I BELIEVE: ‘Rivers are truly awesome features of our natural world, but they demand our proper respect’
Photo credit: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer
Daily Record
Thursday, September 15, 2011
By Brian Cowden – Trout Unlimited’s Musconetcong Home Rivers Initiative Coordinator
Last week, I spent an afternoon photographing the Flatbrook River in New Jersey’s northwest corner during a flood event. It was awe-inspiring to watch the river flowing over its banks, its energy dissipating as it entered the forest and meadows that encompassed this usually medium-sized trout stream. The Flatbrook is perhaps the state’s least developed watershed with very few homes or businesses built in its floodplain. Eventually, the river widens out and flows into the Delaware River, but here, just 20 feet wide, the river’s riffles hold trout
Working for Trout Unlimited, I spend a lot of time in and around rivers, watching them. Seeing healthy river systems function helps me in my restoration work in the Musconetcong watershed.
As I watched the river’s increased flow, it was clear that the river’s main energy was focused in the stream channel while the water flooding over the bank was much slower moving, depositing sediment into the flood plain. This deposition of sediment is the reason we see so many farmers planting our food crops along our rivers and streams where the rich soil lends itself to excellent production.
As I watched from the safety of higher ground along the river, I would occasionally see a tree that had toppled off the banks wash downstream. This too is a natural event, and the tree’s branches and trunk create excellent aquatic habitat once it settles to the river bottom or gets hung up along the bank. Soon enough, new trees and shrubs will replace the ones washed off the banks. River and stream channels shift during these floods, new pools are created, riffles and runs move within the stream’s channel, the flora and fauna around the river adapt, and the cycle continues. Flood waters fill vernal pools and lakes and help recharge our groundwater aquifers, the source of drinking water for so many New Jersey residents. All of these things are a completely natural function of any healthy river system.
However, all of that changes when development occurs within the floodplain. Here in the East, especially where early human settlement often built right along river banks to harness a river’s energy, excessive flooding occurs and affects our lives as we have witnessed this summer. Homes, roadways and businesses are all affected when flooding occurs because so much has been built too closely to flowing river waters. And while our economies no longer heavily rely on harnessing energy from rivers, especially here in New Jersey. Our state’s rivers lack significant power to fuel hydro electric power and the need to grind grains or saw logs with water power is long gone, yet we continue to build too closely to streams and rivers. Roads built in our floodplains and bridge abutments too narrow for flood events create additional high waters; obsolete dams stretch across the river, impeding its flows, their usefulness long gone. All of these things can lead to catastrophic flooding events where loss of life and property are at risk as we’ve recently witnessed. Every home, business or road built within a watershed adds impervious surfaces within those watersheds where rain waters can no longer soak in, but instead have to find other places to run off. And because roads and roofs and parking lots are smooth surfaces, that rainwater flows very quickly, unable to be slowed down by native trees, grasses and shrubs as it flows towards stream tributaries which then flow into larger rivers. This increases flood events as well as expands our floodplains ever further into areas where we already live and work.
The solutions to these problems are not always easy. Adequate funding, especially in today’s difficult economic times, is lacking to purchase the more severely affected businesses and homes to have them razed to prevent further not only flooding but the emotional and economic difficulties that these events bring with them.
Often in the wake of widespread flooding like we’ve seen in recent weeks, there is discussion about how to redirect flood waters by building elaborate tunnel systems, raising buildings up and placing them on stilts or high foundations, or the need to buy out the more severely affected structures so that they can be razed to prevent future pain and suffering from those that live and work in these areas.
There are no simple answers. These are the places where we have chosen to spend our lives. Yet there are important lessons to learn and there are things we can do to reduce, if not prevent, future flooding. Improvements can be made to storm water drainage systems. Obsolete dams that back up our rivers in floods can be removed. Native vegetation can be planted along stream banks to reduce flow velocities when a stream or river overflows. And we can eliminate building within our floodplains.
Rivers are truly awesome features of our natural world, but they demand our proper respect. They supply our drinking water, the very essence of life. But they can also bring much pain and suffering as we have seen when we don’t give them the room they sometimes need to manage naturally.
