West Fork Little River Restoration

with rolling pastures and croplands and a growing number of subdivisions Hall County plays a vital role in keeping Georgia's waterways clean and safe for our County's residents and for our downstream neighbors our County is located in the northern part of the Chattahoochee watershed we have the majority of the shoreline of Lake Lanier and Lake Lanier feeds the Chattahoochee which in turn is the water supply for Atlanta and many of the city's south of us Holloway the Gulf of Mexico in 2001 Hall County and the city of Gainesville performed a community watershed assessment and found that the West Fork Little River was one of the most degraded waterways in the county with substantial sediment loading and high levels of fecal coliform posing problems for fish populations and landowners with the stream restoration grant from the EPA Hall County determined which stream segments were contributing the most to water quality degradation and would improve water quality the most if restored the best definition I think for stream restoration is the restoration of functions of stream functions the things that streams do and if you walked up to a stream and said what do you most like to do of course the stream would answer I like to transport water right if it didn't transport water there would be no stream channel we sent out letters to every landowner that adjoined any stream in this West Fork Little River watershed whether is a small branch entering the West Fork or if they lived on the West Fork itself and several landowners immediately contacted us and told us that they did have severe problems that they wanted us to look at in address most of the problems that the landowners let us know about were the stream bank erosion of the stream banks would collapse the landowners would actually lose part of their pastures and part of their property into the stream every year restoration sites were selected based on excellent landowner support and good vehicular access and overall the county worked directly with 8 landowners on stream restoration projects we got a lot of work done for the smallest amount of money and prevented the most amount of settlement from entering the stream with the smallest amount of restoration work the primary restoration work focused on two stretches of streams a large working farm owned by the sea bolts and a smaller property owned by the Crawfords the problem at the sea boat reach was actually very similar to a lot of problems we see in these headwater rural streams and that is it was channelized so at one point this little stream was meandering across the valley but those meandering streams make it difficult to farm they're sort of in the way so a lot of times these streams are straightened and moved over to the edge of the valley when the stream was moved over to one side of the pasture the stream was moved up against a large slope and when the stream began to go back to its natural meandering patterns that large slope began to erode rapidly the landowner was losing huge amounts of his property into the stream engineers built a new stream bed toward the middle of the pasture and recreated the streams natural meanders they also had to raise the stream bed so when we started this project there was about a two to three foot drop coming right out of this culvert and and to do a restoration to reconnect the stream to the floodplain this this is helpful to us we come upstream and look for those big elevation changes and then literally started the new stream bed you know at just a few tenths of a foot lower than that comer and that's how we can literally bring the bed back up and reconnect it to the original floodplain without you know pumping water we still have water flowing downhill when a string loses connection to its floodplain you see very high elevated banks so you see a stream channel that looks kind of like this is straight up and down and when it rains all that water shoots straight through that roads out the channels and it's going to hit the downstream property owners very quickly with a lot of energy causing more erosion more flooding downstream because we weren't able to dissipate the energy that upstream part so we left the stream and I walked up the stream bank and now I'm standing on the floodplain in fact I'm standing right at the beginning where we're transitioning from channel processes to floodplain processes this is the beginning of the floodplain our goal and restoration is to build a channel just big enough to carry those flows that we need to keep the bed stable and then spread all that extra water out under the floodplain this reduces the energy and also creates more diversity more wildlife diversity and creates a higher function for the stream the sea bulk property restoration was performed while the farm continued to operate with the channel rebuilt Engineers installed log rolls which provide great control and redirect the streams currents to prevent erosion as well as rock veins to concentrate the streamflow and slow down descending water they also had to reestablish the stream buffers stream buffers are vegetated strips of land on either side of streams and they're extremely important for the health of that stream and water quality downstream because they serve as very important filters for storm water when it rains all that stormwater flows over the land we need a good filtration strip that's going to filter out any contaminants soil suspended particles and that water is going to filter out through that stream buffer but they also hold that channel together one of the things we have to do with the restoration is to get the vegetation re-established and and one way to do that is amazing