Tim Hayford was the manager of the Multnomah County Drainage District from 1980-1999. Mr. Hayford was the fourth manager since the conception of the drainage district. He played a key role in issues related to the slough, including urban renewal and the development of the Columbia South Shore area.

Oral History

Narrator: Tim Hayford
Interviewer: Jakob Lahmers
Date: August 14, 2000
Place: Wilsonville, Oregon

Edited by Donna Sinclair

[Begin Side A, Tape 1 of 2]

JL: This is Jakob Lahmers at Portland State University. The project is Oral Histories of the Columbia Slough. The narrator is Tim Hayford, former manager of the Multnomah Drainage District. This interview is taking place at Tim Hayford’s home in Wilsonville,Oregon, on Monday August 14, 2000. Can I get your name?

TH: Tim Hayford

JL: And your date of birth?

TH: August eighteenth, nineteen fifty-five.

JL: And your place of birth?

TH: Portland, Oregon.

JL: When did you start at the Multnomah Drainage District?

TH: I started on June 13, 1980 working for the drainage districts.

JL: What area is encompassed by the drainage district?

TH: The drainage districts are four consecutive drainage districts. Basically their borders are; on the north side of the Columbia River levy system they extend as far east as the Sandy river, as far west as what we refer to as the Portland Railroad Highway. Their southern boundary is the Columbia Slough itself and it also takes in pretty much Columbia Boulevard. Sandy Boulevard basically forms the other natural high spot for a levy system. It encompasses about fifteen square miles of land. It was primarily farm land for many a year.

JL: Can you describe the landscape? How it’s changed since you’ve started there?

TH: What I’ll do is give you a little history background on what actually caused the drainage districts and we can kind of circumvent around to it. I think it’s important that people understand what it was originally. The drainage districts were primarily the number one thing that changed the face of the Columbia Slough forever.

When I talk about the Columbia Slough, there’s really two halves. One is a contained area that is basically upstream of about northeast thirteenth. There’s a cross levy — Riverside Golf Course is on one side, Columbia Edgewater on the other side. But what I refer to as the Upper Columbia Slough is all contained within a levy system. The lower Columbia Slough, from approximately northeast thirteenth down to the mouth where it interjects into the Willamette River and the Columbia River, constitutes the Lower Columbia Slough and is actually affected by the waters of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. In other words it’s tidal. So when the Columbia River comes up high that part of the Columbia Slough also will. The upper slough is all contained by pumping stations and maintains a fairly static water surface elevation. That covers a little bit of the background of the areas and a little bit of a difference of when we talk about the Columbia Slough.

Primarily I’ll now kind of focus on the drainage district. The four drainage districts were formed in the early 1900s right around 1917. The area prior to that time was agricultural property. You have to remember that the Columbia River in the early 1900s and prior to [that time] was pretty much a natural body of water. No dam control on it whatsoever. It fluctuated greatly, and what was ocurring in the early 1900s is settlers were trying to develop that property for farming uses. As a result there’s only a limited amount of production that could be obtained off the property because it usually flooded on an annual basis. They couldn’t get in to do anything with the fields until later in the season — June, July — to actually start cultivating planting crops. And so it was a very short growing season.

What was known back in the early 1900s as a “swampbusters act” [Federal Reclamation Act �� available on CCRH Web Site] enacted by Congress basically took what they kind of referred to as swamp/un-usable land, re-claim it, and put it to a positive, useful purpose. This is also right around the times of World War I when agriculture was a primary concern. The population was growing considerably, thus the purpose of the “swampbusters act” was to make that property useful, beneficial. Grow crops on it.

So in 1917 the property owners that encompassed the four drainage districts got together. Property owners got together and in cooperation with the federal government voted to form drainage districts under Oregon Statute ORS 547, which basically makes the property eligible to receive federal grants to build levies/dikes along the Columbia River System, and also cross-dikes and pumping stations to keep the water out. So that was the start of the change of the Columbia Slough. Before that, basically the slough was very natural. If you go over towards the areas of Smith and Bybee lake, it gives you a good idea of what a lot of the old drainage districts really looked like. A lot of very large lakes.

One thing I should note that would be very useful to obtain in doing this whole thing is in 1917 there was a hand-drawn map that was composed as part of their reclamation act, which really showed the topography of the area prior to any of the levy systems being built [This map is available in the Columbia Slough Web Site Map Archives]. The Multnomah Drainage District has a copy of that, and I do believe Susan Barthel with BES also had acess to that map.

When you really look at it and say, “What did the Columbia Slough look like?” [You find it] very changed from what it is today. If you look at the areas of Smith and Bybee on aerials, and you look back into the other parts of the drainage district you can see where a lot of that area was really a lot of large large lakes.

The area where the Portland Airport is built today was once known as Switzler lake. It was basically a two-thousand acre lake, Smith and Bybee all over again. The same thing for a whole lot of the area all the way to the Sandy River — those were a lot of lake areas. Look at the topography out there — it’s flat, very little fall on anything. So you can imagine where you ended up with the annual innundation by the river formed big lakes. It’s very changed and also there was a lot of cottonwood so it was very much similar to Smith and Bybee Lakes. With the advent of the drainage districts, building the levies and the pump stations, the farmers basically dried the land up. A very fertile land. Some of the most fertile land composition around. Very productive for growing crops.

The Sauvie silt was very much like what’s now Sauvie Island. It’s a very large agricultural area, it’s very fertile. That’s what this area was — kind of a comparison right there. What happened was the farmers started clearing the fields, and as you build pump stations the drainage districts built ditches. They connected parts of the Columbia Slough together where they were kind of sectioned off and weren’t really congruent. They’d combine those together, and also other places that were fairly well overgrown and water couldn’t flow through there — you’ve got a pump station now.

How you create a flow is by turning on the pumps. They need to get the water to the pumps so they actually cleared the banks, cleared out the vegetation and they removed the debris out of the waterways and interconnected them all; so you had a drainage system that would work efficiently. All that work was done by hand and also with machines (drag lines, work from the top of the bank). One way you could say it is they de-neutered or took away as much coverage of the Columbia Slough as possible in order to facilitate the reclamation act. That’s kind of what transpired in that area in the years between 1919 was when the levies were finished. It was completely closed off from the Columbia River through pretty much the Vanport Flood days. Brings you up to 1948. That was kind of the pace of what was happening. Clearing, draining, focus on agricultural.

