It is no secret that nearly all of Oregon's estuaries have serious problems. There are occasionally articles about the need for dredging in one or another estuary, or efforts to deal with an acute environmental problem, such as the sunken cargo ship Pasley leaking oil into Yaquina Bay back in the 1990s. All estuaries connected to a town, such as Newport, Brookings, Tillamook or Bay City, also face threats from urban runoff and associated chemical pollutants. But even relatively pristine estuaries, such as the Salmon River estuary or Sand Lake estuary, face problems, especially of sedimentation. Why?
The answer is simple: excessive logging in the Coast Range, which has been ongoing for more than a hundred years, has dramatically increased the influx of sediment into estuaries, at rates far above the estuaries' natural capacity to handle it. This means the sediment load is not -- and cannot be -- flushed out to sea, as would normally happen during storm surges and floods. Clearcutting, associated road-building and the ecological abuse of riparian zones have all contributed to estuaries' problems. Additional disasters, such as the Tillamook Burns of the 1930s through the 1950s (which resulted from logging operations), have exacerbated problems in some estuaries; Tillamook Bay, for example, is now only a few feet deep at high tide.
Solving estuarine sedimentation is not only an exceedingly complex process, but also an expensive one. Initially, there needs to be accurate mapping of water flow and sediment deposits in an estuary, along with monitoring for pesticides used in timber management and agriculture, and urban chemicals. Though moving all, or most, of the sediment from even a small estuary is a gargantuan task, it may be possible to restore a main channel so the estuary can more successfully flush sediment out to the ocean.
Without a functioning estuary, salmon cannot easily migrate to and from the ocean, and this ultimately starves the forests of the Coast Range of nitrogen. Salmon die after spawning, and their carcasses provide nitrogen to the forest. In addition, many creatures, from shrews and eagles to bears benefit greatly from the nutrients in salmon carcasses, as do young salmon putting on weight for their migration to the sea.
Moreover, the eelgrass beds needed by salmon suffer in a degraded estuary. Some salmon species spawn in estuaries; but all salmon species use estuaries as an essential way station for days or weeks to allow their bodies to adjust to the change between fresh water and salt water as they migrate to or from their natal streams.
Oregon leadership thus far has done an abysmal job of curbing logging abuses that harm estuaries; in 2015 Oregon became the first and so far only state to have federal funding withdrawn by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to put in place an effective nonpoint pollution program. The main issue for the EPA? Oregon's leaders have failed to enact, let alone enforce, logging restrictions to protect streams in the coastal region from sediment runoff.
Oregon's estuaries can certainly be improved and brought back to better functioning than they now have. But it takes more political will than the state's leaders have shown thus far. It is much easier to do a salmon improvement project in an estuary than to stop clearcutting in the Coast Range and remove hundreds of miles of poorly constructed roads. In other words, symptomatic fixes are politically easier -- and cheaper -- than the costly, often longterm, systemic repairs. But our estuaries, from which we derive so much, deserve nothing less than sustained attention.
