The acronym for the Pacific Lumber Company, PALCO, looms in big green letters on a white “No Trespassing” sign, just past the turnoff for Kristi Wrigley’s house. The main road continues up-slope, but a locked gate blocks further passage. Wrigley’s driveway angles to the right, briefly threads through a patch of dark redwood forest, then comes into the open as it drops down to her house, a two-story gray structure covered with hand-hewn redwood shakes, with a brick chimney.

The home is perched on a hill above an apple orchard. Beyond the orchard, screened from sight by thick vegetation, is the North Fork of the Elk River, which flows from steep slopes that used to be forested, embraces the Wrigley spread in a 180-degree curve, and empties into Humboldt Bay just south of Eureka. Her grandfather settled here in 1903, her father, youngest of nine children, was born here in 1908, grew up here, and died here in 1995. She grew up here as well. “The farmers came here because that’s where the good land was,” she said. It’s the first floodplain below what is now Pacific Lumber property.

Until recently, the river was a dependable source of drinking and irrigation water, and a delightful place for kids to swim and fish. “It was playland for my kids,” said Wrigley, 57. But that has all changed. Since the 1990s, when Pacific Lumber drastically escalated the rate of logging upstream, the water has been unfit to drink, choked with dirt and organic debris for several months of the year, and swimming holes have filled with sediment. The watershed above Wrigley’s property, once held in place by an old-growth redwood forest, is literally washing downstream, and in the process wreaking destruction on residents’ properties, as well as on water quality and fish habitat.

Wrigley is one of many who live downstream from recent Pacific Lumber clearcuts who have seen their land and buildings flooded in recent years, and their water quality degraded. Some have seen worse. Thirty-three residents of Stafford, a tiny town south of Eureka, had their homes destroyed in 1997 after a debris torrent roared off Pacific Lumber timberlands. They sued and eventually received $3.3
million from the company.

Pacific Lumber racked up hundreds of violations for illegal logging practices on its 211,000 acres in the 1990s, which led to the suspension of its state timber license twice in the late 1990s. That didn’t halt logging, as the company started relying more on contractors to do the cutting. The State sought civil penalties against Pacific Lumber, and in 1998 Judge Marilyn Miles of Humboldt County Superior Court imposed a fine of $13,000, adding that she wished she could have levied a heavier fine, but was prevented from doing so by statutory restrictions.

Wrigley and others have sued Pacific Lumber for damages, and accepted monetary settlements, but destructive timber operations have continued.

Wrigley relies on the family orchard to supplement her paycheck from the Eureka office of Caltrans, where she is transportation surveyor in the right-of-way engineering department. Today she leads her visitor to the sun deck that wraps around two sides of her house and overlooks the orchard. During two wet winters in the mid-to-late 90s, as well as the winter of 2002–03, which was also unusually rainy, floods washed across the orchard multiple times. “I can only remember three other times when the orchard flooded at all,” she said.

The repeated flooding is rotting the trees’ roots and at the same time starving them of oxygen by leaving layers of impermeable clay, she said. “It used to be that in a good year we’d have 3,000 25-pound boxes of Waltanas [a local variety] to sell. In a normal bad year, we’d have 900. Last fall, I had less than 150.” The orchard—more than seven acres, with several varieties of apples—includes an apple tree that was here when her grandfather bought the place. Only about three acres produce now, she said. Many trees are either dead or lack the necessary vigor.

“I’m just so angry. They’ve ruined my land and our source of water. That should be a sin, but here it’s the norm,” said Wrigley. “I’m labeled a fanatic. Well, goshdarn, my property is flooded. No, I’m not a fanatic. I’m aware of the water rights that go with my land. In here,” pointing to her head, “is an understanding of what it was like here when I was young and when my kids were young. And in here,” tapping her head again, “is an understanding of what happened here in the ’90s.”

What happened was that Pacific Lumber greatly accelerated the rate at which it was pulling timber off its 14,600 acres upstream. According to a September 2000 study by the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, the company’s logging rate increased sevenfold in a ten-year period. Between 1974 and 1987 it logged an average of 72 acres per year in the area. From 1987 to 1997, the average rose to 504 acres a year.

Massive amounts of sediment poured downstream. From 1990 to 1997, the California Department of Forestry (CDF) issued 64 violation notices to the company regarding its logging operations in the North Fork. According to the water quality board study, between 1994 and 1997 landslides in freshly cut areas bled sediment into the North Fork at an annual rate 13 times greater than landslides in parts of the watershed that hadn’t been logged for 15 years or more. The total amount of sediment deposited in the river during that period was 84,000 cubic yards—enough to cover a baseball diamond to the height of a 30-story building—and 95 percent of that came from harvested areas and logging roads. “You don’t see any rocks now in the North Fork,” Wrigley said. “They’re all covered with mud, and we have 45-degree banks with sediment deposition.”

