Russian Riverkeeper
PO Box 1335
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: (707) 433-1958
Fax: (707) 433-1989
info@russianriverkeeper.org
Russian Riverkeeper
PO Box 1335
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: (707) 433-1958
Fax: (707) 433-1989
info@russianriverkeeper.org
At the first opportunity to defend one of the most important decisions for the Russian River three Supervisors have voted for one mining company Syar Industries over the long-term interests and sustainability of our Community. All those campaign contributions from mining backers appear to have paid off with the decision to cast aside a hard fought compromise to end mining in April 2006 to allow Syar Industries to continue open pit mining at the Phase VI Pit near Healdsburg. The justification used by Supervisors Kelley, Smith and Kerns ignored the county's own report that showed that current gravel imports actually would REDUCE green house gas emissions and result in 1.19 Million less truck miles on county roads even as the county touts itself for addressing global warming. The community will suffer from renewed impacts from harmful air emissions, noise, dust, mercury and one company will truck away the profits leaving yet another deep pit that takes away another portion of our aquifer forever...for a few years of gravel. Learn which supervisors are supported by mining interests as three seats are up for grabs on November 7th. FOR MORE IMFORMATION ABOUT PIT MINING PLEASE SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.
WE APPLAUD THE CONTINUED OPPOSITION TO PIT MINING BY SUPERVISOR REILLY AND NEWLY FOUND OPPOSITION OF SUPERVISOR BROWN AND APPRECIATE THE THREE VOTES AGAINST THE PHASE VI PROJECT BY THE PLANNING COMMISSION LED BY COMMISSIONER FURCH WHO IS RUNNING FOR MIKE REILLY'S 5TH DISTRICT SUPERVISOR SEAT!!
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Gravel Mining competes with a healthy sustainable watershed- you can import gravel but you can't import a healthy fishery or plentiful and clean water supplies for our future!
In simple terms the largest impact from gravel mining is erosion. When material is removed from a river system it is replaced from increased erosion upstream and downstream. Gravel mining has lead to or increased impacts that damage public trust resources, but we pay for many of these impacts.
Gravel mining has caused and continues to contribute to severe channel incision (deepening) that has eroded bridges, property, riparian habitat and led to steep to vertical banks that collapse during high flows.
(THIS PICTURE COURTESY OF HEALDSBURG MUSEUM AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
Geyserville Bridge in 1932 had its support piers deeply embedded in riverbed gravel. Well before its New Years 2006 collapse, gravel mining had largely removed over 20 feet of the riverbed that used to support the bridge leading to a $25 million bill to taxpayers.
Gravel mining is the major cause of induced incision of tributaries as gravel removed from the mainstem is replaced with increased erosion of tributaries causing wildlife, property and structural impacts.
Foss Creek in Healdsburg faces the double whammy of years of mining caused channel incision on Dry Creek and the River but also channelization leading to miles of steep erosive banks.
All the way up in Redwood Valley above Coyote Dam we can see that Ukiah Valley Mining has caused major incision and exposed bedrock over 40,000 years old!
Gravel mining has caused braiding or splitting of the main channel despite the regulations that do not allow gravel mining to upset the rivers form.
This picture shows the channel braiding or forming multiple channels after mining above and below this reach near Cloverdale marked in green.
Looking at the aerial this riffle is located on the green line across the LP bar where it crosses the river on the lower right, this was a gentle 4-8 inch drop that is now a huge 3-4 foot drop that will increase erosional pressures for years. All caused by the removal of over 15 feet of gravel from the LP bar.
Gravel mining has contributed to significant reductions in spawning habitat due to increased turbidity and ensuing embededness of gravels in fine materials that prohibits spawning in many mined sections of the River.
Waters edge gravels on a recently mined bar show fine sediment clogging the pore spaces between the rocks, known as embeddedness it prohibits spawning.
Gravel mining perpetuates a greatly degraded state of the River causing more bank erosion that is followed by bank armoring that increases channelization of the river and causes loss of riparian habitat.