I guess I should step back a little bit before I get into Vanport. Back in the ��30s the Port of Portland used to have their airport down by Swan Island. Back right in through here (pointing to map). On the Willamette River. Back in the ��30s, the Port decided that it would eventually need to expand. At that time they started looking into available property.

Also, the Port of Portland is very unique, and I shouldn’t speak for the port. They’ll have representatives speaking to it, but the Port of Portland was very unique in that the Port owns an international airport as well as maintains shipping lanes by dredging, and ports. So you’ve got an airport and also a maritime port. Very unique when you think of it. Most port authorities deal with maritime, not airports. Well this is a very unique situation. The Port of Portland was dredging the Willamette River and dredging the Columbia River for navigation needs. So they looked at available property and they moved out to what we now refer to as the south shore area, or specifically the area between northeast thirteenth upstream to about what is now I-205. It’s about northeast 96th. That was what I referred to before as Switzler Lake and a large array of different lakes. The port decided that that would suffice for their future growth needs and purchased the properties. So that’s one big change — the port decided that they were going to build an airport out there.

We then jump up into 1948 and Vanport was where things really started to change. Not much development out in any of the drainage districts prior to that time. Vanport again was a quick-built city — it was low-cost housing for ship workers. The ship yards were right down in Swan Island, fairly close, and it was available property, flat, easy to develop. The city of Vanport was only alive for I think eight years, if that. I forget when Henry Kaiser first started building Vanport, but I do believe it was only for about six to eight years in existence.

When Vanport did flood was on Memorial Day Weekend 1948. We’re talking about an area over by Portland International Raceway, the Fairgrounds, what was the Multnomah County Fairgrounds and the Expo Center. But what happened was right at this spot right here (points to map), the levy breached. In 1948 the Columbia River and the Willamette Rivers rose very quickly. They were up for a two week period, and again very little dam control in the system. What happened was the water came way up, then the water subsided for about a week and a half and then all of a sudden on Memorial Day Weekend, the water came back up.

The levies themselves were not built out of the most stable materials, and they were not in the extent of what you look at when you drive along marine drive now and you’re sitting on top of the levy. It’s a very sizeable levy. Back in 1948, those levies were not of that stature. Marine Drive was not on there. It was called Levy Drive prior to 1948. What happened down in this area is that the water receded and then when it came back up the ground was already super saturated, and the water started to naturally flow out, and it started quickening.

When the water came back up it formed a very weak spot. The levy collapsed at that spot which flooded what we refer to as the Heron Lakes Golf Course, Portland International Airport. It also breached the levy over here into the Portland Meadows area, Peninsula drainage District Number Two. The first part of the innundation of Vanport basically took from the Portland Railroad up to what we refer to as the Peninsula Drainage Canal. Two days after that event, the levy system for the Multnomah Drainage District at the pump station — the pump station was an early design pump station that wasn’t built on top a pile — it was actually a floating slab built into the side of the levy. What happened is it finally gave in, filled to the side, and breached and then flooded an additional eighty-five hundred acres all the way up to Blue Lake and Fairview Lake.

So that really, Sandy Drainage District, again the four drainage districts, Peninsula Drainage District Number One, Peninsula Drainage District Number Two, Multnomah Drainage District and Sandy Drainage District. Of those, the Sandy Drainage District was the only drainage district not to flood. The reason was is that along with building ships, Kaiser built Vanport, but he also needed aluminum. Kaiser Aluminum, which we now refer to as Reynolds Aluminum was built back in the ��30s to produce metal for production. As a result of building that large of a facility out there, they upgraded the levy system surrounding the Sandy Drainage District with their own money. Sandy Drainage District was the only district that did not fail. It saved millions and millions of dollars so it was money well spent. But it kind of brings you up to Vanport.

At Vanport it pretty much took out everything. And as a result after Vanport it was a good eight to ten weeks for the water to actually subside through there because of the amount of debris blocking the channels. It would flood back into there just before they could actually get things drained out. A lot of thought was given about what to do — should we really rebuild this area? Or, should we keep it like it was? Federal money was available because it was a natural disaster and so it was decided with Federal funds to come in and re-build these areas back.

If you’re going to spend federal money, it’s just like the good old Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers is very different today than what it was then. The Corps used to basically deal with concrete structures, the bigger the better, that type of thing. Well the Corps has definitely changed their identity in that they look at things both from a structural standpoint as well as an environmental standpoint. If 1948 was today, I think there’d be a question whether or not to rebuild the areas if they weren’t developed. If they were fairly natural areas, I think you’d really get to a question if that money is worth being spent, or should it be put back into a natural state.

But the decision was made, and thus the rebuilding of all of the majority of the levy systems through there started. Along with federal, there was private money to rebuild them to their present stature. Which is much taller and much wider than what was experienced in 1948. That rebuilding took a number of years. It didn’t happen overnight, but it was pretty much there — we’re saying okay that’s it.

Again we go back to the Port of Portland as probably being the primary influence in that area, because the port said–hey, if we’re going to have an airport — we’re back in the -60s, the port making decisions and saying okay, gee we went through one flood we don’t want to do that again, and is this going to be our final resting place for an airport? And now we’re talking about international airport. So if you’re going to put money in to being an international airport, you pretty much put in the infrastructure so it doesn’t flood again. The ��60s was the major turning point where additional funding was brought in partially by the port and again by the federal government, to really put money in there and sustain those structures so that they can withstand flood amounts. And with that, the port basically made their stance and started building and expanding rather quickly. Most of that area remained that way.

There was some development out in the other drainage districts, most of that small, but a lot of the development that was there really was still agricultural based until the 1980s. In the 1980s, again, the City of Portland really only came up to the Columbia Boulevard area. They did not extend out to Marine Drive. The City of Portland annexed the Port of Portland or annexed the properties encompassing the airport. I do believe that was back in 1982 or somewhere around ��82 or ��84. Also with the Portland Development Commission, they started an urban renewal area to start annexing in the rest of the properties within the drainage districts up to as far east as 185th to encompass those within the City of Portland’s boundaries. The purpose of forming an urban renewal area was to make the property more beneficial, and at that time it was believed that the best use of that property was for commercial industrial uses, which is really what you see with the Airport Way area today.

