Oral History
Narrator: Jane Graybill
Interviewer: Donna Sinclair
Date: Feb. 16, 2000
Place: Fairview, Oregon- Columbia Slough
Transcribed by Melissa Williams
DS: This is Donna Sinclair from the Center for Columbia River History. Today is February 16, 2000 and I’m interviewing Jane Graybill in the Interlachen community of Fairview, Oregon.
DS: State your name, date of birth, and place of birth.
JG: Okay. I’m Jane Begg Graybill and I was born September 14, 1941 here in Portland, and came to this area of Blue and Fairview Lake in 1966; saw the area and returned the next year in 1967 and was just married at that time and we bought this home in ’67. So I’ve been here most of the time since ’67. Did rent it out a few times when we were attending school and that sort of thing, but majority of the years I’ve been here. When I first came I remember looking out across the lake and this area directly south of our home, that field area over there, was all a natural meadow and occasionally a horse would come down and maybe one cow and that was about it. It was just totally beautiful to look at. And then this section over here, there was some farming activity, although there didn’t seem to be a lot. At the time I was a young mother and I just had my hands full and I remember looking out and being really enraptured with this entire view because it was so quiet and it was so green and we would get kidded by our neighbors across the street because they called this side [Fairview Lake] the swamp and their side [Blue Lake] was the classy upscale because they had the water-skiing and the clear water and ours was shallow, and muddy, and full of cattails. This entire end of the lake was all cattails and little channels that would meander through the cattails; and then on weekends during duck season there were a few private duck blinds out here, had been here for years, and people still came out, and these were all privately owned, and they would hunt on the weekends, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings during duck season the shot would fall on the roof of the house and wake you up [laughs]. It was raining these little tidbits of pellets all the time, and this happened for the first few years when we were here, because it was just literally, it was a vast wetland, only at that time we didn’t even know the word wetland, that’s what’s so funny; I didn’t learn the word until 1989. This neighbor I had who got me started in all this kept talking about the word wetland. I just thought she was kind of strange [laughs]. Because to us this was just this big swamp and our taxes. Multnomah County taxes, at that time in the ’60s and part of the ’70s, were half the amount of the people who lived on the other side of the street, because they were on the upscale Blue Lake side, and they paid twice as much as we did. Of course in those days property was really quite cheap. Then, ugh, I was gone for about four years with my husband so he could attend school and came back just in the summers and I really didn’t realize what was going on environmentally at all. But what began to take place was that the drainage district, they control the water level for all the Columbia Slough, and they needed this lake area for flood storage because they didn’t have a really adequate way to get rid of the flood waters when they came. They had kind of an antique pumping situation where they could pump the flood waters in here out to the Columbia, but it wasn’t reliable and lots of times it didn’t work, and they just couldn’t count on it, so they counted on holding the water here in the winters to save them having to scramble and do a lot of emergency work – we sort of knew that. We also knew that we weren’t really supposed to go down on our lower front lawns and do too much with it, that for some reason the drainage district sort of had permission, or rights. I really didn’t know, it was all very vague in my mind. But the drainage district started at that tree line right over there at the Osborne Creek area ’cause you can see the grove of trees that are there now, right along the edge, and then from that point there are no trees all the way along that shore; that’s because the drainage district then dredged the lake starting in the south middle edge, went all the way around and then rechannelized Fairview Creek; so now it’s in a very confined, much more narrow channel because in the aerial photos, if I could go to the Corps of Engineers and see the aerial photos, Fairview Creek used to come out and spread all the way out, it had this wonderful wetland area. That was the meadow I kept looking at, only I didn’t make that connection at the time, and they dredged and made channels and they built things and moved the land around a lot, put a lot of dredge spoils up there, and then the farmer later on for this entire area could come back and farm these dredge spoils. So he really got additional land out of this deal. For him that was good. And the dredge spoils went all the way down and then they kind of carved out a finger channel that goes clear down to northeast 223rd, you can see that from the road, and then came all the way back along the north shore of Fairview Lake and went the entire length of the lake, deepening the lake, putting the dredge spoils up, and then dumped a lot of them, of course, on this area, which we now call Fairview Lake Dam. So their flood protection came from this dredge activity. We didn’t realize at the time, of course nobody really did.
DS: Do you remember actually seeing the dredging take place?
