:Local Waterways Story

[GRIGGINS] There was a time when the job of the Army Corps of Engineers was pretty straightforward. Clean all the messy wood out of rivers, build dikes on the banks to keep them from flooding and maybe straighten a channel if it was too curvy for easy navigation. But today, after more than a century of control and destruction,they're starting to bring back mother nature in places where it looked like she was gone forever. And they've got millions to do it. Josh Kerns has more.

[JOSH KERNS] Just south of Seattle, amidst the constant noise of big trucks, freight trains and endless industrial buildings lies an oasis, a narrow little channel strewn with stumps and trees. It's squeezed in next to the main thoroughfare and feeds into the Duwamish estuary at the hub of Seattle's busy harbor. The channel is part of a hundred million dollar plan to restore some of what was lost on the Duwamish river.

[PAT CAGNEY] - Today we're at T105, it's a slough that was created in the industrial part of Seattle. We just turned off of West Marginal way.

[KERNS] Pat Cagney is a biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers.

[PAT CAGNEY] we're just in the middle of a meat rendering plant and a concrete production plant and we're going to walk down this slough that was created in an old dead end street. And so this is one of our first early attempts to restore some of that historic habitat.

[KERNS] It's hard to believe this was ever a habitat for anything. Standing around there's not even a hint of anything natural. Upstream there's a huge Boeing factory and downstream endless truck containers waiting to be loaded on to massive ships, this place is a prototypical industrial waterway. But it used to be a beautiful estuary where local Native Americans setup camps and the area was a complex maze of small side channels and creeks that fed into the Duwamish river. And bringing it back is no easy task.

[PAT CAGNEY] - In an urban environment you don't have the luxury of alot of land to work on. And so these habitats, as productive as they are, really are sandwiched in the middle of normal operating businesses.

[KERNS] The Corps' work on the Duwamish River is part of a new direction they've been heading for the past several years. Environmental restoration is a growing part of the mission, though still only comprises a fraction of the Corps'overall workload. And the corps isn't going at it alone. Cagney points out the importance of working with local agencies on their own restoration efforts, something that usually keeps city and county governments happy, especially since the Corps will pay up to seventy five percent of the bill. And not all of this collaborative effort is taking place in the urban jungle.
(sound Stillaguamish frogs)

[KERNS] About 80 miles north of Seattle, along the quiet Stillaguamish river, University of Washinton geology professor Dave Montgomery walks on top of a jumbled bunch of logs along the edge of the channel.

[DAVE MONTGOMERY] This sort of archaic looking messy pile of logs is actually functioning as a pretty effective engineering structure.

[KERNS] The engineering structure is a man made log jam made to emulate jams that used to be found all along northwest rivers, but were removed by the Army Corps of Engineers. Those jams are an important part of natural habitat. And it's an example of the years of research that are done to learn how and what kinds of restoration efforts might work in the future. While the Corps only played a small role in the log jams on the Stillaguamish it's an example of the kinds of ideas they hope to implement elsewhere, like on the Duwamish.
Back on the urban estuary, biologist Pat Cagney sits at another of the Corps' restoration efforts, this one a little bigger, a little greener and a little less noisy and reflecting on the work he's done.

[PAT CAGNEY] This isn't worth throwing away really, people ask why do you work here, why do you spend all the money...and actually it's a pretty good pay off.

[KERNS] For Restoration Radio, I'm Josh Kerns standing on the banks of the Duwamish river.