It kind of gives you a very broad overview of some of the main things that have happened. That’s just from a general land use standpoint. There’s been a lot of changes that have ocurred, but that kind of brings you up to where things are back to about when I started in 1980.

I think some of the things that really start you saying, “Okay well, we understand the need to develop property and that type of thing, but you really also need to start looking at what changes are brought to the environment, to water quality, to how you manage a system.” And I think that probably the main concern is the water quality in the Columbia Slough. You can put in all sorts of restrictions on storm drainage. Through the ��80s and ��90s we went through an awful lot of review, saying okay, stormwater historically has jumped right to the stream. That’s probably not the best thing you can do because there’s all sorts of contaminants in that drainage way.

The Columbia Slough itself is unique in that it is pumped, so it’s a managed system. It flows only as fast as you can pump it. For the most part the upper slough. We found out a lot through studying the Tualatin River Basin. When you look at the contaminants a concern is hydrogen, DO levels, higher phosphorus levels, and a lot of that has to occur with slow, stagnant moving waterways. That’s the Columbia Slough.

One of the things as you go back in history with the Columbia Slough, and this actually goes back to 1921, the City of Portland did not annex the properties within there, but they had a series of combined sewer overflows which dumped directly in. They’ve got a sanitary sewer and a storm sewer using the same pipe is what it is. When it rains hard what happens is that storm sewer, that main sanitary line, is not large enough to hold both the storm and the sanitary, and it overflows, and it overflowed down into the Columbia Slough in a number of places. . . That was the most effective way, and it was a very common engineering practice at that time. Most cities in an area, if it worked, they put in combined systems. Very cost effective. They only had to build plants so big, they didn’t have to handle everything. So you ended up with raw sewage discharging into the Columbia Slough. That was all in the Lower Columbia Slough.

The City of Portland in 1921 entered into an agreement with Multnomah Drainage District and Peninsula Drainage District #2, and they actually excavated what is known as the Peninsula Drainage Canal. They opened it up at that time. This was open to the Columbia River and then all the way down and through here. The reason was just to bring flow from the Columbia River down and through here and flush it back out into the Willamette River when you had high water events. Actually as a theory it worked really well. It did help the Lower Columbia Slough, it did help with the combined sewer overflow problem and again the theory was “dilution is the solution for pollution.” In other words, if you’ve got a pollutant, flush it down somewhere else, get rid of it. They didn’t deal with it like we look at it now. They just figured, fine it’s gonna go to the ocean and it’s not our problem, it’s somebody else’s. However, as a result of the problems with flooding, the Peninsula Drainage Canal was plugged in 1962 with federal funding as well as the Port of Portland. Also a cross-levy was built back down through here. So that just kind of isolated this whole body of water.

. . . About northeast 13th at the location of the Multnomah Drainage Districts pumping stations. So we’ve got pumping stations here. They’re going here and here, so it’s blocked here and it’s blocked here. So water quality has always been a concern, we all know. One you’ve got an agricultural base. Chemicals were developed and tried and used. They were all legal when they were used but, you know, were they safe? We’re still finding out today that they’re still taking chemicals off the market. Dursban, used to use it and put it on your lawn to control insects. You can’t buy it anymore. It was just pulled off by the EPA. It’s just a matter of us becoming smarter so to speak, and being more careful about what we’re using and what the long term effects are. Naturally you end up with an awful lot of surface contaminants that were used from agricultural practices that are going to eventually leach into the water.

The other unique thing is that the Multnomah Drainage Districts in particular. Actually this map will show it. What we’re looking at is the drainage district back in through here, but this whole area, and I’m referring to the area of Gresham, Rockwood, Wilkes, the areas basically from about Stark Street north, all naturally drained into this flatland, this bottom land before the levies were built. So you not only have what would have been here from agriculture, but also from all of the development that occurred.

This area developed rather quickly. All of their discharge basically was straight into the pipe and down it goes. The same idea with opening up the channel — flush it somewhere else, someone else’s problem. You’ve got all this area, the tributary area up and through here which discharged to the Columbia Slough. So when you talk about pollutant loadings it’s not just from this property. It’s also from basically the whole watershed. So when you try and pinpoint pollutants as a concern you really have to look at the whole gambit. You can’t just look at agricultural sources, you have to look at all sources. The water quality really never was a concern, there was nothing that we really looked at. In fact you look at the development and what happened during the farming years and also the early ��80s in conjunction with the slough. I used to refer to it this way — Gee, welcome into my house but don’t look in my garage okay? It’s like the back door effect. You know a lot of people say my front door looks good, don’t look in the back, don’t look in the garage because it’s trashy, it’s ugly. Everybody really kind of viewed the Columbia Slough as a nuisance and a problem versus the amenity that it could be.

Thus a lot of the filling that occurred. There were a lot of waterways that were filled. A lot of dredging that occurred. A lot of the legal filling — what was buried in those — who knows? Are they still there? Probably. You have a very high water table. You dig down in the Columbia Southshore area, you only have to dig down four or five feet and you’ve got water. It’s a very shallow ground surfacewater table. So the contaminants, how far are they going to go? You’ve got water there, you’ve got the tendency that it can spread very easily all over. Water quality in general with the Columbia Slough with the idea of gee, let’s fill it in, or the back door approach was — you throw all your crap out the back door — excuse my language, but it’s just kind of the attitude many people have. And that attitude still continues partially today, but it’s changed considerably since that time. It’s just the practice that was happening there. Also, with the water quality the drainage district maintained the waterways, they also maintained the sloughs.

How they would maintain the sloughs was still from the top of the bank as they did years and years ago. You would remove the vegetation. So you’re removing the screening or that natural buffer that was there. Natural shade, natural everything. You’re basically coming up with a stark-naked bank. So when you started looking at it, and you disturb that natural growth, what comes in but predatory species. Himalayan blackberries. When you look out in certain parts of the slough, all you see is a sea of blackberries. Those were either hand dug or dug mechanically by the drainage district or the vegetation was removed to facilitate maintenance. So you’ve really got a menagerie. Once you pull off that canopy cover, there is hot water. During the summer it used to be used primarily for irrigation. You’d kind of take that water, put it back on the land and replenish. That created a very very stagnant situation. There’s a certain amount of groundwater that upwells into the Columbia Slough. But as you are using that, they used to block it off and basically raise that water, and it became a very stagnant, ugly smelly waterway.

