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How Does McKenzie River Stay Clear of Debris During Wildfire Season?

Source: NBC16.com

By Angelina Dixson and NBC16.com Staff
Wednesday, August 10th 2022

McKENZIE RIVER, Ore. — The McKenzie River is Eugene’s sole source of drinking water; and especially during wildfire season, it’s important to protect it from debris.

But what’s being done to keep it clean during future wildfire seasons?

Protecting the river is a big project for EWEB to keep it resilient during fire seasons.

“We’re doing these large-scale flood restoration projects where we spread out the flow on a flood plane, which reconnects that creek or river with its former historic floodplain,” explains Karl Morgenstern, EWEB’s Watershed Restoration Project Manager. “So, it spreads out the flow and slows down the velocity, drops out sediment and absorbs some of these bigger events when they happen.”

Morgenstern is talking about the storm we saw Tuesday evening with heavy rain, lightning and even hail.

He says it didn’t cause any problems on the McKenzie River front.

“We did not see any of our water quality stations trigger their threshold. We set them at certain thresholds that then gives us a text alert and we didn’t get alerts from that, which was surprising. Maybe it stayed dry enough and absorbed a lot of that or didn’t rain as hard as we thought it would.”

But it’s events like this – plus any future wildfires – that EWEB officials are hoping to work as fast as they can with the restoration project.

This is to keep out any debris from fire activity in our water supply.

He says they’re using a lot of dead, hazard trees in the area to create structures that will slow down the flow and drop-down sediment in some areas.

This and so much more is left to be done.

Read the full article here.

ⒸNBC16.com 2022

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