JG: Oh yeah. Yeah, and there were these big piles of dirt down on our lawn, and course we knew the drainage district just left them there. They never sent any letters, they didn’t really tell us what they were doing. It was sort of this, well I think they’re doing such and such and they’re just dredging the lake. That’s all we knew, and they didn’t tell us what to do with the spoils. So, gradually over time each homeowner said, well gotta get rid of this dirt, gotta do something with it, so they go down and smooth it out, get a little bulldozer, borrow something and smooth it out and then gradually over time either plant it in grass or kind of or let it go wild, and that’s the story of the entire north shore, ’cause that’s all we knew. Um, and in this dredging project that took place in the late ’60s and early ’70s, they also removed all the cattails, and that was acres and acres of cattails. Well, the other thing we didn’t realize was – cattails clean water. This is part of their function – to clean out contaminants of any kind, and so in a sense the lake back then could clean itself, even as gradually more contaminants came down Fairview Creek and Osborne Creek from development and farm activities, there was a semi-cleaning mechanism. The problem, of course, with the lake in a sense is it is so shallow and it is so muddy because way back in the early days, before the Vanport flood and before all these cross-levies were built by the Corps of Engineers, in spring floods the Sandy River and the Columbia could kind of backwash into here, into the Slough, and [it] would send a surge of flow every spring down the entire Columbia Slough, and it was uninterrupted at that time. But the drainage district changed all this pattern of flow, especially after the 1948 flood, even though some of the dikes were in place. They had to do a whole lot more work to make sure we didn’t have another ’48 flood, ’cause that was devastating. Uh, I didn’t live in the home at that time, but the owners that we bought the home from were here during the 1948 flood, and it came up to the basement of this house, and this is at twenty-three feet, so we’re well above the flood plain. So they really radically altered the shoreline, they altered the capacity of the lake to clean itself, so it’s sort of like the lake has been denuded in a sense, and it was never replanted along this whole area over here because it was farmed. And so we had, the farming activity took place right up to the edge of the lake within maybe only three or four feet. Well, if you start to think about it, you think back, oh yeah, I remember all those spray planes every Spring that came and flew down over these fields and sprayed these fields for years, and then the little, um, tractors also up until, probably five years ago, would spray every year, up and down all these rows. Then you had the rain that came all these years, you have all that washing of the chemicals all those years right down off the edge of the lake into the lake for all those years.
DS: Did you swim in the lake?
JG: Yes. I have in the past.
DS: And your children?
JG: Um, my kids didn’t like it. They were just naturally repulsed so it wasn’t a problem. They went over the street to Blue Lake to swim. But I used to spend a little bit of time swimming out there and I do sail it now, it’s deep enough to sail, but we discourage any kind of motorized boats because that stirs up the sediments even more and we know that the potential for contaminated sediments here is pretty high; they have done a study in Fairview Creek right over here between where it enters the lake and right up to 223rd, there’s a little reach area in there that the City of Portland did in conjunction with their Buffalo Slough Sediment Study, and they found DDT, DDE, two types of chlordane, and deleldrin in the sediments in Fairview Creek. Now the report said that they had gone down two to four feet to find those contaminants and I remember looking, it was sort of an old-fashioned typewriter that did this report, and the little mark that meant feet, I thought I wonder if they really went down that deep because that’s expensive to do, to core down deeply, and I was interested in sediment testing at the time so I called the fellow up at City of Portland and I said ‘Were those samples really two to four feet deep?’ and he said no, that was a typo, that was an error, they were only two to four centimeters. So we’ve got contaminant right at the very top of the sediment column, just, you know, within barefoot distance if you’re walking in the creek. That’s pretty significant, and another friend of mine who is a geologist looked at that report and he said, ‘You know readings in Fairview Creek from the chart look to me like they’re just as high as the ones in Buffalo Slough.’ But, they’re real quiet about that, nobody really wants to deal with it, and it’s very hard to get people to really address that, and there’s very little data, other than that data very little on the sediment contamination for this area, and the fish have never been tested here. They do extensive fish tissue tests to see what kind of accumulation there are in the fatty portions of the fish and they’ve done a lot for the lower Slough. They’ve done nothing for Fairview Lake, and we have people who come down, right up until all these neighborhoods were built, they would come down through the trees and fish and take home fish, and different kinds of pan fish, carp, and there were cutthroat trout that lived along the edges of the lake, especially in Osborne Creek area in the center part because the water’s cooler over there, over there at Fairview Creek. The south shore of the lake would tend to be a whole lot cooler anyway because they used to have all these trees, uh, the north shore gets tremendous sun in the summer, so tree planting, serious tree planting on this side shade-wise and temperature-wise wouldn’t make quite as much sense. Up until two years ago, and especially this last year, the thickness of the trees was so thick for the remainder of the south shore going west, that we could not see any of the buildings behind the trees and now we can see practically everything that’s over there. Uh, there’s been a lot of standing original trees that have been taken down in the last year and the year before that.
DS: Now if the drainage district manages that area and there are no trees there, then how can there be development on [it]? If they’re managing it for flood control, or it’s because they just did it that time, they changed their strategies and …
JG: Oh you mean the altering of Fairview Creek?
DS: Yeah.
JG: Well, they simply put up all these dredge spoils and nobody, as far as I know, has really tested the spoils where these houses now sit. We don’t… if I were living over there I would certainly have my soils tested, but I know those folks don’t know that. They also don’t know the serious flood situation we have here because manually, on paper, uh, the City of Portland, the drainage district, and the Port of Portland did an engineering study where they lowered the base flood elevation for the Columbia Slough from seventeen feet, which was for the hundred years storm event, that the Corps of Engineers has it all mapped and if you go back to their old maps it’s seventeen feet, it’s seventeen feet at the mouth of Fairview Creek, it’s around here, it’s at Blue Lake, it’s everywhere. But in 1984 the agencies down there who wanted to change this did their own hydrology study and manipulated, however they had to do, and sent it up to FEMA, FEMA approved it. So, we now have this entire subdivision here sitting at what they think is a safe distance from the fourteen foot base flood elevation and that’s what City of Fairview used in 1998 in a letter to FEMA, that they were still using the fourteen foot base flood elevation. The interesting thing is in the 1996 flood we didn’t have those homes over here, and in the ’96 flood the water came up to, I have a marker in my backyard, to fourteen feet and that storm event, by George Taylor, he’s the state climatologist, he told me on the phone that in the ’96 flood event in our area here in the upper Slough was only a twenty-five year event. So we had fourteen feet of flooding situation at a twenty-five year storm event, and yet those people over there think they’re safe, and they’re not, and…
DS: That’s about fourteen feet over there, this is twenty-three [on the opposite side of Fairview Lake where the new development is].
