s need to get the process done in time to meet irrigation user needs, the Forest Service initially was not going to do the study because their time was committed to other projects. In the end, instead of hiring an outside consultant the district arranged to use the Forest Service as a contractor to do NEPA.

“There are different levels of NEPA depending on the significance of the project,” Asbridge said.

Assessment comes first in the process and consists of various surveys of resources that might be affected by the project including wildlife, botany, fish species, and cultural resource sites. There are three broad categories to the process.

“There are a bunch of projects that would fall into what we call categorical exclusions,” Asbridge said. “Those are projects that over the years, the Forest Service has determined there is no significant cumulative effect to the public and those require less analysis. If we think there is going to be a significant effect or it does not fit one of these excluded categories, then we would do an environmental assessment.”

In the case of the Eliot diversion, there may already be some existing surveys in the area of the proposed project that can be used for the NEPA analysis.

“It was for other Forest Service projects, wildlife-related, some cultural resources and we‘ve done fish surveys up there too,” Asbridge said. “Although I would be the first to admit that with the debris torrent, fish distribution is probably all different than what it was before.”

The analysis involves inter-disciplinary review from multiple areas and then it is released for public disclosure and comment. The current timeline should have the NEPA process completed by the end of April and construction starting May 1. Compton said the district is in good shape to meet its irrigation needs because the water from Eliot isn’t used until later in the growing season.

“Our target is to have irrigation water out of there by July 1. We will go through our first big set before that but we should be alright,” he said. “We have got a good water year going and there is a good snow pack so we should be fine.”

In the full irrigation season, the district relies on 25 percent of the water from the Eliot Glacier to meet their needs.

The original diversion was built in 1964 and has had to be repaired twice before, the last time in 1999. Partly because of that history, the district faces a new issue besides that of rebuilding the wiped-out diversion and the changed channel.

“It is just the reality, our insurance company basically cancelled our flood insurance,” Compton said. “We are shopping a secondary market but so far we haven’t found anyone willing to pick us up. Especially when you go and look at some of the pictures of that glacial moraine up above and there are a couple of more humps waiting to get saturated and fall off there. You can understand where they (insurance companies) are at but it makes it a real tenuous situation for the district.”