Up Fanno Creek

The Fields Property Project and The String of Pearls

The mighty handsome buck I jumped a few days ago while walking the Fields Property.

As I posted last week, tomorrow night Metro and Tigard will be hosting a “Community Open House” designed to help them further develop land-use plans for the Fields Property – Tigard Library, 5:30 to 7:30 PM. If you live anywhere in the Fanno Creek watershed (and in the Tualatin Basin for that matter), I urge you to attend this meeting and let the planners know how, and to what extent, you believe that property should be developed. If you can’t make the meeting, there’s an online survey here you can take that includes a general overview of the three planning concepts that will be presented.

These days, when I think of this property it’s always within the context of its location near the top of the last four miles of Fanno Creek’s 14 mile run.* Below, in the very rough approximation of the creek’s floodplain between the bridge on Main Street and its confluence with the Tualatin River, the creek flows through several parks and dozens of private properties. I sometimes refer to the area as the “Gut,” but maybe a better name, given the positive potential they represent would be “String of Pearls.”


Most of those properties are industrial/commercial in nature and many of them include large portions of undeveloped land that lie deep into the floodplain. Together with the areas already designated as parkland, these relatively undisturbed portions of the floodplain cover around 2% of the creek’s total watershed. More significantly, they comprise .6 square miles or almost half of its total floodplain.

When I look at this string of pearls, the first thing I see is the great potential for the development of a large, multi-purpose, semi-self-sufficient, natural stormwater processing machine. If the development of the Fields Property to include amenities such as soccer fields and baseball diamonds can be avoided, or at least substantially curtailed, there is a great opportunity to enhance the area’s already positive contribution to Fanno Creek’s water quality. What’s good for Fanno Creek is good for the Tualatin River. Hence my insistence that the fate of this property is of significance to every person in the Basin.

As rate-payers, we need to do all we can to insure that the cost of meeting stormwater quality criteria, now and in the future, is kept as low as possible. One of the keys to meeting that goal is to insure that our remaining natural infrastructure is kept intact as much as possible.

I’ve walked the Fields Property multiple times, most recently just two days ago. The open areas that would figure significantly in the development of sports fields are so heavily sloped towards the creek that I suspect a great deal of cutting and filling would need to take place before they would be serviceable. Furthermore, the drainage through the eastern portion of the property is fairly marked, to the extent that the lower areas were very soggy, even ‘though it had been several days since the last significant rainfall. A better use for this area would be to convert it into a prairie, with an emphasis in its planting towards creating habitat for pollinators and field birds.

If enough people give their input to the planners, regardless of what that input may be, I’m reasonably confident that a well balanced plan will ultimately emerge from the process. See you there?

*the beeline distance between downtown Tigard is 2.8 miles, but the stream meanders a total of approximately 4.8 miles to cover that distance.

Sad Day for Fanno Creek

Today is Stephen Sykes's last day with Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services. He and his family are moving to Omaha, Nebraska, partly to be closer to other family members, but also to pursue a new position in the private sector.

I met Stephen back in 2007, when I first learned about the issues associated with the BES pump station in the Vista Brook neighborhood. He was handling the difficult communications chores between the agency and the public as both grappled with their respective and competing perspectives towards a sewage transport problem that has plagued Fanno Creek for more than fifty years. Some people placed in such positions are little more than mouth parts for the lead organization; but Stephen brought real intelligence, compassion, and character to the table, and for that we should all be grateful. 

Stephen is tremendously excited about his new prospects, and so am I. I will miss him, but I suspect we'll be hearing more about/from him another day. He has a great future in communications. Adios, Stephen!

Follow-up from Stephen Sykes / BES

As anticipated, Stephen has circulated additional information on the unanticipated seepage of groundwater along the Fanno Creek trail that posted about last week. Content follows:

Hello, 

In order to further investigate any possible connections between the pressure sewer and the groundwater seeping from the Fanno Trail last week, BES staff have refilled the pressure sewer with wastewater and have inspection staff onsite this week. A bright green dye was added to the wastewater in order to more accurately determine if any future seeping groundwater contains wastewater from the pressure sewer.  

If any trail users or neighbors along the Fanno Trail see a green testing dye on the trail or adjacent to the trail please call 503-823-1700 and make a report. Please include information related to the Fanno pressure sewer under the Fanno Trail.

 If a leak is identified, BES inspection staff will temporarily close the trail while the pressure line is drained and the trail is cleaned.