JG: Yeah, and those houses are probably sitting up at about fifteen feet, and just behind them the other houses at sixteen feet and it gradually goes up. But, um, and they have left some of that area, which is obviously very flat, uh, which was covered in the ’96 flood. I have a flood photo here too that shows the shows that. Now they’re telling these new people over here, and this section is directly south, that the flood elevation is probably fifteen feet and so most of them will probably start at fifteen to seventeen feet, but, if we really did get the hundred year event in this area I think there are going to be a lot of people in trouble. And they’re not being told the facts, and of course, we applied, we had a friend’s group here, and we applied for a LOMAR, a letter of map revision, which is a formal request to go to FEMA to have them evaluate our area and change that flood plain level because we’re not dealing with the current flood plain, and we only ask for an increase to fifteen feet based flood elevation. Actually it should be seventeen feet. There’s a Corps of Engineers. Their original study was much more on target, and I know that because before 1996, back in the seventies even, it flooded our backyard higher than what it was in the ’96 flood, and it came up to a fence line that I remember where it is along the fence and my daughter even remembers, she was so impressed as a child, that the height of that water it left debris along our fence and when a flood does that it’s called a debris line and that’s how they measure the height of floods, which is very obvious, you don’t really think about it until an engineer tells you, ‘Now you need to look for a debris line.’ [laughs], they go ‘Oh yeah.’ My daughter distinctly remembers that as a child and I remember that event and one or two others where it came up even higher than the ’96 flood. Now part of that problem is, and I just found out this last year, is that there’s a major constriction in this upper Slough area just above the Fairview Lake Dam, probably only fifteen hundred feet, below the dam – agricultural crossing that has combined with major storm water, or effluent pipes form the Gresham Sewage Treatment Plant, some of their older pipes, but they’re still in use and they’re still there. But that constriction has caused flood waters to back up into the lake at all these different major events and we were never told that. No one knew that, yet we have this community sitting here that is really vulnerable, and they’re supposed to be taking that agricultural crossing out and either replace it with something that’s, um, safe and won’t effect the flooding of this area.
DS: I don’t really understand how that backs water up… what an agricultural crossing is and how that backs water up. Because from my understanding Fairview Lake, from what I read, that they actually had flood gates that they could open to drain water out of the lake into the Slough So I wanted to ask you about that. I don’t really understand how that works.
JG: During the summer, you can do that, during the winter even though the flood gates will open so it’ll allow the rains and the storm water to pass through, when we’re hit with a major storm event, like a twenty-five year event, which was the ’96 event, or how about a fifty year event or a hundred year event. Everything rises here so quickly, and then the old pumps at the Drainage District couldn’t pump it out fast enough. . .
DS: Because it’s just right by the dam, right?
JG: No, no, they’re out, now they’re out by the Columbia River so they pipe a lot of this out there, that the whole system was so overwhelmed so quickly that no one could control it and the Fairview Lake Dam is not an engineered dam, it’s really not even technically a dam or a levy for flood control according to the Corps themselves.
DS: I read that.
JG: Yeah.
DS: Who built the dam?
JG: Well, it was built over the years, it’s sort of like a community effort, it was whoever needed to get rid of something [laughs], put it on the dam. Um, when the I-84 freeway was built up here, freeway rubble went into there and I have neighbors who remember seeing, you know, huge chunks of concrete, left over stuff, big scraps of junk were put in there. Um. They bulldozed over the original wetland trees so we had bulldozed debris in this landfill. We had the Gresham Sewage Treatment Plant when they did their big new one, which has not probably been, I’m just guessing fifteen, twenty years maybe – their construction material, a lot of it was dumped there, and then of course, dredging of the Slough, the upper Slough and dredging of the lake to keep this deep enough for flood control. All that was piled up over time. So we get this accumulation. Now we know that it’s an unengineered, unconsolidated, uncomplicated dam, and that was verified for us by, uh, John Bolio who was the Deputy State Geologist at DOGAMI, Department of Geology and Mineral Industries.
DS: So who put the flood gates in then?
JG: Well, [sigh] I don’t know who actually did that. It was probably the drainage District came up with some little model. It really does need a new one because it gets overwhelmed in any storm event, and then there was probably, and agreement with the local farmers, um, because they were major land owners here, and because they used it for irrigation, and I remember there used to be the irrigation pumps located down on the south shore of the lake and they would come on in the Summer, you could kind of hear ’em, and um, then behind all these trees were all these fields and so they irrigated. I think there were two or three different farmers who used the upper Slough and the lake as irrigation. And so it’s one of the early agricultural crossings that is still there. Now, that’s in the City of Gresham now, the City of Gresham was notified back in 1988 and 1989, by letter by the Drainage District, that they need to do something with this agricultural crossing because it’s causing serious flooding potential, well it already had, in our area and Gresham didn’t make a move to do that because they didn’t get it in their budget and this will be the first year, and this is the year two thousand, and they keep telling us that yes it’ll be out this summer [laugh], so I hope it will because, we fortunately didn’t have any huge major rain events this Winter, otherwise we would have really been in trouble, overwhelmed.
