High Water in Oregon

It has been raining here in Oregon for a week.  Fortunately, I am writing a report that involves some knotty problems in structural geology.  I am also watching the local streams on an on-line feature published by the City of Salem called "High Water Watch" by the firm, One Rain, Inc.

There is an interactive map that you can click to find stream depths and flows. The stream widths are less than thirty feet on average, so a stream height of five feet is quite remarkable.  The starting height is two feet. For a four  foot reading, you cannot stand in the stream.

Interested?  Put "high water" and "salem oregon" into your browser and you will be led to the online information.

The present (Let's see, December 1 the creeks started to rise with previous rains...) eleven day series of storms is very unusual.  The storms have caused a regional catastrophe of washed out roads, landslides and wholesale scenes of flooded parts of Portland and of Coast Range towns like Vernonia.  Muddy water everywhere.  A one-day rainfall record was set in Portland on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th.  The highest water levels and greatest flows in the Salem Hills, came at lunch hour. Here is a weather satellite of the storm system at about that time.

Like any weather information by the National Weather Service, the accessible information, now, will be pushed into the past by following days of observation, so let me give you a very short list of flows on a creek in the Salem Hills. The time for each reading is 10:30 in the morning.  It just looks good to me that way.
December 5: 40.cfs , December 6: 56 cfs , December 7: 350 cfs , December 8: 177 cfs , December 9: 204 cfs , December 10: 187 cfs, December 11: 96 cfs, December 12: 104 cfs. The stream is Battle Creek at Commercial Road.

The stream drains a highland of weathered basalt (basalt is dark gray or black igneous rock, an extrusive).  The upper reaches of the creek drain a rural area, that accounts for about 20 square miles.  A tributary, Waln Creek, drains another 6 square miles of suburban land.  At the time of the height of the flood, another gage on the rural stem read 100.45 cfs.  The combined rural/suburban gage read 389.90 cfs, so there was a greater contribution of runoff from impervious cover of streets and parking areas.

On a visceral level, the December 7th flood was wild.  Without the measurements, it demonstrated the nature of a catastrophe.  There are unusual sights, in my case, water forming as small ponds on my lawn or Battle Creek flood waters sliding around a tight curve in the stream bed on Rees Hill Road like a water slide ride at the now defunct Thrillville Water Park.

Disclaimer:  No bridges were washed out in the Salem Hills by this event.  Car access was safe and I did not wade in any creeks. I took notes, a few pictures and went and had coffee.

A Big Fault Across a Great River

This photograph appeared in the National Geographic website, today.

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/victoria-falls-aerial-ngpc2015/?utm_source=GooglePlus&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_gp20151022photo-pod&utm_campaign=Content

It looks like a great fault (a rift, even).  Imagine something like that happening across the Mississippi River, the Columbia or the Hudson River?

What could be similar in the contiguous United States?  How about The Fall Line that caused one of the first hydro-power industrial sites in the original 13 colonies.  Alexander Hamilton (see AHA@Twitter.com),  had a part in the development of the site.

The Fall line extends into Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.  Does anybody want to put together a collection of 200 New Jersey water wells and about 100 Pennsylvania wells and draw a structure map along the Fault?

A Winding Geology Tale or Trail, if you would have it so

In 1974, an older geologist asked me this,"Tell me a story, John?" We were standing in a wide railroad cut of the Schulkyll River in Limerick, Pennsylvania and we were looking at red rocks and rock joints. Jerry Szymanski  had dashed up the rubble slope and was more or less hanging from the flat surface of the top of the outcropping. That question was his teacher's way of getting me to put together what we were seeing, right or wrong.  His question was a European way of instruction. I started talking.  He listened for a while and then asked me questions, getting me to to point out a thicker sandstone bed on one side of a chosen fault and the relative vertical position of that bed on the other side.

