Beneath the surface of a small pool salmon lie rotting where they died, their life cycles unfulfilled. Nearby, a manmade barrier has blocked passage to upstream spawning grounds.
Each fish might have laid or fertilized a thousand eggs. Those never-to-be hatchlings might have hatched, headed to sea, grown to maturity and returned to the hooks and nets of happy anglers and boosted the local economy.
The problem is culverts, those corrugated metal tubes providing transport to flowing water that must be crossed by roads. Built properly, they pose no impediment to migrating fish. Built poorly, they can become the impassable equivalent of a hydroelectric dam from the point of view of the fish.
Reconnecting baby salmon nurseries to the ocean is the entire focus of the Kenai Watershed Forum’s stream restoration effort, which has been slowly rebuilding culverts since 2002. At the rate of one to two a year depending on funding, cost and complexity, it is a daunting task. Across the Kenai Peninsula more than 50 such culvert barriers block fish movement, according to Robert Ruffner, the forum’s executive director.
“There are roughly 2,000 miles of road on the Kenai Peninsula and about 2,000 miles of streams,” Ruffner said. “About 30 to 40 miles of streams may be blocked.”
A wealth of small tributaries feeding the peninsula’s major fish-rich rivers provides nurseries and spawning grounds to several species of salmon. But just one bad culvert can prevent fish from reaching miles of rich habitat.
In some cases, a simple lack of awareness or poor planning has lead road designers and builders to install culverts too small to handle seasonal runoff, Ruffner said. The inevitable flooding scours downstream earthwork surrounding culverts, leaving their ends several inches above the water level, creating a condition called a perched or hanging culvert.
Baby salmon emerging from the gravel beds in these tributaries often need to migrate upstream to reach richer feeding grounds, especially when water levels drop and freeze-over cuts off habitat nearer to and within the major rivers.
“Some species more than others migrate around,” Ruffner said. “Both coho and chinook will migrate from the largest systems to smaller systems depending on the time of year.”
Juvenile fish, however, cannot swim up a culvert waterfall as small as four inches in height. They may find food elsewhere, but according to studies done in Pacific Northwest streams, juvenile salmon able to migrate upstream, whether because they find more food, develop stronger muscles, or both, tend to survive better in the open ocean once they swim to sea, Ruffner said.
Here in Alaska, an ongoing tagging program is under way in an effort to determine the feeding and migrating habits of juvenile fish.
To adult salmon returning to spawn, a small waterfall poses no impediment, but they can’t get through culverts that have been crushed, a not infrequent condition along roadways on the peninsula, Ruffner notes.
The watershed forum, along with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, began surveying culverts in 2002; a survey Ruffner said is mostly complete. By 2004, the Kenai Watershed Forum was fixing the most problematic of the culverts.
Its first restoration job, completed in 2004, involved replacing a culvert on Silver Salmon Creek on Ninilchik Native land. According to Ruffner, the short-term benefits were immediately apparent: juvenile salmonids that couldn’t rest and feed in that section of the stream are now numerous, and adult chinook began spawning in the area while the last of the new vegetation was still being planted. The project opened more than 12 miles of previously unreachable habitat to kings and silvers.
The following year, another effort helped restore a Stariski Creek tributary crossed by Pepper Road. There, poor construction contributed to flooding and road failure in 2005. In August of that year, private funding allowed the forum to build a small bridge that should prevent the road from failing in the same manner.
Still another successful project was completed last year at Bean Creek, a tributary to the Kenai River near Cooper Landing. A culvert beneath Raven Road was too small and suspended about 18 inches above the natural stream. This perch blocked juvenile salmon from reaching their preferred nursery. The culvert was replaced, and moments after the water was allowed to flow, juvenile salmon were seen jetting through.
This summer’s projects include replacing a culvert at Leaf Creek about four miles north of the end of the road at Captain Cook State Park, fixing another at Slikok Creek in Soldotna, and a third on Swanson River Road, Ruffner said.
The reconstruction projects are not cheap. The Bean Creek project, for instance, consumed about $115,000. That’s small change compared to the $500,000 the forum expects to spend this summer, Ruffner said.
The nonprofit organization with a membership of more then 300 gets funding through grants from sources such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, ConocoPhillips and others, including private donors.
Despite the daunting task ahead — it could take years to fix all the problem culverts ?— Ruffner is optimistic, in part, because with increasing education and awareness, fewer and fewer poor designs are finding their way into roads. Mistakes made elsewhere have become opportunities to learn. The forum works with contractors, encouraging better installation methods and the use of properly sized culverts in an effort to create conditions as close to natural as possible. They get it, Ruffner said.
Road construction over salmon streams, however, is largely regulated by state standards, and the Kenai Peninsula Borough’s road standards basically mirror those of the state.
“In my opinion, there are some good laws on the books, but they aren’t enforced all that diligently,” Ruffner said. “I think the borough should be encouraging the state to upgrade its standards.”
Fortunately, the peninsula, compared to many other locations in the country, has relatively few roads crossing fish streams.
“The sky is not falling,” he said. “But as we grow, we need to bear in mind that it is easier to do things right up front. Nothing would make our organization happier than not to have to do any restorations, to put the program right out of business.”
Hal Spence can be reached at harold.spence@peninsulaclarion.com.
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