DS: How long did it take for the water from the flood of ’96 to recede?
JG: Oh, a few days, once it got going I think like February 9th was one of the high days, February 10th, and then slowly the week following it started to go down. Now, though, you see the Drainage District did pass an 8.2 million dollar bond to build new pumps. They have massive new pumps in place, which have taken over where the old ones just couldn’t do the job. My question would be, how much of a guarantee can they give us during a major natural hazard, such as an earthquake, and we know that there is a published fault in this area, it diagonals right across Blue Lake and heads right out the Columbia River, which means it intersects the Marine Drive Levy, and I know that that whole levy is really a serious issue, um, because how do you earthquake proof a landfill levy, and now we know that these major earthquakes do come to our area, everybody’s aware because it’s been in the newspaper so much. In the earlier days we were asking some of these same questions because there was another early study done that there was a possible earthquake fault that was a half a mile wide that went north south ride underneath the Fairview Lake Dam, which would also mean if it were there, in fact, that it would go underneath the Gresham Sewage Treatment Plant and down into Gresham. And so it would travel directly north so it would also have to go underneath the Marine Drive Levy, probably out into the Columbia, who knows maybe up into Washington. But we had these two faults then, the Landau Published Fault Oregon Geology in May of ’93 coming diagonally, the north south one, which is, they really haven’t totally verified that because they haven’t followed up on doing the studies, but they would have met right [laughs] at the Marine Drive Levy and so I would ask people, well, what’s the situation, we have these two faults at a Marine drive levy and all of this area is built on alluvial soils, which are prone to, and the clue word here is liquefaction, and the other clue phrase is ground motion amplification. Those are real buzz words, when you say those words engineers perk up, and people who know about earthquakes really perk up. Well, the public is getting educated and we know now that these types of soils, it’s like building something on jello, once they move in an earthquake situation they become liquefied and things that are on top tend to sink and it truly is an amazing. . . but, Statewide Goal Five, the Oregon LCDC Goal Five is natural hazards. I’m not, I’m sorry, it’s Goal Seven, Goal Five is the Natural Resources, the Natural Hazards Goal is Goal Seven, that means that comprehensive plans for all the local cities that are supposed to take into account the natural hazards in their area, and what we found was, by doing a little research, that the local city had not adequately, done that, and so people here really don’t realize how vulnerable we are. The original homes on the area between Blue and Fairview Lake were built on this sandstone ridge and I can remember when I first came that everybody sort of knew, we were supposed to be considered somewhat safe because this was a sandstone ridge and the foundation was more firm, and if you go out in your yards and gardens today you’ll find these chunks of sandstone, and that’s the Troutdale Sandstone Aquifer Formation that holds a lot of our water underground and probably early volcanic activity raised up this ridge between the two lakes because this is the formation that’s really found deep underground, is the sandstone that’s come to the surface. And I can remember being kind of surprised when newer homes started to come in along the lane and they were really down low and some of them were kind of out there on where these dredge spoils had been put.
DS: How many homes were here when you first came here, approximately?
JG: Well, when you came in the old section here? Most of these older homes were here, there had been a few fill-ins in between, I’m just guessing, I haven’t really counted, probably not more than thirty or forty.
DS: They were all up at the high point of the ridge?
JG: Uh-huh. Oh yeah. On the high point. Because people remembered the ’48 flood [laughs] and they had a lot of memories. But you know over time people forget and cities develop, and cities are in a hurry to develop and they don’t tell you things and you’ll never find out unless you personally do the research and go up and ask questions and ask to see the documents, and most people don’t have time to do that. I realize that, it’s an incredible job. So, natural hazards-wise I think we’re in kind of a unique unusual situation because we have the potential of fault zones, we have the potential of liquifaction, and ground motion amplification, and those two words needed to have been in our public testimony in order for it to be enter into Statewide Goal #7, Natural Hazards for the local city, and because I at the time didn’t know what lingo I was supposed to use I didn’t use those words, I just talked about the fault zones and so they will not address anything unless you do the research and put it in front of them and then you have to nicely convince them that this is probably true, but then it also has to be verified by many engineering reports and so. And even today cities can decide whether they want to use the information or not and they can infill here on dredge spoils with no problem. And I find that somewhat distressing [laughs]. But it’s really – homeowner, landowner beware. In fact there was no [pauses to get out a report], there is this report from the City of Portland called Flood and Landslide Hazard Mitigation Plan October of ’96 under the section called Hazard Disclosure [she reads form the report] ‘Current state real-estate disclosure laws do not mandate disclosure of all known flood and other natural hazards,’ and that really made an impression on me because that’s what the situation is here and, we’re trying to educate as we can.
DS: Buyer beware.
JG: [laughs] Yeah this is a warning from Kelso, Washington buyer beware. [Reads] ‘and for homeowners it’s buyer beware, Oregon law does not require homeowners to specifically disclose landslide hazards, and landslide insurance is expensive and difficult to find. But counties and cities may not have adequate mapping or geotechnical expertise to know where they should require further study or how to evaluate proposed fixes,’ and that’s February 7, 1999 from The Oregonian.