JL: What years were they using that for irrigation?

TH: Basically from 1920. It’s still being used for irrigation today but as a main source of irrigation, it was from the 1920s through the early ��80s. Then as the land developed, that need subsided. But primarily up until 1984/85. Still again a certain amount is still being used for irrigation but that must be down to probably less than a thousand acres out of a total of twenty thousand acres.

So when you really look at water quality, what’s been dumped there, what’s been dumped from up above, what’s coming in through the groundwater and that contamination, and what do you do about it? You know that’s one of the biggest questions I think we addressed is saying, well you can do two things. One is you can stop it where you can as much as possible, and that’s the source control. The other is the long term — what do you do with what’s already been deposited there? That becomes a very very costly endeavor. The other one that you look at with water quality is that the City of Portland annexed the properties in the early ��80s, built their back up well supply system. Their Bull-Run back-up supply system and a series of wells. They’re deep wells into the second and third aquifer, but out in that specific area. They found found hits of contamination. Some of that, I think a small percentage of it, could be affiliated with surface, the surrounding lands. A lot of it actually goes back down because they are so deep, into groundwater contamination that was from up in the tributary area. That changed. Now you’ve got to start looking at putting in a well that we’re going to use for a backup water supply for a major metropolitan area. You start looking at land use, you’ve got the property zone.

[End Side A, Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2]

Groundwater that’s historically been discharged into sumps and also directly discharged from the tributary areas and then you’ve got sediment contamination. So you really have a real mix of problems with “doubling on top of it” land use. But you also had the advantage of looking and saying how do we regulate land use? And source control to limit what’s there today, what’s being discharged in the future, and then going back and saying now what do you do to remedy what’s happened in the past? There was a very extensive sediment analysis being done which was real interesting but you really get to the question of saying — is it a problem? And is it spreading? And what can you do about it? If you start dredging all of the Columbia Slough, you’ve got an extensive waterway out there of twenty five miles worth of drainages. What do you do with the material? How do you get it out of there without again going back and destroying all of the vegetation on the banks?

One of the things they ended up doing on the Tualatin River, which we looked at, was during the summertime one stretch of the Tualatin River needed dredging. It had contaminants, and they actually filled the waterway in — taking dumptrucks gravel and dirt — they filled the middle of the Tualatin River in, then they came back and they excavated all of it back out. Talk about spending some money! That doesn’t come cheap and wasn’t necessary. The real concern is how harmful is the sediment? How different is it than other parts? We don’t live in a clean world anymore. We are mankind and we created what we’re living in. We’re understanding it but the real question is — is it different here in the Columbia Slough, the sediment you’re seeing, than what you’re seeing in sediments in the Columbia River? The Sandy River? Other areas that you look at? What we’ve found was — no, not that much difference. There could have been billions of dollars spent on the Columbia Slough on sediment remediation. I’m not sure where that project is today. I’d be interested to find out, but the reality is that we took background samples of other areas, other sloughs, other drainages that are very slow moving like this, in non-developed areas, and guess what? Sediment samples were very close to those background samples. So how far do you go? You can study anything for a long time but the reality is, how do you clean it up? I mean it’s going to take money to clean it up, it takes time.

I still think that that’s probably where everybody is on the Columbia Sough. What do you do with it? Do you try and contain it? Pretty hard to do. Do you try and remove it? What’s the good and bad? How much environmental damage do you do in the process of removing it etcetera. Of course there are “hot spots” so to speak, in the slough. Those are pretty much identified. Those can pretty much be searched back to specific uses too. Areas around there of historic old uses.

JL: What would some of those “hot spots” be?

TH: I do believe there are some areas, what was referred to as (laughing) — There was a guy who took in oil and he dug a hole on his property and again these soils are sauvie silts. They can be real clay. He dug a hole in his property and he dumped oil in his property and then he would skim it and try and re-use it as an oil recycling place. This was right on the Columbia Slough. Well we all know oil has got what in it? You’ve got motor oil, you’ve got chrome, it’s a hydrocarbon, it’s got everything you can imagine in it, so yeah that was one of them. That’s a well known one off of 47th and now what do you try and do? It’s been filled in years ago, but it’s still leaching into the Columbia Slough. There are other ones over by the Air National Guard Base which are documented that they’re taking care of and basically removing the material. The ones up in the area of Gresham where we end up with the TCE contamination, Boeing,

JL: What’s TCE?

TH: Tri-chloryletheline. It was used extensively in the ��60s and ��70s for a solvent. Cleaning metal, cleaning automotive parts, you got something greasy? TCE was a very effective (solvent). Boeing used it for cleaning metal prior to fabrication. It was very effective. They just dumped it down the pipe. In that area in particular it went into sumps. Sumps were very gravelly. You dig a hole and you can pour a lot of water into it and it doesn’t ever really seem to come back up. Well it does come back up, down and through here. It also got into that TCE is heavier than water. What happened is that it’s heavier than water and it went down and actually has contaminated some of those deeper aquifers where the well supplies are pulling their water from. When I left in 1999, I know Boeing had spent upwards of sixteen to twenty million dollars putting in stripping towers, pumping the water around where that contamination was into basically charcoal filter stripping towers and cleaning it up that way. Very extensive. Can you ever stop it? Boy you know, I don’t know. That’s one we’ll probably struggle with for a long time.

JL: You were talking about the Air Guard being another hot spot around there. What kind of chemicals were from there?

TH: You know I’m not real sure which ones really. I know they had some munition storage areas and some disposal areas from cleaning, fabrication, parts and that. My guess it that you would probably see some of the solvent types in through there, plus oil. I remember working out and through those areas and sometimes you can see oil. We were cleaning out the sloughs and you’d disturb the side soils and basically you’d see oil plumes starting out and through there. But that’s what used to be done years ago. People threw it out there and said there you go. Contamination of abandoned barrels of stuff. Contamination from what was stored in the city of Vanport, in this whole area, that was stored in barrels or open barrels that spilled when you inundated this land. When you had the flood it wasn’t going out, it pushed back into these dry lands and then it just very slowly worked its way out. You really kind of go back and you say gee how far do you go with that?

The forces that were put to work, the smartest ones were to stop it at the source.