to me we literally will will find certain species of vegetation like a black willow this is a black willow and we'll take cuttings of the limbs and just drive it into the ground and then it sprouts this was also a lot of stake but this one's you know maybe two growing seasons old and starting to push out once we established in the end there's an move the stream over we fenced out the entire length of the restoration project except for one cattle crossing so the cattle could get from one pasture to the other pasture and then we established a couple of cattle watering troughs that are fed by clean well water despite popular belief cows are not an aquatic animal so they are best served to be out of the stream and up on the pasture the problems that they cause they're pretty numerous first of all they they tend to create instability we don't have vegetation next to the bank holding the banks in place and we have cattle eating the vegetation their hooves trample the banks so it loosens the soil making it easier to erode and then of course as they're taking a drink of water sometimes they go ahead and use the bathroom right in the stream as well and that's not healthy for the stream either the cattle love the new watering system will actually walk through the stream crossing in order to get to the watering device because they like the water out of this well so much better than the water straight out of the stream in 2009 the sea bolt project earned a Georgia engineering Alliance Honor Award it recognized Hall County the landowner and the project's engineering firm Michael baker corporation for the site's innovative natural stream channel design that allowed the tributary to be restored with minimal impacts to the working farm the crawford site was a little bit different than the other sites being that it was on the main stem of the West Fork of the Little River much closer to Lake the stream was much larger in size and the banks were absolutely vertical banks were collapsing the landowner was losing several feet of pasture per year and we did not have enough room to move the entire stream over like we did on the the other properties my neighbor who had been cutting the pasture for us was very concerned about the erosion of the pasture it's gotten gradually worse in the 15 years we've been here in some years when we had two or three floods in one year it would be remarkably worse so we were concerned about it when we got to this site the bank behind me which we call the left bank looking downstream was vertical and eroding it was probably 12 feet high and if you stood at the top of the bank the water was directly underneath you totally vertical and moving this way a roadie at early and it was probably a hundred to 120 feet long what we did there is we established a small mini floodplain on the bank of that river to where when the stream rises during a rain event it actually allows the stream to flow over onto this mini floodplain that floodplain bench is completely planted in trees and vegetation the one good thing is that the problem was localized and not system-wide so upstream of this bad bank erosion where we still had some trees holding the bank in place but the channel was pretty deep we used some structures called cross vanes to help keep the stream centered this is a cross vein that we were talking about and the cross veins are built out of these large boulders they start high start up on the stream bank and then sloped down into the channel so the way these structures work that as as water starts to increase it literally rolls that water towards the center of the channel so it keeps that thaw back or the deepest part of the channel right in the center and then it protects the bank because it reduces the velocities or it reduces the energy of the water there's a bridge just as the river comes onto our property and that narrows the water when it's heavy and it just sort of accelerates it coming on to our property so this is supposed to slow it down and correct that problem so before the project the stream was actually going around this big tree on the other side of the tree and was up against that high bank right at that gate so if you came out of that gate and took two steps you'd fall right down into the channel so we built this vein this cross vein this is the vein arm tied right into this tree and built a floodplain bench on the other side to not only protect the tree but also protect the bank as well so the sea bolt and Crawford reaches the two different projects really give us a nice example of different ways to do stream restoration at the sea bolt property we really were able to do full-scale restoration the stream was incised and we were able to reconnect it to the floodplain at the crawford reach it was more about bank stability we had a short reach of stream that was unstable we had different property owners and we used restoration techniques but more to stabilize the bank and then to do a little bit of habitat work in the channel I think this project was a big success because it did improve community awareness especially by contacting all those landowners making them aware of the problems they may have had on their site and we did manage to improve the water quality of the streams that that is measurable in the northern watershed of the West Fork of the Little River in all the West Fork Little River restoration project restored approximately 4,000 feet of stream and provided healthier fish habitat and cleaner water feeding lake lanier pleasing property owners and cows to

Channel: Chattahoochee Riverkeeper

Views: 66,438

Keywords: West, Fork, Little, River, Restoration

Id: dDi1IqMQaf8

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2011