 This approach may provide useful information about the cause of the water seepage from the trail last week. As you are likely aware, the Fanno pressure sewer is not currently running  while BES constructs a temporary improvement to the line by adding a surge tank at the Fanno pump station. It is important that the pressure sewer be available to run should the area experience a large storm event and wastewater / stormwater flows increase significantly. For this reason, the pressure sewer is typically full of wastewater when the pump station is inactive.

 Thank you for your cooperation during this process and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Stephen Sykes – Public Involvement
City of Portland Environmental Services
1120 SW 5th Avenue
Room 1000, Portland, OR 97204

phone:  503.823.7898
cell:  503.823.8341
fax:  503.823.6995

www.portlandonline.com/bes/

 

The Poo Problem. Or maybe not.

There's a section in Up Fanno Creek that features information on the sewage pumping station Portland's BES operates in the Vista Brook neighborhood. It's been the site of multiple sewage spills and is thoroughly despised by the surrounding home owners. The report below was issuedby BES earlier today, and as it points out not all "spills" or unanticipated flows that take place in that area during storm events are necessarily sewage related. It will be interesting to hear what the technical folks finally conclude. I am sure that Stephen Sykes, who originally posted the information, will tell us soon.

Good afternoon,

Some of you may have seen Trail closed and 'Sewer Spill' signs on the Fanno trail today. I want to provide some information for you regarding what BES staff have learned as of today.

Wednesday evening, a Garden Home resident reported water seeping up through the Fanno Greenway trail immediately east of the wooden footbridge over the wetland, just east of SW 86th Ave.  Our staff visited the site Thursday morning and collected a water sample.  Staff put up “trail closed” and “sewer spill” signs Thursday afternoon.  The pressure sewer was not running, but you may recall that we ran it during the heavy storms around Thanksgiving. As a result of that operation, the line had sewage in it, which staff drained last night in order to empty the pressure sewer.  The trail has been cleaned and we’re not seeing additional water seepage on the trail as of this morning.

The water sample analysis came back and levels of E. coli in it are consistent with typical surface water conditions in this area, but not with wastewater.  We’re continuing to investigate the issue and the potential connection between the water seepage on the trail and the Fanno pressure sewer. 

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Stephen Sykes – Public Involvement

City of Portland Environmental Services
1120 SW 5th Avenue Room 1000
Portland, OR 97204

phone:  503.823.7898
cell:  503.823.8341
fax:  503.823.6995

www.portlandonline.com/bes/

 

 

Photo Files: #12 / The Urban Stream Syndrome

 
Two views of a trouble spot on Fanno Creek, showing the backyard of a residence on one side of the channel and a sewage pumping facility on the other. The facility was constructed less than a decade ago and was designed to collect and then move sewage several hundred feet uphill through a system of pipes and high-pressure pumps so it can be treated by Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services. Unfortunately for the creek and the surrounding neighborhood, the system has been plagued with failures to such an extent it sometimes dumps a potent mix of stormwater and raw sewage into the stream. A “fix” in the form of a second pumping facility is on the way, but until it is up and running, more spills of raw sewage are likely to find their way into Fanno Creek.

Pollution from sewage is just one of the many factors that have plagued the health of the stream for at least 150 years. Collectively, these factors lead to a pattern of stream behaviors that is called the Urban Stream Syndrome:

“The term ‘urban stream syndrome’ describes the consistently observed ecological degradation     of streams draining urban land. …Symptoms of the urban stream syndrome include a flashier hydrograph, elevated concentrations of nutrients and contaminants, altered channel morphology, and reduced biotic richness, with increased dominance of tolerant species…The mechanisms driving the syndrome are complex and interactive, but most impacts can be ascribed to a few major large-scale sources, primarily urban stormwater runoff delivered to streams by hydraulically efficient drainage systems. Other stressors, such as combined or sanitary sewer overflows, wastewater treatment plant effluents, and legacy pollutants (long-lived pollutants from earlier land uses) can obscure the effects of stormwater runoff…Remediation of stormwater impacts is most likely to be achieved through widespread application of innovative approaches to drainage design. Because humans dominate urban ecosystems, research on urban stream ecology will require a broadening of stream ecological research to integrate with social, behavioral, and economic research.” (Walsh, et al, 2005)

Related articles

Streams show signs of degradation at earliest stages of urban development

Photo Files: #11 / The Fanno Legacy

 Period garments on display next to portraits of Augustus Fanno and his second wife, Rebecca Denny.

We talk a lot about the pace of change these days, sometimes shaking our heads and marvelling out loud how hard it is to keep up with it all. But in the 80 years between 1804 and 1884 (Augustus's life span) an entire continent and everyone on it was changed in ways we still don't fully comprehend. Fanno had not only been swept up in those changes, he had fashioned a number of them himself. When I reflect on his accomplishments and his time, the very first word that springs to mind is "citizen." He was, among a great many other things, the kind of man who exercised his rights primarily so that he might better do his duty. 