That’s what you can do through land use. That’s what you can do through permitting. Let’s do that and focus on that that you’re gonna get the biggest bang for your buck. The other ones I still think are a long time coming on how you treat it, how you come up with a cure.

JL: How has the district changed since from the time you started until you left?

TH: When I started in 1980 it was primarily almost all agricultural properties except for some major developments. Reynolds aluminum, the Port of Portland, The area over in Peninsula Drainage District #2, which had basically the horse track. Those were primarily the major developments there. There were some other spotty developments, but when I started back in 1980, actually the Glen Jackson Bridge — I do believe started construction in 1978. What you really look at is when you’ve got I-205, I-84, a major east/west railspur, and the advent of the urban renewal project, the change that I saw was basically and kind of my job that I think I completed was to make sure that the infrastructure — in our case the flood control infrastructure — was in place to accomodate that development.

When I started back in 1980 it was primarily all agricultural property. The drainage district had one real focus and that was they’d set out and they’d maintain certain parts of the ditches with a drag line from the top and they’d clean certain areas and operate the pump stations and do some levy maintenance. It was a very low-profile entity. When I first started with the drainage district there were four employees. Basically when you say four employees, there were four employees that covered an area of about twelve-thousand acres. It gives you an idea of how much attention was given to that public works entity. With four people you can’t get a whole heck of a lot done. So it kind of gives you an idea that there was only so much that was really done.

However, with development it became a more impervious area, faster run-off, a more critical need to maintain those facilities in top-notch running condition so that if you do have an event you’re not worried about if you’ll lose out. When you have a natural event, what happens? Who knows? Talk to the big guy upstairs because he’s gonna throw as many curve balls as he can as long as he’s on the mound you know? So you end up with an area that if it’s agricultural, how much damage is done if it’s flooded? Not too much. It can be re-claimed fairly inexpensively. But when you throw out international airports, you throw out industrial-commercial private and public funds, and developments that have interest there, you change the whole story and you really focus on how do you meet the demands for the future build in the area? You can only build out so much. You’ve only got so much land so you can calculate these things. How do you get them done? How do you pay for them? How do you build and maintain a system with environmental concerns?

Let’s jump back to 1964 and you’re a property owner that just bought 150 acres and you look at it and say, “Yeah, I’m just on the east side of the airport, I know this thing��s going to be industrial commercial someday because the airport’s there. Gee, why don’t we take these ditches and pipe ’em? It gets rid of them you know? You can clean that system out that way. Or else take ’em and concrete line them.”

A lot of peoples’ vision was hey, it’s a ditch and you want to move water, how do they do it in L.A.? You’ve got that system that gets water in there in a hurry, gets the water out of there in a hurry. A lot of people say, “Gee why didn’t we do that with the Columbia Slough?” A lot of problems with that, but that’s kind of the mentality you dealt with and that’s what everybody kind of said. Well if you can’t do it that way, then let’s go ahead and clean them so that they’re spic and span on the sides and we can move water through there as effectively as possible. But when you look at it from an environmental standpoint, you realize that that’s not possible, it’s not feasible at all. So some of the biggest challenges that I looked at were, how do you maintain the system, how do you provide the infrastructure. The pump stations, reinforcing the levies, maintaining the waterways so that you can get the water as people discharge to it, making sure that you can move the water through the system to get to larger pump stations, and how do you do it in an environmental fashion? That was probably my largest concern, paying for the infrastructure through bond measures, working land use. You have to work one on one with the land use, with the planning bureaus, and it’s not just City of Portland, but you’ve got Gresham, Troutdale, Fairview, Wood Village, Multnomah County, and the property owners. You do work for property owners still. How do you maintain those and pay for them and how do you still meet your environmental concerns?

I think that we started looking at things very differently and saying as far as maintaining the waterways from the top of banks from a land use point of view, once a building is built and they have to have a fifty foot setback, you really don’t want large pieces of equipment in there disturbing that area. One, fifty feet’s not very much land, not very much room, and it also whatever’s there for landscape or whatever you’re going to trash. It’s also going to take out all of the trees, how do you get those out of there? So it became more of a win/lose situation if you came in there to do maintenance in order to move water and you went in and stripped everything off of there. One, it’s very costly to remove the material, cause it all had to be hauled out. Previously you sidecasted onto the farmers field and you came back the next spring, dozed it into his property, he tilled it in and said thanks for the fresh fertilizer! It’s very fertile stuff. You can’t do that anymore, you’re gonna haul it out of there. So then you’re building roads on top of the top of the banks and you’ve stripped off all of the vegetation, you also come up with the question of gee, did I create a soft spot? Did I create a slip zone? I took off the natural vegetation to hold it, and do I create something that’s going to be prone to liability that’s going to slip off in the next winter storms?

So we started looking at those things and said gee, what we should do is look at putting our maintenance systems into the waterway. Small barges, accommodations. Remove culverts, put in bridges. Build offload points in certain parts of the slough that could coincide also as access points for recreation. We would have to close those periodically just to barge the material out and through there but you’re not removing the vegetation off the shores. You may be trimming some of it and grinding it, but you’re not removing trees so you’re not dealing with the stability issue. You are removing the sediments. It’s a slower process, but once you barge them to an offload area, they’ve already pretty much de-watered/decanted, and you can handle that material and haul it somewhere. If you’re going to go ahead and do it from the top of the bank, you have those problems regardless, but you’re building roads instead of building something to float, and you still end up with the long term project of where are you going to haul it to? It really became, we focused our maintenance efforts on changing over to a water borne form of maintenance and pretty much got it implemented. Still there’s a lot of problems with it, but as the area grows it seems the only natural solution. Again, how do you accomodate economic growth, development, and the environment at the same time? Those were really the main changes I saw.

I haven’t really been out in that area — every year you go out there and it changes considerably. I mean when I first started in 1980 I could go out there and talk to, there were, everybody I drove down somebody’s field you could sit there and talk to the farmer because you knew him. The farmers owned hundreds of acres at a time and there was a handful of them that you knew. You go out there today and it’s all of a sudden you see new buildings so it’s you know, typical development. (pause) Where do we go? (laughs)

JL: (laughing) Let’s get to the Glen Jackson Bridge, environmental impact

TH: When you look at, and again I was kind of hitting on it, but when you look at the transportation modes and when Glen Jackson Bridge was built, there’s a lot of filling involved with the Glen Jackson Bridge just because they needed to elevate that waterway up and above the surrounding land. So of course there was some filling in there, some filling in of some waterways.

