Campus retrofit to bring salmon back

Mt. Hood is the first community college anywhere to achieve Salmon Safe status, according to Steve Wise, executive director of the Sandy River Basin Watershed Council.

Kelly Creek and Beaver Creek flow through the campus grounds. The creeks flow into the Sandy River which is home to four species of wild endangered salmon: spring chinook, fall chinook, coho, and steelhead.

Currently, a dam separates Beaver Creek and MHCC’s pond. The dam causes the water to get too warm to be healthy for salmon. “The water doesn’t flow through as fast as it flows in, and so sits and absorbs sunlight,” said Wise. “Bypassing or removing the dam (would) reconnect the flow from the upstream end to the downstream end, (and) the water (would) move along on its own pace without staying in place as long.”

When the campus was originally built, the raised walkway between the main Academic Center and the P.E. building was “envisioned” to have a suspension bridge, but plans changed and the dam was placed. “There are other designs besides completely removing the dam where some of the pond might stay in place but most of the water would flow through,” said Wise.

The ultimate goal is to lower the pond’s temperature so that it is habitable for salmon. “Both Beaver Creek and Kelly Creek and parts of the Sandy (River) are on the state’s impaired list for temperature, for a lot of reasons,” said Wise.

To offset temperature and pollution to the creeks, and to divert millions of gallons of rainwater runoff at MHCC, over 20 different projects are planned around the campus.

  One plan to address both problems would be to transform some parking lots. Lots A, E, F, G, and H would have slanted parking spaces with a pedestrian walkway and bioswales (rain gardens), said Wise.

The lots would be repaved with permeable pavement, using material similar to what lots are already paved with but that are porous, so water can flow through more easily. Bacterial colonies under the pavement would digest a lot of the pollution from parking lots, making the water flowing into the creeks cleaner, according to Wise.

“You can make it into a filter on purpose for particular pollutants including some of the stuff that runs off a parking lots, like the oil and grease that comes off of cars,” he said. Permeable pavement is “more expensive than opening up an area and planting it, but it provides a surface that you can use in the industrial way, or the edge of the parking lot,” he said.

Another proposal for diverting rainwater is to dig up a million-gallon tank buried in the Building 17 courtyard. The tank was intended to be used as a cooling system, but one of the pump mechanisms early on, said Wise. The tank would be retrofitted to collect, filter, and disperse rainwater. “If you had a million-gallon storage tank linked to roof runoff, you could irrigate a lot of places some parts of the year, and save on fresh water.”

The idea of a retrofit is important because it would be much less expensive than starting the project from scratch, Wise said.

The Salmon Safe and rain runoff project is intended to be an “educational laboratory” as well as a cost-effective way to make the college more ecologically sustainable, he noted.

To carry out and fund the work, MHCC is partnering with Metro, the City of Gresham, the Sandy River Basin Watershed Council, and other organizations. “You have regional agencies, you have the city, you have the college, which is a separate, independent organization within the watershed council, working together because none of us can quite do it separately, and that’s how watershed restoration works,” said Wise.