I think I must have stepped into a time machine or touched some kind of temporal portal without realizing it. My own personal Outlander without the handsome scotsman. Haven’t I done this before? Is this 2022 or 2008 stuck on some kind of loop reel and playing over and over. Yesterday I was over the MOON about the little beaver in pleasant hill. Seeing new life spring into what is such a grim space and being able to start the beaver story all over again. Writing the media and all my photographer friends.
And then I found out about the Grayson Creek Desilting project of 2023 and I felt like I had entered a mobius strip of beavers.
As you may or may not know Grayson Creek was the reinvention of the 1960s army corps of engineers who said there as they did all over Contra Costa – hey, that crazy creek doesn’t NEED to bend all over and take up so much space. We can straighten it and move it into the right spaces that will leave lots more room for building houses and parking lots. Tadaaa!!! The new and improved Grayson Creek! And all we have to do ever few years is bring in some bulldozers and pull out all the sediment we allowed to accumulate and we’ll be as good as new!
Now maybe you have a long memory and maybe you remember the Alhambra watershed project in 2008 that decided that once we saved the beavers they needed to rip out all the soil around their new dam as part of a sediment removal project that had been in the works for years. The plan was to take out all the trees near the secondary dam and just bulldoze away all the accumulated mud.
Well that’s what’s on the menu for the grayson creek beavers. All the way from Chilpancingo to Imhoff and all the beavers in between.
There is approximately 2 to 7 feet of sediment to be removed on each of the sediment bars contributing to about 172,300 cubic yards (cy); 129,800 cy from Walnut Creek and 42,500 cy from Grayson Creek. The sediment removal activities will take place within District right-of-way.
And you might be thinking, hey that’s lot of sediment to be removed. 2 two seven feet for a mile of creek hauled away in dump trucks over a two year period.
Work is proposed to occur from April to October of two consecutive years expected to start in 2023 such that only one side of the channel is desilted each year minimizing impacts to the ESAs. The contractor is anticipated to work sequentially on the channels, desilting each of them separately, with a single crew using all the equipment to complete work on one side before proceeding with the next. The estimated duration of Project work is a total of 192 days spent over two seasons (96 days per season).
Can you imagine what the water is going to look like? Desilting one side at a time? I believe the words OH PUZEEZE are in order. Never mind that if the creek had enough beavers it wouldn’t NEED a desilting projet. The friends of pleasant hill creeks wrote me about this yesterday and said that the EIR has already been completed and no beavers were seen at the time. Comments needed to be submitted ASAP and would Worth A Dam be willing to sign on to their comments because we might carry some more weight.
To which I said, isn’t this where I came in?????
Three sensitive or locally rare mammal species were determined to have the potential to occur within the Project area: pallid bat (Antrozous pallidus), western red bat (Lasiurus blossevillii), and hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus).
As to any other mammal species in the area we neither know nor care.