Dirty Showers

It was Wrigley’s mother who first noticed something wrong with the drinking water, which the family had been pumping directly from the river. “She said the coffee tasted terrible. Then she said the water did, too. We realized she was right. It tasted like dirt. We couldn’t believe it because we had always had really good water,”said Wrigley. At about that same time, in the early ’90s, she and her family started noticing something else—taking a shower didn’t make them clean. “The water left us messy. We’d have grit on us.” In 1999, under a cleanup and abatement order from the water quality board, Pacific Lumber began to truck water in to Wrigley and her neighbors

As a victim of flooding, Wrigley has plenty of company. Just down the road from her place stands the modest cream-colored, green-trimmed home of Miklos Kallo, a 63-year-old Vietnam vet who suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome. On the night of December 27, 2000, he and his family were trapped by floodwaters and had to be rescued by emergency personnel. The flood did not enter his home, but it did tear away his front porch.

Where the valley widens out toward Humboldt Bay, Lucindo Souza has been running beef cattle on 10 acres. He can’t pasture his herd year-round any more because the grass gets covered in muck from winter floods. During the same storm that marooned Kallo, Souza lost 600 feet of fence, which he had to pay out of his own pocket to replace. Similar stories of damage can be heard in the Freshwater Creek valley to the north, another populated area downstream of Pacific Lumber timberlands.

Jerry Gess, 61, who lives at the confluence of Freshwater and McCready Creeks, took drastic action last year, after repeated inundations: he removed his deck and built a dike—a 151-foot-long L-shaped concrete retaining wall, four to six feet high. It cost him over $15,000. Putting a new deck in will take another $3,000, he figures. Since 1995, his garage has been flooded three times, he said, and when the big rains came in December 2002, Freshwater Creek came within inches of washing into his home. The wall is meant to protect his home from both Freshwater Creek and McCready Creek, whose watershed also has been logged recently. Last winter there were no heavy rains. “We had water against the wall, but that’s all,” he said.

Gess, a mechanic and long-time resident, stresses that he is not opposed to logging. “I feel almost guilty saying what I feel. Every time I see a logging truck I think, ‘There’s a guy feeding his family.’” At the same time, when it comes to Freshwater, which like the Elk watershed has been intensively cut over the past 15 years, Gess thinks enough is enough. At the least, he said, Pacific Lumber should be prevented from harvesting during the rainy season, when the risk of flooding is greatest. At the most, he thinks logging in Freshwater should be stopped altogether: “The only way to clean this up is to leave it alone and let 50 years go by,” he has concluded.

Pacific Lumber: No Connection

Pacific Lumber has repeatedly denied any linkage between recent cycles of logging and flooding in the Elk and Freshwater basins. For example, in the 2002 watershed analysis of Freshwater, which the company performed as part of the 50-year Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP), a set of logging restrictions aimed at protecting endangered species, the company acknowledged the presence of “high levels of fine sediment in many areas,” but attributed it to natural erosion and to activities that occurred 40 to 135 years ago, “particularly related to [logging] road construction and use.” The flooding in Freshwater in the mid-to-late 1990s was due to heavier rainfall than during the preceding 10- to 15-year period, the company argued.

Bill Trush, adjunct professor in the Fisheries Department at Humboldt State University, adamantly disagrees that so-called “legacy logging” was behind the present-day flooding problems in the Freshwater and Elk basins. He said the proof could be found in the middle reaches of the Elk River basin, up on Pacific Lumber land. Because the terrain there is steep and narrow, the waterways don’t store sediment, they flush it out quickly. Nonetheless, these reaches too are now severely clogged by fine particles because of erosion from fresh clearcut, he said.

Fisheries biologist Patrick Higgins, of Arcata, commented that until the late 1980s, the Elk River was “the best coho fishery in the state.” Today, coho are federally listed as a threatened species. Because of ideal ocean conditions the last two years, coho runs in Freshwater Creek and the Elk River have been sizeable compared to the recent past, he said, but are still only a fraction of what they once were.

Timber operations slowed in the late 1990s, but picked up again a couple of years ago, and there is plenty of evidence of ongoing damage. In some places, sediment deposition in the Elk watershed is six to eight feet above the river’s original gravel bed, according to residents as well as staff scientists with the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. In a 2003 study, water quality board staff observed “significant channel, bank, and floodplain aggradation” following the major storms of December 2002. They estimated, on the basis of an evaluation of watershed conditions, that “flood severity” in 2001 was 135 percent worse than it was in 1997.

Two major reports by a panel of independent scientists commissioned by the water board—one released in 2002, the other in 2003—found that the rate of cutting is too high in five watersheds that have been declared “sediment impaired” under the Clean Water Act: the Elk River, and Freshwater, Stitz, Jordan, and Bear Creeks, near Humboldt Redwoods State Park. In addition, a 2003 study of nine North Coast streams by hydrologist Randy Klein found that the North Fork of the Elk River was clogged by sediment for longer periods of time than any of the other waterways.

