Federal neglect

Erosion chews into wetlands on north shore of Flathead Lake

A lonely surveying stake juts from the sand on the north end of Flathead Lake, catching the attention of Mark Lorang, a research assistant professor with the University of Montana's Yellow Bay Biological Station.

"That's one of my old head

stakes that I planted way out in the marsh," Lorang says.

The stake no longer is hidden in the marshy wetlands of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Waterfowl Production Area just south of the Eagle Bend golf course. It now is fully exposed in the sand, at least 30 feet from a flimsy wall of cattails that marks the present-day shoreline.

Severe erosion has eaten away a good chunk of the waterfowl habitat since the stake was planted in 1993.

Lorang estimates that about 15 acres of prime, federally owned wetlands has been lost in just the past 10 years. The erosion continues, despite a requirement to curb erosion at the waterfowl production area and restore wetlands in a 1998 federal license issued for Kerr Dam, at the foot of Flathead Lake. No such effort has been made.

To Lorang and others, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's management of the waterfowl production area is an exhibit of institutional malfeasance: The agency with the ultimate regulatory authority to prevent habitat loss on public as well as private lands has allowed its own critical wetlands to wash away year after year.

The agency's inaction has become even more apparent in the past year, as two neighboring private landowners mustered the resources and willpower to implement a shoreline protection method that Lorang has advocated soon after his arrival at the biological station in 1986.

Bigfork businessman and state Sen. Bob Keenan was the first to take the leap with Lorang's "dynamic equilibrium beach" as an alternative to a concrete seawall for protecting his lakefront property. Wave action had severely eroded Keenan's property, with one stretch of shoreline that receded 40 feet during the summer of 2004.

Keenan first proposed a seawall to protect the property, but that approach was roundly opposed by multiple agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, along with Lorang.

Seawalls, they said, would create a barrier between the lake and the wetlands. Lorang maintains that seawalls would lead to "an ecological desert" between the lake and the wetlands, which serve as the "kidneys" for Flathead Lake, filtering nutrients and pollution from the upstream floodplain.

Keenan didn't argue, and instead sought out Lorang for the alternative approach. At a cost of about $100,000, Keenan loaded his shoreline with a mixture of cobble and gravel under Lorang's guidance, creating an effective dynamic equilibrium beach in the spring of 2005.

It was a breakthrough project for Lorang, who had spent nearly 20 years trying to convince landowners and public agencies to pursue the same course.

"It was a huge success story," Lorang says. "In one phone call with Bob, that 20-year story changed."

Roger Sortino, the neighbor just to the west of Keenan, followed suit this past spring, building an even larger beach. Roughly 3,000 linear feet of shoreline has been protected in one year.

Meanwhile, the entire length of the waterfowl production area remains completely and obviously unprotected.

"The very agency that is charged with protecting the resource are proving to be negligent through their inability to react to an emergency situation for 15 years," observes Keenan of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Bruce Measure, one of Montana's representatives on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, says the loss of land has been obvious during the past 40 years.

"I was just mortified when I went out there with a group, the Flathead Lakers, to see all that was gone," he said. "To have that happen on a federal agency's watch, with no explanation, it's long past the time they should have done something."

The losses have been dramatic as the remains of old cottonwood and birch trees, standing on their rootwads, some more than 100 feet from the current shoreline.

"This was all forest out here," says Lorang, and behind the forest was the marsh.

What was an enclosed pond on the refuge, sheltered from the lakefront first by trees and then by cattails, is now essentially part of the lake.

Shoreline retreat of about one mile has been measured since Kerr Dam became operational in 1938.

Lorang has calculated that Flathead Lake's north shore has receded about 20 feet since 1998 because of wave erosion.

"Some areas along the river mouth and near the WPA ponds have retreated well over 300 feet," he adds.

So how is that no efforts have been made to curb erosion on the federal waterfowl production area? The Fish and Wildlife Service did indeed consider it an important matter in the early 1990s, advancing a proposal to build a seawall at the head of the lake.