This field conference between us two, happened at 6 P.M., one May evening when the rest of our 30 member field team had gone back to hot showers at the hotel.  Jerry had asked for someone to show him around, but there were no takers but me. I had heard him speak at tailgate meetings in upper New York State, where he found a flower structure in trench at a nuclear power plant.  I wanted to meet the man.  We went around to two other sites; inside the nuclear power plant to look at a little fault, to a quarry to follow a fault across the Pennsylvania farmland. Jerry's concentration was remarkable.  He was thinking so intently, once, that he missed his step and fell pall-mall down one hill into my arms. Storytelling is important in geology; is illustrated with maps, well-chosen and well-arranged data and with geologic cross-sections.

In hobbies and careers in a while, endeavors become inter-related. Consider canoeing, fishing and geomorphology.  Clean sand and gravel layers are boons to well field engineers and environmental geologists.  The setting down of these deposits can be studied either intently or incidentally in boating or fishing trips on large rivers.  Consider the Santiam River near Albany, Oregon and the Willamette River near Salem.  The Santiam has a long wide gravel bar downstream of the crossing of Interstate 5.  While fishing, I and a friend have taken breaks to pick up interesting rocks; brick red crumbling stones, white plagioclase-speckled andesitic basalt cobbles and small geodes. Our rock hunting is erring devoid of the real connection to the river, because the aquatic insect life, Mayflies cannot live without clean, cool tumbling water.  The insects need the rocks, to adhere to is the egg stage, to hide as six legged crawling, darting insects from hungry trout and then to rise fitfully to the surface, shucking their molding skins to dry their new wings and fly off into the brush to mate.  The Summer 2015 issue of Flyfishing & Tying Journal described how to fish the different parts of such stretches of these two rivers. The stream gradient is 20 to 30 feet per mile and canoeing is easy.  This region is part of a two hundred mile plus "recreational boating highway".  There are steelhead and salmon runs on the rivers and eagles and osprey nest nearby to fly along the river courses and to feed on the fish.

A Surprise Achievement: The Manasquan Reservoir in New Jersey

This morning, I was checking snow levels on Route 9 and there it was, the MANASQUAN RESERVOIR, just as we designed it when I was a grad student finishing up at Rutgers, New Brunswick!

I was the field geologist on the project, and still have the maps.  The greatest concern was leakage through the sand and gravel of the Kirkwood Formation (The geologic age escapes me, maybe Pliocene).  

The floor was a problem that we solved by drilling a few deep wells.  It was the greenish silty clay of the Manasquan Formation and we found that it would work well to contain the water.

I had a mentor, Dennis Lachelle, from Jenny Geotechnical out of West Orange.  He came out to the field one day, comfortable in his air conditioned car.  It was 100 degrees and I was lying under the drilling rig out in the middle of the proposed floor of the reservoir, getting out of the sun.  He thought it was pretty funny when there was a stirring in the brush and I got out from under the rig.

The Manasquan Reservoir? I did that!

Old cross-sections to come.

DETROIT RANGER DISTRICT, OREGON

Revisiting a Favorite Forest Haunt

The Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon is carpeted with a National Forest that is broken up into management areas called Ranger Districts.  I had the privilege of serving as a contract worker on a district that lies east of Salem, Oregon in 1997 and 1998.  The following link is to a map of some of the remarkable features that are so attractive about the Detroit Ranger District. The land is remarkable for its ruggedness and beauty.  Detroit is a favorite stopping point for travelers from the Willamette Valley who are taking the three hour automobile ride to "the other side", the tourist towns of Sisters, Redmond and Bend.  In their long trip, they climb almost 5000 feet in elevation from Salem (elev. 200 feet) over the Range (Santiam Pass is 4800 feet) and down to the Deschutes River valley (elevation 3200 feet).  In doing so, the travelers pass between sleeping and inactive strato-volcanoes that have been gouged by alpine glacier ice. 

Here is a link to a map of some of the sites and pull-offs in the District:  

One Man's Sites in the Detroit Ranger District, Oregon