JL: So when you’re referring to filling are you referring to the slough and the wetland areas or actually the river?

TH: Right. Actually into the slough and wetlands areas. In certain areas they had, again it’s built with federal funds, ODOT being the manager of that. When you look at what–I mean building a major freeway is not an easy task. What’s involved and through there. When you look at what they did with the I-205/Glen Jackson Freeway, they did fill in some waterways and some wetlands. They changed some of the water courses. Flow was actually severed to where now it was forced to go upstream rather than downstream.

But all in all one of the major things that was looked at–in fact when I first got there some of the things that I finally realized where they were coming from. You’ve got I-205 in through here, where’s it going to dump it’s water? At one time it was proposed to dump all of the water from the I-205 into the Columbia Slough. There’s still a certain amount of water that flows from I-205 into the Columbia Slough. Not very much. Actually I think there’s documented ODOT on the MPEDS permits, I think there’s only about two or three discharge points from I-205 into the Columbia Slough. What they did was they constructed in the bike path that is associated with I-205. What that bike path is — underneath is large concrete tubes that’s a flume that discharges to the Columbia River. Now I mean these flumes are, what are they? five feet high and they are ten feet long rectangles. When it does rain hard basically those don’t run full but they do sure shoot out a lot of water that could have gone down into the drainage district, and associated contaminants. But again I-205 was being built in the 80s so they did have a different type of sump system for the catchbasins etcetera. The main thing that you bring in with I-205 was you brought a way to, the biggest thing is you’ve brought in that transportation node to those properties which brought people, development, etcetera. You’ve got I-84, I-205, I-5 and a rail corridor and an airport. You’ve got the major transportation hubs of the City of Portland out in the South Shore area. So it’s just not the Glen Jackson Bridge itself, but it’s just that finally the awareness of the other way through rather than just I-5 that opens up those other areas. Actually the Glen Jackson Bridge was kind of fun to watch being built but that’s a sideline! (laughs) That was a sideline.

JL: Did that bridge itself ,when they actually got it going, did that allow for more industry? Or was the industry already coming?

TH: The industry was coming, but an interesting question, and you can sit and kind of say well, what did it do? Some industry was already there. With the advent of I-205, and being able to get in there you had to accomodate truck traffic. Which meant that you had to build Airport Way. You talk about milestones, Airport Way itself, there were wetlands that were filled in with Airport Way just because it was also dredged in material. But you build the arterials in through there with I-205 you’ve got a lot of truck traffic so you built an arterial to accomodate truck traffic. The area already had some industrial, some small plots, and I would say that would be what I would refer to as “dirty industrial.” More of the small guy, not saying anything, but it’s the small guy, small production, he’s going to try and get away with everything he can. Maybe it’s out of not knowing exactly what’s there, or just because he’s a small guy and nobody pays attention. So actually with the small industrial developments you have more contamination than the large ones because they’re easier to regulate. If you hadn’t have had I-205, my belief, you can kinda say how’s that work out? You might have had more pollution because you’d end up with smaller less profile companies, less money to where if you bring it in with I-205 and the large Airport Way, you have to accomodate truck traffic, you have to build the infrastructure to it. Large available parcels that went in large parcels rather than an acre here and an acre there.

But my experiences were that we actually found more contamination from the smaller one-guy shows, one person shows, versus the larger. So it’s kind of hard to say which way — Glen Jackson and I-205 and also Airport Way. How those differ if you didn’t build them. It may have been worse. Now the area wouldn’t have developed as quickly as it’s developed. That area in twenty years, actually it’s less than twenty years. It didn’t really start developing until about 1988 — after all of the infrastructure was in place. In twelve years that area has definitely just boomed. It took awhile to get out of the 1980s depression/early 80s depression to get the economy moving again, urban renewal. That’s another story (laughs) So, those things can throw a different twist on it, if they weren’t built how would it look? I’ll betcha it would look a lot worse than what you’re seeing. It depends on what looks good to people and what looks bad, but yeah, it would be more uncontrolled development. A real headache as far as environmental concerns, land use concerns.

JL: You were talking about the expansion of Airport Way. I know there’s been a lot of expansions as far as the airport. There’s a big one on 60th I believe, and they’ve been continually expanding it. I guess, what other types of impacts have there been from the airport expansion? Other than the Airport Way. Are there things relating directly to the slough and the drainage district?

TH: Yeah, I think so. One report I read looked at the future expansion of the Portland International Airport, and this was almost a type of Buck Rogers type of approach, but you always come into question saying how does the Port of Portland own Government Island? This whole being Government Island is owned by the Port of Portland. Why does the Port of Portland own Government Island? Well, at one time when they were talking about making this an international airport they were also saying what does international mean? Again, going back to this kind of, I wish I could find this, somebody has seen it before. But at one point the Port of Portland looked at saying gee, we may need to expand our runways so that we can land rocket ships so to speak, you know? Coming in? So one of the reasons they did was that they at one time looked at connecting Government Island to the mainland. By dredging in the property in through here and expanding their runways out onto Government Island.

So you look at the Port. The Port’s probably the single greatest influence on that whole area — good, bad, indifferent — the City of Portland’s good, bad, indifferent. We’re in a metropolitan area. The port has specific challenges. They are serving a need. . . and a lot of people like to try and pinpoint the Port of Portland. I worked extensively with the port and I found them in most cases very aware of all parameters. Environmental, economic. Sure there’s a lot of short-sightedness that occurred over the years, but in the long run I think they tried to look at the whole picture too, saying — what’s what here? They’ve got a large challenge on their concerns with contamination of the Columbia Slough. Sedimentation, some of that you know, but also with de-icing programs.

How do you treat that? Their question is, do you shut down an airport because you have to de-ice airplanes? It’s an international airport. That’s not an alternative. You start looking at the others. Very large challenge. . . you look at your points of discharge, you try and pick it up at the source. De-icing used to go on with no checks and balances whatsoever. The pilot��s eventually the one who determines whether or not his plane gets de-iced. It’s his call. It’s his liability. It’s in his hands — he’s the one flying you. It’s the same as you having a passenger in your car. You’re responsibility is to make sure they put on a seat belt, and to make sure you’re car’s safe to drive. Same with a pilot, so he’s the one who actually controls the de-icing. Years ago it used to be better safe than sorry. Pilots say I’m sitting here ready to take off, de-ice me again and just say hey, keep throwing that stuff on here because that’s the safest thing I can do. With no concern about what was being thrown down and where it was going. Went down the drain. Where’d it go? Columbia Slough.