At high flows the River drops its sediment load into the void formed by LP Bar mining and exits the bar with increased velocity and slams into the next bank looking to replace its optimal bedload. This was the place until the rock riprap went up, now the erosion is just occurring below the riprap.
All too often where there is mining there is riprap, this ugly bank is near Geyserville and seems to attract the invasive giant reed, Arrundo Donax, quite well.
Gravel mining has caused a drop in Middle Reach aquifer levels roughly equivalent to the loss of 450,000 acre feet of water or six and a half times the current SCWA water usage from the river.
These graphics show what has occurred in the Middle Reach of the Russian River between Healdsburg and Forestville, over 25 feet of bed level degradation has lead to a major loss of aquifer storage, it has been calculated to be over a hundred thousand acre feet of water.
Gravel mining continues to threaten our naturally filtered water supplies by reducing the natural bedload transport and perpetuating a greatly incised river channel.
Another eroding bank caused by incision near SCWA water intakes. 50 years ago the bank height was only 12 feet now it is over 25ft.
In lower Alexander Valley incision from mining there is threatening these last two Red Alders trees in a 2 mile stretch of river. Note the riprap that isn’t helping stop bank erosion.
Another major gravel mining impact we will pay for as taxpayers is dealing with the hundreds of acres of Open Pit gravel mines that are unstable, pollutant filled holes in our future water supplies. Open Pit mines exist in the Middle Reach below Healdsburg and in the Ukiah Valley. We will focus on the Middle Reach impacts here as they are the same or worse in Ukiah Valley.
These aerials show the Middle Reach of the Russian River below Healdsburg and the extent of Open Pit mines.
The second picture shows the rough boundaries of the Middle Reach aquifer in blue and the Open Pits in red...almost half of the highest yield parts of our aquifer are gone forever due to polluted Open Pit Mines that will never be reclaimed.
Open Pit mining impacts include:
Increased fine sediment delivery to the river during flood events and stranding or capture of Salmon in pits.
Fine sediment filled pits release fine sediment back into river when floods frequently connect Open Pits to the river.
Eventual capture of the Open Pits by the river
Open Pit mines are far deeper than the River and water always finds a low point as will the River some tragic day in the future.
All Open Pits have no engineered levees and instead are just left over strips of unmined land...waiting to collapse.
Spending millions to stabilize and armor the pits for the next few hundred years
In the 2006 New Years flood the River decided to ignore the “keyway” and find it’s own way into the Basalt Pit almost breaching the entire levee.
A ground level picture showing how close the levee came to failing, someday us taxpayers will have to pay for this type of damage.
• Permanent loss of prime agricultural lands
• Permanent loss of tens of thousands of acre feet of aquifer waters
• Causing increases of Mercury loading in local fish & bird species
Gravel mining companies pass along most of the environmental costs of gravel mining to our community that has paid and will continue to pay for decades after mining has ended. In the last 60 years we have paid for:
• Fixing bridge foundation damage to Highway 101, Cloverdale First Street, Geyserville, Westside Road
• Paying for riparian & fishery restoration work
• Filtration plants to filter out sediment from water supplies
• Property loss from bank erosion and collapse
• Erosion control and stabilization work at the $6 million dollar Riverfront Park complex that was Kaiser Sand & Gravel Open Pit mines
Our children will be burdened with the future costs from past and current gravel mining in the Russian River such as:
• Cleaning up Mercury pollution in former Open Pit mines
• Stabilizing eroding Open Pit mines and preventing them from capturing the river
• Future bridge replacements and retrofits
• Restoration of the Chinook Salmon spawning grounds and other fishery restoration
• Stabilizing eroding stream banks and preventing sediment delivery
All those gravel industry profits make for great political campaign donations to influence local politics. In many other areas of the state and country, if you want to mine gravel from a public resource like a river you pay the state for the privilege of taking away a public trust resource. Not so in the Russian River. Due to a misguided Supreme Court decision (Rehnquist), the Russian River is treated like private property as far as gravel extraction is concerned so miners can take gravel with no compensation to the state or community. This makes for great profits and the desire to protect these profits.