But that proposal ran into a wall of opposition, mainly based on concerns that a concrete revetment would isolate the lake from the wetlands. The service dropped the plan and has yet to return with another.

"There was disagreement on how to best approach that problem, and there was also opposition from the public," said Steve Kallin, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service project leader for the National Bison Range Complex, which includes the Flathead Lake waterfowl production area.

Kallin has been at that position for just two years. "I can't really speak to what occurred with much detail prior to my arrival," he says.

But Jon Jourdonnais, director of hydroelectric licensing and compliance for PPL Montana, can recall a long history of inaction on the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"Since 1996 when we proposed to deal with the erosion on the north shore by means of an erosion control beach, we've been trying to work with the service to have them give us some final direction on what they would approve," said Jourdonnais.

To this day, there has been no "final direction."

As the operator of Kerr Dam, PPL Montana technically is responsible for protecting the shoreline. Under the terms of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's relicensing of the dam in 1998, PPL Montana "is to construct a shore-aligned erosion control equilibrium beach from the Flathead River mouth about 4,400 feet east to the WPA boundary and about 4,300 feet west along WPA lands and north along the west Flathead River shoreline to the WPA boundary."

But Article 68 says it must do so "in consultation" with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the land. Another catch: PPL Montana "is to provide development of 37 acres of wetland habitat on the WPA at a cost not to exceed $6,600 an acre."

That last provision has proved to be a major sticking point, a source of monetary disagreement over a "settlement" between the Fish and Wildlife Service and PPL Montana, according to Jourdonnais.

"It became obvious that they are asking for a settlement that's far in excess of what PPL needs to provide … well beyond what our license obligations are," Jourdonnais said.

As recently as last fall, there were discussions about ways to extend the shoreline protection project to neighboring private properties. The idea was to use PPL Montana's up-front expenditures for grants that could be applied to private lands. But those opportunities did not materialize, and the talks bogged down.

"Providing erosion control on private lands is outside the scope of the license. We've said we would try to leverage our contribution," Jourdonnais said. "What we're trying to do is break this down into pieces. No one party can fix it all."

PPL Montana wants to focus on protecting the WPA shoreline.

"We need to get this done, because there won't be much left to protect," he said.

Within the past month, Kallin and Jourdonnais agreed to pursue a shoreline protection design from Lorang.

And the plan that Lorang has in mind will address the sticky issue of restoring 37 acres of wetlands. It involves building a gravel and cobble levy far from the shoreline, basically to form an artificial spit that extends east from the river mouth, tapering closer to the WPA shoreline. A backwater will develop behind the berm, and over time that backwater will become a pond.

Wetlands will be "recreated," according to Lorang.

"Certainly we want to get this done," said Kallin. "We'd like to minimize any more habitat loss, but it's important to proceed in a manner that is sustainable. It's important to look at methods for recovering some of that lost habitat and not just stop erosion. So it's important to have a proper design in order to do that."

Kallin added that it's "premature" to say whether Lorang's design will be adequate.

"We're primarily interested in ensuring that it's done effectively and in the long term, it will be sustainable," Kallin said. "That's our primary goal."

Lorang is beyond losing patience with the problem. He's heard too much talk and seen too little action to protect the shoreline and the wetlands.

"I really think if it was solely up to the power company this thing would have been done a long time ago," Lorang says.

Lorang has a theory about the overall procrastination: He's concluded that its related to a deep-seated reluctance to trust a beachlike structure rather than an armored seawall.

"It's really hard to imagine stuff that moves around sucking up the energy and protecting the shoreline," Lorang says. Sure enough, beach structures are not effective in certain situations, particularly when they are hit with waves or currents at a severe angle. But the north shore is perfectly situated for the beach remedy, provided that enough material is put in the right places, Lorang says.

An experimental beach that was built on a vulnerable spit of land just west of the river mouth in 1993 has held up remarkably well, and there are other successful examples around the world, he notes.

"There's the engineer," Lorang says, waving an arm at Flathead Lake. "All you gotta do is put in the material and let the waves do the engineering … If you just give me a stick, I'll walk around like Moses and tell them where to put it."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com