SEQUIM — Impending drought in light of a record-low snowpack in the Olympic Mountains has state and local officials asking the public to help prevent calamitous wildfire from scorching area properties and considering heroic measures to save fish in diminishing waters.
Clallam County is at the highest risk of any county in the state for catastrophic loss due to wildfire, Bryan Suslick of the state Department of Natural Resources told about 150 people at a community forum to discuss drought conditions and options at Sequim’s Guy Cole Convention Center.
“The reason is we have a lot of our homes” in heavily forested areas, Suslick said Thursday evening.
“If we do get a major fire, there are a lot of homes in the path of that. That is where the catastrophic loss comes in.”
Residents can take steps to cut the risk to their homes, such as keeping certain types of vegetation confined to certain zones.
The first zone, from the structure to about 30 feet away, “should be the zone where you keep your green grass, your low shrubs, your deciduous trees [and] your fruit trees,” Suslick said.
The next zone, from 30 to 100 feet, is where conifers should be located, he added.
“They are fine to have close to your house. Just thin them out to where the tops of them aren’t touching each other, and then trim them 6 to 10 feet off the ground so fire can’t get up in the crowns.”
And make sure all vegetation in these zones is watered regularly, Suslick said.
“What we are trying to do is [get] the fire coming through the forest to slowly drop to the ground and burn around your home,” he said.
The snowpack in the Olympic Mountains is currently at zero, the lowest it has been since 2005, when it was a little less than 50 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Snowpack is like a frozen reservoir for river basins, in a typical year accumulating over the winter and slowly melting through the spring and summer, providing a water supply for rivers and streams.
The Dungeness River, which relies on snowpack through the summer and early autumn, is expected to dwindle dramatically.
The driest time is expected to be from August through October.
Less water in the river means less space for salmon and other species of fish to swim upriver to spawn.
Conservationists are “pretty concerned about getting fish upstream,” said Teresa Scott of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
About 1.3 million pink salmon are expected to enter the river this year on their way south to spawning grounds in the Olympic Mountains, she said.
“What are we going to do about getting those fish from point A to point B?” asked Scott Chitwood, the director of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s Natural Resources Department.
“We are going to monitor them. We want to make sure these fish can get to the spawning rivers.”
“With a record estimated return of pink salmon to the Dungeness and record-low flows — that is not a good combination.”
Challenges include “choke points” in the Dungeness River, Chitwood said.
If the river gets too low, for instance, it may run underneath the riverbed at some points.
“These are the conditions that we want to try and avoid,” Chitwood said.
Small man-made dams also act as artificial checkpoints.
“When the flows go down, these can start blocking fish in the river, and that is a real issue for us” during drought years, Scott said.
State employees and volunteers routinely remove the small dams one rock or log at a time. That has started for this year.
If more is needed to ease fish passage, man-made channels can cut into the riverbed and be lined with plastic.
“Whatever we can do to deepen water across those rivers — those efforts can work,” Chitwood said, noting that such measures have been used in the past successfully, including during a significant drought in the fall of 1987.
“We were putting sandbags across the rivers 1 or 2 feet wide, trying to channel the water down this chute,” he said.
“It did work to get fish from below to above a problem river.”
Another option is to allow fewer fish to get into the river by thinning out their ranks in July or August through sport fishing efforts at the mouth of the Dungeness River, Scott suggested.
The last resort would be to trap fish and haul them in tanks upriver, Chitwood said, adding that many fish do not survive such a trek.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.