Pacific Lumber does have an ongoing program to rehabilitate logging roads, the single greatest source of sediment deposition over the long term. However, that doesn’t do much to prevent landslides, which in any given year account for more than half the total volume of material delivered to stream channels in the basin, according to one of Pacific Lumber’s own consultants, Arcata-based Pacific Watersheds Associates.

For years the company resisted demands for compensation for the damage to property values, insisting both in public hearings and in numerous scientific documents that its recent logging and roadbuilding have not been a major cause of increased flooding. “The claim that extensive flooding of homes and structures have [sic] been the result of PALCO’s timber harvesting operations in the Freshwater Creek watershed is erroneous,” said Jeffrey Barrett, Pacific Lumber’s director of science programs, in a December 2000 statement to the regional water quality board. “The claim that PALCO’s operations are discharging unacceptable amounts of sediment into Freshwater Creek is erroneous,” he added.

In the late 1990s, Wrigley and 21 of her neighbors took the company to court. In 2002, a settlement was reached, the amount of which was not disclosed. Pacific Lumber’s response to the litigation was mixed. “Trials are always good to avoid. The resolution was one we think is fair,” commented Edgar Washburn, the company’s attorney, at the time. Last October, however, in a letter to company employees, Robert Manne, the company’s chief executive officer, complained that residents had “extorted money from the company.”

Wrigley, who is also a plaintiff in another property damage suit that is working its way through the courts, said that legal settlements, while certainly a solace, don’t address the real problem: continued logging by Pacific Lumber in watersheds that are already severely damaged. That’s why she directs most of her anger at the California Department of Forestry (CDF), which is charged with regulating logging practices. “My public trust agency said it’s okay for them to flood me the way they are. CDF simply licenses the destruction,” she said bitterly.

She’s not alone in that view. Back in November 1997, people living downstream from Pacific Lumber lands had trekked to a hearing of the Senate Natural Resources Committee to plead for emergency rules to stop the damaging logging practices. A neighbor of Wrigley’s told the legislators: “The Forest Practices Act as administered by the California Department of Forestry does not protect the property of downstream neighbors, nor does it protect the health of our streams, their aquatic life, and the fisheries they once supported.”

And in the Third Corner

Not surprisingly, the Department of Forestry sees things differently. In 2001 it restricted logging in the Elk River and Freshwater Creek watersheds to levels aimed at ensuring that flood conditions would not worsen. That ceiling, still in effect, is similar in the two watersheds: 500 clearcut equivalent acres in Freshwater and 600 in Elk. Pacific Lumber is not permitted to clearcut any more land than that annually, though it can log more acreage if it uses lighter methods, such as selective harvesting.

Almost as soon as the limits were issued they hit controversy. Most notably, Leslie Reid of the U.S. Forest Service’s Redwood Sciences Laboratory in Arcata, a leading expert on the environmental impacts of logging, said that in calculating the limits, CDF had failed to consider the most important factor: the reduced capacity of streams to carry water due to channel shrinkage caused by sediment build-up from harvested areas and logging roads.

John Munn, the CDF hydrologist who made the calculations on which the limits were based, did not dispute Reid’s criticism. He said the purpose of his calculation was simply to determine how much logging could take place without increasing peak flows beyond current levels. “Our conclusions haven’t changed,” he told a reporter at the time. “The (annual acreage) limit was based on not making peak flows worse.” Reid has recommended that no more than 39 acres be cut annually in the sub-watershed where Wrigley lives. That would be about one-tenth of what is cut now in an average year.

Muddy Prognosis

Is flooding worsening in the two basins? Yes, contends Jesse Noell of Salmon Forever, a watershed restoration group. In the Freshwater and Elk basins, “six or seven houses that hadn’t been flooded before got flooded” when torrential rains hit the North Coast at the end of December 2002, said Noell, who until recently lived in Elk in a home rented from Wrigley. CDF Deputy Chief John Marshall, however, said the evidence is not yet in on that question and on the role of logging in the upper reaches of the two basins. That “$64,000 question” is being addressed through the watershed analysis process that Pacific Lumber is conducting under the terms of its 50-year HCP, which was part of the 1999 deal in which the company sold 7,500 acres, including the 3,000-acre Headwaters grove southeast of Eureka, to the federal government for $480 million. The watershed analysis will determine the appropriate scale and type of logging for every watershed on Pacific Lumber’s 211,000 acres. The outcome could lead to a change in the restrictions under which the company currently operates. The analysis for the Freshwater basin is done and, according to Marshall, the 500-acre limit will remain in place. That’s bad news for Pacific Lumber, which had hoped to see it raised, and for Freshwater residents, who’d hoped it would be lowered.

In April, Pacific Lumber asked state and federal agencies to consider sweeping revisions to its Habitat Conservation Plan. These would give it increased access to wooded areas along streams and on steep slopes, and greater freedom to operate during wet weather. If the proposed revisions are approved, erosion on its timberlands is likely to increase—bad news for residents of Elk and Freshwater.