Along the Willamette River Water Trail. Photo from Oregon Parks and Recreation.
If we’re ever going to restore the Willamette River basin, it’s going to cost a huge chunk of money.
Anywhere from about $593 million to $1.2 billion, according to Oregon DEQ.
In a new report, DEQ says decades of farming, logging and urban development have degraded the basins streams and rivers.
DEQ put together this report for the EPA, which collects information on how much it would cost to meet the nation’s water quality goals.
Here’s what DEQ found:
- About 96,000 acres may need restoring. Most of them, about 70%, are agricultural lands. But it also includes land inside urban growth boundaries.
- The money would need to be spent on removing land from agriculture and restoring it as habitat along streams and rivers. It also includes protecting waterways with fencing and improving in-stream habitat. A good portion of the money, maybe as high as 30%, would be used to pay rent to landowners so that state officials could have access to do the restoration work.
- The biggest problems include water temperatures that are too warm and too much sediment in the rivers and streams. Restoring the basin could eventually lower heat pollution by about 12.9 billion kilocalories daily. (A kilocalorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat one gram of water by one degree Celsius.) Planting shade trees along streams and rivers are an important part of cooling the water.
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