Over the last four election cycles, individuals and companies linked to the gravel mining industry have poured tens of thousands of dollars into Sonoma County Board of Supervisors elections. The results are predictable such as one Supervisor saying, “We are sitting on a gold mine (of gravel) and we should use it”. Of course if this person were working for the community they would have thought - We ARE sitting on a gold mine, a sustainable water supply - and made decisions based on the best long-term use of competing resources.
Create a watershed management plan that creates accurate sediment budget, examines and recommends a plan to address flood capacity, bank stability and healthy riparian areas. At a minimum cease mining until accurate sediment budget is established, adequate mitigations are required for interruption of sediment supply and induced erosion, rigorous water quality studies are performed on gravel imbeddedness and permeability.
• Donate to Russian Riverkeeper - mark your donation “gravel”
• Learn about the issues at one of our workshops
• Attend a planning commission meeting or Board of Supervisors meeting and speak out against mining
• Write letters to the editor, elected officials, and resource agencies against continued gravel mining.
The Russian River has served as a source of construction aggregate or gravel for over 80 years and has contributed to structures such as the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, much of Highway 101, Santa Rosa City Hall and thousands of other projects. Since Russian River gravel was the most convenient source to the growing North Bay area it has yielded hundreds of millions of tons of gravel. In parts of the Russian River’s main stem and some key tributaries the riverbed is composed of rock up to 25,000 years old and the channel has dropped over 25 feet. This means that we have removed a quantity of gravel in 80 years that it took the river 25,000 years to create and we have open pits that could take a thousand years to re-fill – that is the definition of unsustainable resource extraction.
This gravel extraction has caused numerous severe impacts to the structure, water quality, water quantity, riparian vegetation, wildlife and wild fish of the Russian River. Due to over-extraction the river channel has deepened or incised causing banks to collapse. This has caused loss of property and loss of river access due to vertical banks. Mining has caused increases in turbidity and suspended sediment from upsetting the natural sediment budget and transport that normally keeps erosion to a minimum. The channel incision has caused a lowering of the water tables in the Middle Reach and Alexander Valley’s that equals over four times the current annual water use in Sonoma County and North Marin. With population projections expected to double by 2045, we’ll need a lot more water. The channel incision has also separated the top of bank riparian vegetation from the river vertically depriving riparian species of water and the river of shade. The reduced vigor of the riparian areas has reduced wild life diversity by not being able to support as many species. The endangered Chinook and Coho Salmon and Steelhead Trout suffer several impacts from mining such as increased gravel embeddedness leading to reduced spawning success, loss of cool shaded water due to mainstem and tributary incision and increased turbidity reducing juvenile rearing success.
The ability of the river to continue to support our community with a clean plentiful water supply, aesthetic enjoyment, recreation and cultural and economic enrichment from having wild Salmon and Steelhead is at risk from continued gravel mining. This fact was widely acknowledged in the 1980’s and 1990’s as the Russian River is recognized in three graduate level geomorphology textbooks as the best example of impacts from over-extraction of river gravel.
This knowledge and awareness generated a response that forced the county to create the Aggregate Resources Management Plan (ARM Plan) that was supposed to regulate gravel extraction to sustainable levels. Since the ARM plan was certified in 1994, every single gravel extraction permit has requested and received variances from permit conditions in spite of public protests. Arm plan permit conditions meant to protect our future water supplies like the 100 acre maximum for open pit mining has given way to 130 acres reducing future water supplies. Conditions like having an independent science panel review each years mining before the next year has given way to two to three year time lags between gravel extraction and actual review and miners are allowed to move ahead without the “feedback loop” envisioned in the ARM plan. This year Shamrock was given the green light to begin gravel extraction in upper Alexander Valley despite their mining violating the ARM plan provision that extraction not change channel shape. Shamrock’s previous extraction has caused the river channel to migrate wildly and erode large bank sections, change the riffle locations and vastly reduce Chinook Salmon spawning habitat. Despite earlier success, the profit minded mining industry gradually has rolled back any gains due to superior resources compared to non-profit organizations
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