DS: So these are the things you’re working on. What event got you, or what happened?
[End Side A, Tape 1 of 1] [Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 1]JG: [mid-sentence] and by then it was probably farmed because they did come in and farm that little area. And watching the Union Pacific Train go by as I had done [laugh] as I had done for the last twenty-five or plus years, and I remember, and it took me about seven years to consciously form the question in my mind ‘Why does it look like that trailer park, which is even further south behind the railroad back up there, why does it look like it’s so close to the railroad?’ And that question began to haunt me, and finally, I had a friend who was beginning to interest me into kind of an overall wetland situation – I’d learned the word wetland, I realized that creeks were important, the lakes were important, and our drinking water was important, and it’s all right here. But that railroad thing really bugged me, so I had her come with me and we went up, down, and through the trailer park, and the trailer park is interesting because it’s in stages and levels. You start at a high level and then you go down about four or five different levels and plateau areas where they put the trailers. There was one row of mobile homes that was right underneath the railroad track and I was just amazed because it’s raised bed and you can’t see them from here, because they’re down underneath that railroad, and so I started researching and found out there’s supposed to be at least a fifty feet buffer from the railroad to where there is any living space. Fifty feet? I mean that’s really nothing at all because 1986, and I think it was in the summer, I remember it being kind of warm, we were sitting here at dinner and it was dark out, but all of a sudden there was this huge crash, I mean metal cascading, crashing, convulsing, right across the lake and you know sound travels across water and almost magnifies and so it was extremely loud. There was a train derailment right over there, probably about fifteen hundred feet east of the area that I had been looking at wondering about that RV park and sure enough in the newspaper the next day was three or four train cars derailed, tumbled off the railroad track, down into the strawberry field. They now have people living in those strawberry fields, but at the time they didn’t. So I started doing a little bit of research. Have you ever tried to call the rail road? [laughs] It’s very difficult to get a hold of them and after many calls, they said well there’s supposed to be sort of a protected area, but it’s up to the individual cities to enforce it. So in all my naivet�� I wrote up a little thing to present to the Fairview City Council and I asked them if they had any ordinances to protect people from cars falling off the track, especially in this RV park because those were there at that time, not during the derailment so much, but when I went up to testify they were…
DS: And they were closer than the fifty feet.
JG: Well, they were right about the fifty foot level. But the railroad bed sits above them, it just didn’t make any sense, and I talked to somebody else who said you know, those um, mobile homes have propane in them and they’re just likely to explode if something like that hits them. Now if that train derailment had been fifteen hundred feet or so further west and those living units had been there, there would have been a real up-cry from the community about lack protection. But, the people on the council really didn’t ask me very many questions, and I had done my research. I told them what the rail road told me, I had measured the distance, and I thought that there really ought to be more of a buffer situation. But they just really weren’t that interested and I remember thinking this was really strange. Why weren’t they curious? Why weren’t they as curious as I was about safety, about people living there? But they weren’t and they said it’s up to the railroad and I said well, the railroad said it’s up to you. Well, they didn’t want an ordinance so there’s never been an ordinance to protect the people from the railroads and now we’ve got all these new homes down there, which probably are at least fifty feet. But when you have a raised railroad bed I think you are asking for a whole lot more trouble. Now it’s true it may be the only derailment we have in a hundred, or two hundred year, but when you witness it for yourself it makes very deep impression. So that’s how I got started. I realized something was wrong. The right questions weren’t being asked, the protection, it just seemed to me the human element and the citizen trying to participate just was just not adequate. And then, gradually my friend took me to other meetings, uh like down town it was called The City and the City and the Country. It was sponsored by Portland State where you brought developers and you brought um, people who were interested in land restoration together for big conferences and everything, and that was a big eye-opener to me. I had absolutely no idea of what this whole scenario was all about. But we did research then on our drinking water and that’s when we were made aware of the plume of contamination from Boeing and Cascade, and we became very interested in that because at that time they didn’t have a lot of the monitoring laws. They had a few, but they didn’t have any extraction wells in place either and this whole issue was really coming forth. Um, and we were being educated along with it; we’d go down to DEQ we’d go through files and find letters and some amazing things that are there for the public to research, and that’s when we found out there may have been this earthquake fault running underneath the Fairview Lake Dam, and we’d find maps of the contamination, and then gradually, couple three, four years later, the information would come out in the newspaper and of course we paid a lot of attention to it but the average person doesn’t really understand what’s going on unless you are at the receiving end of where these chemicals could come and infiltrate your water supply and then you get very interested and of course the City of Portland – this was their project, they had to make sure that plume didn’t get into their well field. But we are sandwiched in between the plume and the City of Portland well field, so if somebody does get hit with the contaminates first, we would be the first one.
