NPIC WA/BC Annual General Meeting
June 6-8, 2007, Landmark Center, WA

Friday Field Trips

Tacoma Water - Green River Watershed

Departs 12:30 PM Friday from Landmark Center, Return about 5 PM

Transportation Provided for Up to 12 People

Sign Up with Paul Hickey at PHickey@cityoftacoma.org 253-502-8692

Description: The Tacoma Water municipal water supply watershed and facilities are located about an hour's drive from downtown Tacoma. We will drive by van (Tacoma Public Utilities has a couple 7-passenger vans) to the Tacoma Water Headworks gate where we will enter the watershed. At this location we will show participants two engineered log jams, and gravel and loose wood placement sites where we annually release into the Green River spawning gravel and both large and small wood that has floated into Howard Hanson Reservoir. The reservoir is located about 3-1/2 miles upstream of the Tacoma diversion.

At the Tacoma Water diversion we will visit new juvenile fish screens at our water intake, an adult ladder and sorting facility, and water-to-water transfer facility where adult salmon and steelhead will be transferred to a tank to be trucked upstream and released in the upper watershed. We are awaiting written unified direction from the fisheries co-managers on which species and stocks to pass upstream. Until then, our facilities remain ready to operate, but unused.

Traveling further upstream, we'll visit the Corps of Engineers' Howard Hanson Dam (HHD) where river flows are controlled. This is the first year the Corps of Engineers is storing water for municipal water supply behind the dam, so the water level in the reservoir is higher than normal. Typically, high reservoir pool on June 1 is elevation 1147 ft. This year the target is 1167 ft which represents an additional 20K acre feet of storage. Half of the extra storage will be used for municipal supply and half will be shared with resource agencies for flow supplementation. At HHD we can describe how Tacoma Water and other Green River stakeholders work with the Corps of Engineers to discuss flow management to protect steelhead, chinook, coho and chum throughout the year.

Upstream of HHD we will visit a couple fish habitat projects such as engineered log jams, beaded ponds fed by groundwater to provide over wintering refuge to juvenile salmonids, and a couple bridges that we've constructed to replace culvert barriers to fish passage. Other potential sites we could visit are managed elk pastures, and an eagle's nest, but these are optional as they are not fish-related. There is also a pair of loons setting up housekeeping in the watershed. We've installed a loon cam pointed at the nest (in cooperation with WDFW) to transmit their nesting progress to the WDFW's website for the public to view. We hope the loons decide to nest in their usual location where the camera is located, but as of today don't know where they will decide to nest.