It really became apparent after we started studying the slough that the problems with the dissolved oxygen are associated with hits from the de-icing program. It’s a very extensive program to basically combat the problem with using glycol, looking at other things. The reality is someday something else may come up to be used instead of using anti-freeze/glycol. Again that’s a real tough call when you look at the port saying how do you not fly airplanes? I’d hate to be the one that says no, we’re shutting — I shut down the airport once during the flood. That was enough. (laughs) That was almost enough! Shut down a lot of airplanes like that. That’s something that you can really kind of get into but you know the airports get a lot of challenges and they’ve got a lot of wetlands that they have historically filled in and a lot of lands that they will continue to fill in in order to meet future demand. The question is, how do you mitigate for it? or is it best not to mitigate and not develop? Again that’s a call that a lot of people will fight over for a long time but it’s just a fact of life that it’s there. The city is still growing–too fast, leaps and bounds.

JL: I’ve read about the de-icing, I’ve read that there’s government restrictions they’re now having to meet but I guess, I don’t know if they’ve been neglected. Do you know what the restrictions are specifically?

TH: With the EPA , DEQ on meeting those requirements. I’m not sure what the numbers were that were set. Those numbers were actually set after I left, but if I do remember we were working with DEQ to come into a phased approach to come within compliance. Knowing that the infrastructure wasn’t in place and I do believe it was a five-year plan to develop infrastructure, but also to try different things because it is such a–this is a system that you can’t just–it’s not like a pipe where you can control everything or something like that. This is a natural system and you’ve got natural barriers that you can only do so much with. So the DEQ, EPA, Port of Portland agreement was to look at a phased approach and to do an analysis on a yearly basis saying okay let’s try this approach and see what happens–oh, didn’t work, let’s try something else, oh hey, that seems to be a very positive affect but again each year is also very different. Rainfall, temperature, snowfall, ice, how much de-icing, everything it’s a real tough one to see. The main thing is being aware. Source control and how do you contain it? That’s going to be a tough one. It’s going to be a tough one and very expensive.

JL: What were the most important changes if you could pick one thing what would you say the most important change has been since from the time you were there when you started in 1980 until you left?

TH: Well I think the singlemost I’d say would probably be the formation of the urban renewal area. I mean that really started bringing money in and focusing on the development and the expedition/how it expedited the growth at that time. I think that’s probably the single largest challenge I was dealing with, that and being in the drainage district which is a very small entity in comparison to the City of Portland. We always felt like it was David and Goliath. Small guy out there trying and trying to keep costs down. So I think probably bringing in that urban renewal area which forced the drainage district to come to the play.

[End Side B, Tape 1 of 2, Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2]

So I think that the renewal of the South Shore area and the urban renewal area and also requiring the drainage district to basically say yeah, if you’re going to stay a drainage district out there, which you have to, you have to have some sort of a public works out there in order to maintain those facilities. But whether or not that’s going to be the drainage district or whether or not that’s going to be someone else such as the City of Portland providing those services. So I think that was our single largest challenge was to basically belly up and get it done, and how do you get it done and still try and remain cost effective?

The second most challenging was dealing with the environmental concerns. I guess I kind of looked at those as being personal challenges. Dealing with the environmental concerns and how do you accomodate those basically going into a water-based form of maintenance without much funding, with still a lot of challenges there, physical as well as monetary, to get it done, and still dealing with–at the time I started pushing for the water based form of maintenance, I would say that 50-60% of the population out there was still farmers. It was still the good old boy type of approach that said what do you need to do that kind of garbage for? Let’s just keep on doing what we’ve been doing for a lot of years. Many meetings I spent out there talking with them and they’d kind of say, now listen to my side. You want to develop property okay? To each their own. But let’s put you on the other side. You’ve got your building here and we come in and we’ve got to remove this stuff and we’re tearing everything — we cause a lot of liability pride. To me that was a very large personal challenge, to even get a lot of those people to listen and say okay, that kind of makes sense, how much does it cost? Well, we don’t really know because we don’t even know if it’ll work! Start developing it and phasing it and putting to actual application was really one of the largest environmental benefits that can happen out in that area over the long term. It’s not that you can do the whole area at once, but over a thirty to fifty–let’s face it, the South Shore area is going to be there as long as we have the earth, so it’s gonna take awhile for nature to heal itself anyway and grow back up in the vegetation but at least you’re giving it a chance. I feel from my standpoint it was probably one of my biggest things, that we benefitted from out in that area and having farmer say yes that’s got to be done, we’ve got to move the water and go in on it.

JL: What types of changes do you see happening, I know you’re not with the district anymore, but what kinds of things do you see happening in the next ten or fifteen years as far as the district and the slough itself?

TH: I think the slough–one of the other big challenges and I really didn’t talk about it much was the change of the slough. You end up with water quality problems in the slough, and they end up almost being seasonal. I don’t know how much time we’ve got and how far we can ramble but it is a very diverse waterway and in the wintertime you’ve got water that comes in. Your goal is “water in, water out.” During the summertime you don’t have much flow other than what you’ve got by groundwater. The groundwater that you receive into the system is very rich in nutrients. Historically that whole area up above there was on septic systems and sumps so you’ve got a very rich groundwater that upwells into the Columbia Slough which is full of nutrients. It’s very slow moving, and you’ve knocked off the vegetative cover so you’ve got kind of a steaming pot there. Water temperature goes up, everything else starts to bloom, and all sorts of things happen.

One of the big problems that we started looking at during the summertime was what we refer to as flow augmentation. Trying to move the water through the system by–you can do it a couple of ways. One was adding water to it from the Columbia River, actually with the pump stations that we had out and through here we looked at taking water from here and discharging it into the slough so pumping from here to here, and pumping it back out through here to increase flow. Again, the solution to pollution is dilution. More water in, more water out, what’s that do? We ran a lot of computer models and looked at that and a lot of different scenarios and found out that yeah, you did end up with some benefits but not much. We also looked at just the matter of–we used to hold the water surface up extremely high in the summertime to augment/facilitate irrigation. You created a larger pool with warmer water. When you look back historically at pictures of the Columbia Slough during the summer months, now September October, which I guess are the low flow months, you looked at the Columbia Slough and it was something you could jump across. Hardly anything there. One of the things I started always looking at was saying well if you’re going to look at flow augmentation, which is moving it through there, maybe that’s really what you start looking at is taking it back to what it looked like naturally which in the summertime a lot of it dried up. When you end up drying up those waterways, you end up with grass growing in.

