~Restoration Completed~

Pepper Road Crossing • Anchor River, AK
Summer 2005

The Pepper Road crossing of a tributary to Stariski Creek is yet another case that sums up the reason everyone needs to pay more attention to how roads interact with our salmon streams. This road failed during the normal spring breakup at the end of April, stranding four residents on the other side of the creek and washing about one hundred yards of road fill into a salmon bearing stream. The failure was entirely predictable and preventable; pre-failure corrective action would have benefited both the environment and the pocketbook of everyone involved – which in this case includes all taxpayers and residents of the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Pre Wash-out

We first learned of this particular crossing in late summer 2004 when it was pointed out to us as a potential fish barrier by the local EPA staff at the Kenai River Center. We investigated the site that fall, collecting enough information to document that indeed this culvert was “perched,” that is, it is high enough that juvenile salmonids could not swim upstream of its outlet. This along with the fact that the road was likely cutting off several miles of salmon habitat was enough information to begin our search for funding that would allow us to remove and replace the culvert.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded us funding in the winter of 2004, with the hope that we could come up with a temporary fix that would keep the road from failing and re-open the salmonid habitat. However, this road and several others that service this particular subdivision were not legal. In addition to not complying with federal environmental regulations, the roads were also built in the Kenai Peninsula Borough’s right-of-way with substandard material and substandard design. This means that the borough’s road department won’t maintain them and they fall in “no mans land” for repair and maintenance.
The fact that the developer was in violation of a federal court order to rebuild this road crossing complicated efforts to obtain federal grant funds to do this work. We redirected the secured US Fish and Wildlife Service funding to another good project that was next in line, but the work on Pepper Road was delayed.

Early this spring, we conducted some follow-up field work to see what the creek looked like when break-up started. The standard assessment used to evaluate fish passage for culverts revealed that this one failed on all three measures: 1) it was perched by more than 4”, 2) its slope was greater than 2% and 3) it constricted the natural channel by more than 50%. Even though there was still ice on the stream, it was clear to us that failure was imminent. In a memo dated 4/2/2005 written to several resource mangers we predicted that the stream was sure to fail. On 4/24/2005 it did.

Road wash-out

With the road washed out, local residents were hamstrung. They weren’t supposed to work on the road because it was (and still is) tied up in litigation, and the borough couldn’t repair it because it was never built to standards. After a few days of inaction, and after the high water receded, someone made minimal repairs to reopen the road. The “fix” used the same culvert, just cutting the road down so it was passable. Since the same culvert was used, failure was certain to happen again.

In August 2005, with a private funding source, we were able to place a small bridge across the stream that will prevent the road from failing in the same manner. The repair is not perfect, due to limited funding and the wrong time of year to be conducting stream bank revegetation work, but it should keep the road from washing out again this fall. Late next spring, we’ll hop back down there and finish up the stream bank work, to restore the channel back to a more healthy condition.

Bridge construction

Channel reconstruction

The take-home bottom-line lesson here is that more oversight is needed on road building activities that occur in the Kenai Peninsula Borough right-of-ways. This is particularly true when salmon bearing streams are to be crossed.