DS: Isn’t it about a mile from your wells, that the plume…
JG: Probably, probably about that, yeah. And, of course, ground water contamination moves very slowly. But the problem is in the summer when the City of Portland pumps, they can pump up to ninety million gallons of water a day, from the Blue Lake wells and from this area and they supplement all of the City of Portland with this ground water. The pumping capacity tends to pull that plume downward more towards the Columbia River and course downward toward their well field. Um, but, uh, some of the people wanted to list us as a superfund site, but the powers that be knew that if the superfund came in here that it’d be federal people everywhere making all kinds of demands and they just didn’t want to cope with the federal folks coming in and so I guess they went back and lobbied in Washington, D.C. and were somewhat convincing and so all of the responsibility was turned over to the DEQ and DEQ has put in [quick gasp] many, many monitoring wells, many extraction wells that cover this whole area and their goal is to keep pulling this plume back southward, away form this down gradient flow, this natural down gradient flow, keep it going backward and they hope eventually to shrink it to a really a small size. I don’t know that they can ever get rid of those kinds of chemicals, they’re extremely difficult, but there is technology now available to really probably keep it safe; as long as financially they can do this, it’s fine. If something happens to our system where the state can’t cover the cost anymore, if something went wrong federally where they can’t cover all these superfund sites, then we’re in trouble. But, you know, as long as our economy’s good and everybody can do their job we probably will be okay. So from the railroad to the ground water and then the destruction of habitat areas. When I first came here in the late ’60s, you’d often have to get out of your car and pick up a turtle and move it off the road so that somebody else wouldn’t drive on it. And we had Western Pond Turtles and we had Painted Turtles, and we would often see the baby ones crawling around. You know even up until all these new homes came in there were neighbors down here, about five to ten years ago, who had little turtles crawling across their yards, and we know now that this area was a nesting site for all these varieties of turtles, um, and they need between a hundred and three hundred feet buffer for their nest sites and they like sandy soil, and we had wet, sandy soil in lots of places because this is built up from overflow of the Sandy River for hundreds of years from flood conditions. . . I haven’t seen any turtles now for about three years, um… we would see an occasional one, and… they may, well I don’t know if I can say they may come back because their habitat is essentially gone and they don’t like, of course, dogs and cats and then we get lots of raccoons. This last year we’ve had more raccoons than we’ve had in years; they were in the trees, they’re in people’s porches, and they eliminated several cats in the neighborhood and severely wounded others. So if you kept your cats in at night you were probably okay, but if you let your cat roam outside, we had several people who lost them just this last year. So our turtle population, and you know, turtles are a real indicator of the health of a water shed, and I didn’t know anything about this either because everything at one time was here, we didn’t; have to worry about any of this and all of a sudden you kind of wake up, twenty… like Rip Van Winkle… twenty-five, thirty years later and you go there’s nothing here anymore, there’s very little wildlife. We had Blue Heron nests right over there in Osborne Creek. Now I personally didn’t see them but I have neighbors down the street who know where those nests were and we’re just fearful now that those nests are gone within the last year or two. And we also learned, too late once again, that Blue Heron nests and rookeries are protected under Statewide Goal 5, Natural Resources. But it wasn’t documented, it wasn’t photographed, and it wasn’t presented to the planning commissions, the city councils, and verified and stamped and approved so somebody can come in and remove the natural habitat, remove nests, whatever, and if nobody’s there to interfere, to intercede, it’s gone, and then if, well, it’s simply gone. And [short sigh of frustration] every once in a while we keep finding out about another thing that’s gone; another element that makes this a unique area is gone and I’m just wondering, there’s so little left. Our hope is in restoration. If you can convince subdivisions to plant and restore lakefront areas, which will be taking place for the first time in about a week. City of Portland is coupling with the Columbia Slough Watershed Council and there are some fund available where they can buy wetland native plants at lower cost and come out and help us prepare places in our yards and put native plants in, which is a start. The other thing is that there were historical runs of Coho Salmon in Fairview Creek, and I just learned, really learned about that from a fellow I met, about a month ago, at the Blue Lake Historical presentation put on by the City of Troutdale and his name was Homer Campbell, somebody introduced me to him and he told me and I said, ‘Would you please write this down for me? This is really interesting that we actually had Coho in Fairview Creek.’ And he said, ‘Yes, as a boy I fished for them,’ and then he wrote this letter up for me and sent it and I have his permission to hand the letter out to anybody who wanted anecdotal history. Well, the interesting thing is we can ask a mighty question, and the question would be, today, could we restore Coho lines in Fairview Creek? If this is truly a nursery area for the little smolts, as it once was, probably for hundreds and hundreds of years, could we do it again? We wiped it out in the last fifty years and it may take fifty more to restore it, but could we start the process, could it be done? And the Columbia Slough is probably the most contaminated water body in the state of Oregon, other than the Tualatin, and there are many, many problems up and down the Slough But, you know, if everybody made it a goal, it could work. We might be able to clean it up well enough if we had a place where the fish could go out and the fish could come in. And I know this is very naive, and it’s reaching for the stars, it’s a real stretch as I call it, but it’s a stretch in the reach and I think it’s at least worth restoring to see if it’s possible. That’s my latest dream [laugh].