One of the things that we looked at with flow augmentation was moving the water through there which did help–let’s see if I can explain this without being too–you’ve got the column of water. As you back the water up that column of water filled with lots of algae and became very non-transluscent. The light was absorbed and through there it became very stagnant and stale. As you started cleaning up the water, flowing the water through there so it wasn’t in one place, the column of water became cleaner/clearer. So now, the problem that we developed was we ended up with photosynthesis (sunlight) getting down into the bed of the sediment and what we found was historically there’s and old seed bed of aquatic weeds in through there so when you look at the Columbia Slough now, this time of year, the things filled with aquatic weeds. So is that good? because sooner or later they fall off, they die off, which plugs up your intakes to your pumps. They also cause, can cause over oxygenation. So you start looking at this whole cycle again.

My feeling is that what you’re going to see in the slough in the future is — how you manage it may be probably not the most aesthetic, but probably from a water quality natural standpoint would be the most natural and probably the best in that. I think that’s always been a problem with the Columbia Slough — looking at it aesthetically. What is it that you want to see? Go back to what I said earlier. A lot of people said well let’s concrete the darn thing and be done with it and we’ve got L.A. On the other hand you’ve got a lot of people who say no, we don’t want anything to happen to it, we just want it to remain natural. You’ve got to manipulate it’s system one way or another you’re going to play with it. It’s just a matter of saying do you like looking at a nice big body of water with fish in it? Different types of aquatic weeds? Lots of algae? Or do you look at it more from a natural standpoint that says well we don’t have natural fish up and through there, most of it’s carp and crappie. They’re, how should I say?, well, they’re just not your choice of fish. But on the other hand, if those waterways weren’t nearly as large, at much smaller you’ve got cooler water temperature, you’ve got a much smaller cross-section of the water, so you end up with less volume of water.

Let’s see if I can do a little cross section here. So you’ve got a little natural area in and through here. It looks like this (showing map). And you’ve got your vegetation up here, trees, and this is kind of your normal water surface elevation. One of the things we looked at and I think you may see is trying to do this flow augmentation during the summertime when all you’ve really got is groundwater to contend with is you may end up with a water surface that looks like this. In otherwords you don’t have the water quality problem in this upper area. In relation this was more of a natural look anyway. Those things pretty well dried up. When they dry up, you’ve just got a lot less water to deal with.

JL: Over the summer drawing that you drew a very low water level.

TH: Yeah, very low, it’s just a typical cross-section with maybe just a smaller channel for a low flow. I think that really gets into a question of �� you can argue both sides of it from environmental habitat and environmental water quality. I think it’s a real toss up which way you go. I think what it really comes down to is aesthetics. I still think there’s a real question out there that says what do people want the Columbia Slough to look like? You know there’s a lot of things it could look like. Go to Broadmoor Golf Course, it looks like a park out there. Nice big body of water. Then you look close and it goes (sniffs) eeww, it’s got a lot of stuff in it and it stinks, and it smells and this is sewer! On the other hand if you’ve got a lower water body of water what you start creating is a lot of vegetative growth. It’s not your tall trees, it’s more your grasses and natural filtration system. It’s going to naturally grow up and through there. The future of what it looks like? I think that’s really a question of that people really need to decide what they want aesthetically. I think environmentally it can be a toss up. Hard to say. That would be my guess of what it comes down to in the future, a very much different look of what you see today during the summer months. During the wintertime you’re going to see a full pool elevation because it’s used for storage–what you can’t pump you store.

JL: Anything that you want to add that we haven’t gotten to?

TH: I think that’s pretty much it. I think the area is so convoluted. If you really look at saying gee could you find a harder place to develop? I think you’ve probably picked the hardest one that you could. The issues, they go all over. I wish I had some of my old notes and old presentations ��cause we had a lot of those things pictured down there. Dave Hendricks would be a good one to talk to. Dave’s hot on the issues today and he has access to all of my old stuff and I know he’s being interviewed on this also. Actually I’ll look forward to hearing what Dave said.

JL: It’s on the web.

TH: Is it now? My computer’s supposed to get back here real quick, but Dave’s right in there with what the current situations are. It will be interesting to see what happens and I say the development of the property is going to be done in ten or fifteen years. That’s a curve that tops out and it’s done. I think that how you deal with it in the long run is really going to be an on-going question and struggle. It’s not a struggle in my opinion of economics versus environment. Economics is going to get there. It’s only so much property. I think the environmental concerns are really the ones that are going to be a huge question of saying how do you deal with this problem? It’s a monster. It can’t be looked at easily and quickly because of all of the pollution concerns that are there from the water quality, during the winter and summer, the problems of de-icing and the natural discharge of storm water, it’s a problem everywhere. To your low flows, oxygen depletion, algae, the concerns with overabundance of aquatic vegetation in through there, recreation didn’t get into that one, that’s a real (laughs) some people, I mean it was kind of funny because at one time they came back and Johnson Lake which is right off of I205. Some guy kept on asking me can we water ski on Johnson Lake? I don’t know? Can we? Who’s to decide? Who governs those bodies of water?

JL: Are there regulations as far as that?

TH: No, uh-uh, not at all. That’s what I told myself. There’s nobody that really regulates it. DSL doesn’t. As far as the uses, Oregon State Marine Board doesn’t. Nobody really does. It’s just kind of going what do you do? Kind of like the challenges of Fairview Lake. That’s just a melting pot there. But I don’t know I just see that I’ll be interested to see what happens in twenty years. Environmental’s going to be the real one and I think it’s going to go back to aesthetics. What do the people really want to see? It’s manipulated. It already is, and you can deal with it in a positive way or argue it both ways. That was it.

JL: Thanks a lot for your time and help on the interview

TH: I’ll look forward to hearing some of the other interviews on the web.

JL: All right

TH: That’ll be fun

[Interview Ends]