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A Chiropractor for Channelized Creeks

The Urban Creeks Council is making house calls to landowners whose ailing streams are giving them headaches. The prescription? Hydraulic stream restoration and soft soil stabilization techniques.

The Council's treatment program revolves around making the complexities of stream dynamics and functions simple to landowners and public works staff in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. SMPPL, Stream Restoration for Private Property Landowners, answers and tracks calls about stream failures and holds workshops to bring neighbors together for cooperative and holistic problem-solving. Their message is that hard structures meant to armor a bank upset a waterway's natural processes and will lead to failures downstream.

Sometimes neighborhoods opt to contract with the Council to permanently fix their problems and reconfigure stream hydrology. Other times, stabilizing the bank to restore a stream's equilibrium in its altered state is the best hope for restoration. Using natural materials, such as easily-rooted woody plants and native vegetation, the Council employs a scheme of bioengineering methods to slow water velocities and prevent bank scour, while simultaneously reinforcing the soil with deep roots. Such "soft" approaches can also be easy on the pocketbook - estimated at 1/10th the cost of "hard" methods in some cases (see also Rejecting Rip Rap p. 3).

So why, if such methods are so good, so cheap and so long-lived, aren't they more widely used? "Regulators have not insisted they be," says the Council's Josh Bradt. "Public works departments and developers need to get familiar with these approaches, they need to go places and see that they work. But we need the help of the regulators to move in this direction."

Contact Josh Bradt (510)540-6669

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