By Matt Jenkins
 

Jerry Wallace is set—as he puts it—to “unzip” a levee.  A logger-turned-blasting expert with a wiry beard and a well-worn pair of overalls, he carefully checks a tangle of explosives-packed PVC pipe and flexible yellow cord here at the edge of Upper Klamath Lake, in the high desert of southern Oregon. What Wallace is about to do will, in fact, look a lot more like blowing the levee to smithereens than unzipping it, but he is insistent on this point: “There’s no blowin’ sh-t up around here. This is applied physics. This is science.”

Fifty years ago, this was the mouth of the Williamson River, which served as a nursery for hundreds of thousands of larval shortnose and Lost River sucker fish after their parents spawned upstream. In the 1950s, two enterprising brothers used a dredge and a dragline to build the levee around the river delta—which they then drained and converted to farm fields, growing mostly wheat and potatoes. Populations of the two fish—both suckers—plunged after their rearing habitat was destroyed. In 1988 they were added to the federal list of endangered species.

For the past decade, however, The Nature Conservancy has been laying the groundwork for a deconstruction project to resuscitate the delta. In 1996 the Conservancy bought the farm and created the Williamson River Delta Preserve. Since then, Mark Stern, the Conservancy’s Klamath Basin conservation director, and Matt Barry, the preserve manager, have been planning how to remove crucial sections of the levee and let the lake back into the 7,400-acre farm. “We’re trying to create this riparian and wetland habitat for these young fish,” Stern says, “so that instead of being shunted directly into the lake when they’re coming down the river, they have some habitat to feed and rear in.”

Using computer models provided by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, Stern and Barry determined which sections of levee needed to be removed to re-create the suckers’ habitat.

Then things started getting tricky.

Much of the initial levee-deconstruction work was done with heavy mechanized excavators—but the farm’s mushy peat soils had a habit of trying to swallow the machines in their tracks. “Those excavators aren’t speedy devils,” says Warren Olson, the construction manager for the project. He instituted an emergency procedure that his equipment operators were soon forced to invoke with dreary regularity: “If you feel the machine sinking, stop and call for help,” he says, “or else you’re goin’ all the way to China.”

After enduring several months of near-daily bulldozer rescue operations, Olson decided to switch to Plan B: He called in Jerry Wallace and his blasting crew. Wallace has a gruff air, but he thinks a little like a sommelier, pairing the perfect explosive with the task at hand. For this job he has chosen ammonium nitrate, a “gassy” explosive that will bulldoze the earthen dike out of the way and let the lake water flood in. Last October, he and his crew spent two weeks stuffing four sections of the levee with almost a quarter-million pounds of the stuff.

On a sunny but frosty morning at the end of the month, Wallace checked the shot one last time, looking over all 2,898 explosives-packed holes. Then, with a crowd of visitors gathered to watch, he fired it off.

As the first couple of charges exploded, a startled flock of birds took wing, chased by a crescendo of blasts that rocketed silver-tipped gouts of earth hundreds of feet into the air. One after another, four staggered explosions ripped apart 2 miles of the levee. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the crack of the final charge hung in the air. Gobs of peat muck rained out of the sky, and a rusty haze drifted off to the south.

“That,” one onlooker said softly, “was flat friggin’ awesome!”

1  2  3  4  5  Next»

Nature picture credits: Photo © Kenneth Popper; Illustration © Alan Daniels