DS: The fish, the salmon, is symbolic of restoring…
JG: Right. The turtles probably we can’t because they need land, they need alluvial soils, they need sandy places, they need undisturbed places and those are gone. The Heron nests are gone. The Heron still will come here and fly, of course, and do some fishing, but I don’t think they’re going to be nesting here anymore. The eagles had a perch tree right in the middle of Interlachen Lane up until about six years ago. There was one tree that had these wonderful, huge snags at the very top because it had been, you know, topped many years ago, and every year, between February and March they would come and perch up in that tree and this was their tree; we even saw two of them up there one day and got pictures of two of them sitting in this one perch tree. The old timers, like the um Welch and Johnson families who’ve lived here for many years, and the people on the Blue Lake side could look over and see it better than we could. Everyone would say, ‘Oh yeah, those eagles have been there for years, as long as I have.’ Well, they’ve been here for fifty and sixty, seventy years. So it was here. The wetland was here, the habitat was here, the creatures were here, and uh, we saw it disappear on paper and we saw it disappear on land. And uh, there’s a great sadness involved with that. So, well, I guess now we can just try something really outstanding [laughs],and go for it, I think it’s a quite an idea and there are some neighbors who are really… want to pursue this.
DS: Um… what [train whistle in background]
JG: There’s the train. That’s what I looked at for all those years before I started asking my question, ‘Why does it look like those RVs are so close to the train?’
DS: Do you feel like you’ve been effective as a citizen advocate?
JG: [Long sigh]. I would say eighty percent no, and twenty percent yes. The one thing, it was a great compromise, but the one thing that did come about as a result of this that the City of Fairview did put in place this buffer area that included Fairview Creek and buffer around the undeveloped portions of the lake at that time, which was all the eastern and southern shore, of thirty-five feet. But that’s only because the farmer that was here really was upset that night, they were originally going to put it at fifty feet, and he was very upset, he said, ��that’s a taking, you’re taking my farmland, I’ve lived here all these years.�� So they said oh, okay, so they lowered it to thirty-five feet. And then for little Osborne Creek, which was absolutely untouched till this last year, form the railroad to the lake it was, it was a jewel, you went in there and you just felt like you were in a different place. They only allowed twenty-five foot buffer for that and that’s because of all the development they knew was coming. And there’s industrial storage in that whole area, and the RV park was already in and they knew. See, they had the long range vision, they knew what was going to be here and they wanted to give development full advantage of as much land as they possibly could and…
DS: [They or You] were butting up against the Columbia River Scenic Area.
JG: Yeah, well, yeah. This was part of the original Columbia River Plan, I think they called it in the earlier days, yeah, and this was, in fact there was an ordinance in 1980 called Ordinance 234, Multnomah County 234 called Significant Environmental Concern and this land from northeast 223rd, south to the railroad track, all along the southern portion of the lake, all the way down, included the dam and even beyond the dam area, was considered, by ordinance – significant, environmental concern land and was to be carefully planned for any conflicts with wildlife, with habitat, and with fish.
DS: Didn’t you ask for a reevaluation of that at some point?
JG: Oh yes, at several points. And what we found out was the document that did this never even had a map made to go with it. And then the document never made it out of the office of Multnomah County…
DS: This was a draft copy wasn’t it?
JG: Uh, yeah, but there was a final. There was a final Ordinance 234 that was stamped, I’ve had many copies here. But it never made it out to the local cities of Gresham and Fairview. And what they did was they just came in in 1990 then and made their own maps of environmental concern which I thought was interesting phrasing, because they say they didn’t know anything about this other one, and they designated the water bodies themselves as significant environmental concern, supposedly to be protected, and some of this original flood area down here was also but in the meantime they shrunk that down to a lot smaller area so that they could put those homes in, and then now it’s just wrap around houses and, and there’s not nearly enough protected by ordinance.
DS: Is that the part that was lake, that was actually part of a lake, um, when you first came here?
JG: Yeah. See the way that there’s this little kind of finger island thingy, well that and the green areas behind there where it looks like it’s kind of mowed, that was all lake area and it was cattail, and so it was this giant marsh, and then when the drainage district changed this with the dredge spoils they kept putting it up and up and up, and they would dredge off and on through the years so they could build up that land high enough and then smooth it off and it would extend out into the lake. And so that’s, um…
DS: So that they could hold more water in the lake?
JG: Yeah, um hum.
DS: Um… can you tell me about your introduction to the Columbia Watershed Council? How you got involved with that.
JG: Yeah, well, I guess because we were sort of in tune with the area and we’d heard that there was this idea of forming a watershed council, and we thought, ��this sounds pretty interesting.�� So we wanted to be there from the very first stages and we just made it a point to participate and um. I’ve been there ever since, so, I guess it’s probably been I don’t know, seven or eight years now actually.
DS: And when did the Friends of Blue and Fairview Lake form?
JG: Um… there was an original forming quite a long time ago and it didn’t get quite off the ground and so it went dormant. And then when the contamination issue with the ground water and the plume with the TCE in it and all that came up, were learned there was a grant available through EPA called a Technical Assistance Grant that would come in and help local communities who drink the water be able to educate their community by publicizing some newsletters and we also, well we hired this wonderful panel from Portland State. It was a dream of one of our members to not just have one consultant, but have a panel of experts and so we had two civil engineers, and we had two geologists, and a toxicologist on our original panel and they would review all of our engineering reports, and there are many of them, they would review the ones in their professional area and then offer comments to DEQ in our behalf for their record of decision to put together this big cleanup plan because we didn’t want to be left out as a community, you know if the average citizen isn’t totally educated in engineering, and in geology, and in hydrology, and geotechnical things they can’t have a voice, and either you hire them privately out of your own pocket or you get a grant like this and have a panel interpret the language for you and put your desires of your community back to the agencies. And so we have a Web Site now and we have a complete library, at Portland Sate, of all the engineering reports; they pulled together everything for us, documented everything, and it’s all available in the engineering department for anyone to go and research that involves this entire area, and this area has been extremely well-studied from that viewpoint, not so much on the issues of wildlife and the loss of habitat, land use laws are real sticky and so, um, they tend, people don’t want to really deal with that quite as much, but underground you can because of the City of Portland situation, they’re very vulnerable and so are we and many, many experts have been hired over the years to study the contamination…
DS: The water supply.