Below: Robert Fanno (L) owner of the Fanno Saw Works in Chico, California, and direct descendant of Augustus Fanno's first son, Eugene. This photo was taken during the Fanno Family Reunion held in the summer of Oregon's sesqui-centennial year, 2009.


 

Photo Files: #10 / Living in Interesting TImes

The Fanno farmhouse was built in 1859, the same year that Oregon gained statehood. By that time Augustus Fanno, the family patriarch, was 55 years old and had lived in the watershed for a dozen years. The huge cottonwood  in the front yard (undergoing pruning in 2010, below) was little more than a spindly sapling at the time. In the early spring, if you happen to step off the path that runs into the park behind the house, you may suddenly detect the pungent aroma of onions, one of Fanno's mainstay crops all those long years ago.

Photo Files - #9 / Pyroculture

"Reflect for a moment on what it means to actually control fire, at any scale of conflagration, in an open and non-mechanized environment. Imagine that one breezeless morning you and a handful of your closest kin pack up your gear and set off across a limitless savannah covered with head-high grasses. You reach a stopping place everyone can agree on, and suddenly you are standing there, fire implements in hand, about to put a select portion of the savannah to the torch. Maybe this is your first time, and although you know how it’s done, you’ve never been responsible for ensuring that at the end of the day none of your kin are dead and the land has been burned in just the right manner – scorched and cleared of all undesirable growth, yet everything else of value left intact. What kind of composure, knowledge base, technical know-how, and group organization would that take? I equate it to the deep knowing exhibited by the Polynesians who navigated their boats through thousands of miles of open ocean.” (About the Atfalati experience; pg 51, Up Fanno Creek)

Photo Files - #7 / Children of the Flood

Cammasia quamash, (blue camas) one of the staples of the Atfalati economy, still grows wild in the Fanno Creek watershed.

Writing about the coming of the Atfalati to the Tualatin Basin was one of the more challenging portions of the Up Fanno Creek journey. Their story had to be pieced together from all sorts of resources, most of them oblique and of problematic reliability. Still, it had to be told, even if poorly; next to geology and climate, no other force had a greater impact on the pre-Settlement shaping of the Fanno Creek watershed.

Exactly when the Atfalati moved into the watershed is unclear, and I made it even more unclear in my book by writing “…between nine and twelve thousand years ago…” in one place, and “…from 4,000 and 9,000 years ago” in another. The idea I meant to put forward with these two sets of dates was that the first human incursions into the Tualatin Valley took place 9-12 ka, but settlement by the Atfalati came later – perhaps by as much a several thousand years. Somehow  I messed that up and will fix it if and when I put out a 2nd edition of the book.

Regardless of when they may have arrived in the watershed, they immediately went about the process of stopping parts of the ecological succession process dead in its tracks. We know they did this because otherwise the Pioneers who arrived here in the early 1800s would have encountered a landscape similar to those further to the north, in Washington – mile after mile of towering trees with barely room enough between their huge trunks to drive a wagon. Instead, the first Euro-Americans to visit the area walked into a well-managed environment, major portions of it in the form of an oak savannah, the signature eco-scape of the Tualatin Basin.

Below – Went looking for a ghost of the Atfalati presence and found only a fragment or two.

 

Photo Files - #6 / Boring Volcanoes

The bowl that is the Tualatin Basin of today came off The Blind Potter’s wheel around 500,000 years ago. That’s the approximate shutoff date for the Boring volcanoes that began erupting in and around the Portland Basin roughly 10 million yeas ago. These volcanoes figured significantly in the development of the Tualatin Hills, a high ridge of land that separates the Portland and Tualatin basins. The extinct carcasses of five of these small shield volcanoes comprise the north and east elevations of the Fanno Creek watershed. In the photo above a small, un-named stream has made a home in a crease or fold created in one or more of the flows that came down the face side of TV Hill.

It is rare to find the actual bosom of these flows lying so exposed in this watershed. Most of it is still buried under thick blankets of vegetation that have overgrown these forgotten places since the sewer-men passed through during the last four decades of the previous century. But when heavy rains come to TV Hill, the unchecked flow of storm water will sometimes rip off everything – including even the ordinarily tenacious moss – right down to the bare rock.

Below, Lost Creek tumbles through underbrush covering five acres of undeveloped ravine in the upper reaches of Sylvan Creek - one of Fanno Creek's most important tributaries.