JG: Right, because of the water supply. Does that answer your question [laugh]?
DS: Uh hum, oh yeah.
JG: OK.
DS: What do you find is the biggest obstacle to politics as a citizen?
JG: The fact that really the citizen is not allowed to participate to the fullest and I know that now only from personal experience. Um, I never would have believed that had I not gotten involved. Um, the statewide planning goal for the state of Oregon, number one goal is citizen involvement, and what we found was we were not welcomed in many meetings locally, because I guess we asked too many questions and we brought up issues that city governments didn’t want to have to address, we were sort of a bother to them, but we’re still asking questions and we’re still hoping and dreaming. But I think really we found that distressing, the fact that you’re asked to leave meetings in public even though we weren’t physically disruptive, sometimes I would just sit there and not say a word and I was told to leave. Um…
DS: In the City of Fairview?
JG: Uh hum. And then in other meetings where I knew there was going to be discussion about the development of one of these areas and its impact on wildlife and habitat, I was told if I came to the meeting that they would cancel the meeting… and I should have, you know I’m kind of a chicken in a way, I should have just quietly sat there ’til they disbanded the meeting, I did not attend that one, but there have three or four times that this has happened, and public testimony, we’re never that sure our testimony really makes it to the right people. We’ve entered many, many documents and in fact in the earlier days I had two neighbors who have oral testimony and, about the wetland areas right down here that have since all been changed and everything, and she went up to listen to the tape, they tape oral testimony, and to make a copy of it for herself and the tape had been erased, it was not there. And it’s just [short exasperated sigh], accumulation of these kinds of things and it’s distressing. But um, when you see the resource really being devastated and lost, and there’s sort of an attempt to maybe, you know, do a little bit here and a little bit there, plant some things, have the right kind of covert crossing down, that’s good but, but we’re gonna have to take a much larger community responsibility if we’re gonna see any sort of restoration, and some of the safety issues that are still here; it’s gonna take a large ground swell, and you know people get tired of doing this…
DS: Are you getting tired?
JG: Well, as long as my health is fine I’ll probably, I’ll never lose interest, and there are some other folks who will never really lose the interest because they know what’s at stake, they know this is such a valuable resource that as long as they’re upright, and mobile, and have a voice they’ll probably still speak. But it really is a losing battle because cities have their own plans and they have to work with big corporations, and they have to work with huge agencies and maybe if there are too many regulations that are going to come down it’s better that they hurry up and do it now before larger regulations come in and say ‘No you can’t develop here and you can’t do that;’ they don’t want that, of course, and once you’re a landowner that’s a real sticky situation so, the faster that they develop, form their viewpoint, it’s the better for them. That’s kind of the way, see we’re downhill here and we look out and up to all this happening; no one else sees it this way because we’re facing them and we’ve been here so long we know and understand the whole story. But…
DS: Are there a lot of people who’ve been in the neighborhood a long time who are involved in fighting the development?
JG: Well, really, some, uh, some yes and some no. Because we have a lot of people here whose activities and occupations are contracting and development, and just like any community, teachers, and professional people, and, and retired people, so it’s just a matter of where your heart is and where your money is invested; it really, communities have to grow and they do grow, so um, it would have taken probably buying lots of land and putting it into a land trust in order to really preserve and protect, and we were told that when we first started.
DS: Did you consider it?
JG: Um, we didn’t know where that kind of money would come from. I mean, obviously if you were going to buy one hundred acres of that land over there it was prohibitive, um, so it’s not possible. So we’re bit of a dreamers, that’s true.
DS: Were you active in the community before you started working on these kinds of issues?
JG: Not really. I had been on the local board a couple of times, uh, back in the seventies, but I still didn’t know anything about the word wetland [laughs], or any of this. No I was busy raising a family and also working part time. Uh, I had been a school teacher for, uh, seven years and then did seven years of substituting in my past. But my family was my main interest so, but once they were grow and kind of gone and you start looking around and thinking ‘Whoa [laughs], what’s going on here?’ that’s when you start to get interested, uh hum.
DS: So what do you think is the most critical issue in managing the Columbia Slough?
JG: Oh, probably cooperation. [Sigh]. Uh, and managing the Slough, I mean if we’re gonna try to do any restoration work it’s gonna cost money and there’s so many businesses and corporations, and huge landowners up and down the Slough, plus lots of little ones like we are, but we have to have a big goal and we have to have a big dream and it has to be such a good one everyone’s willing to cooperate. Um, there’s a certain amount of it now, of course, that’s mandated, that the City of Portland has to start cleaning up through, and DEQ and all that, but I think really the fish are probably the only. . .
[End Side B, Tape 1 of 1, end interview]
