Loggers

Loggers

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You can’t rebuild a creek like that by taking a bulldozer and pushing a bunch of dirt and big rocks back in the creekbed. It doesn’t happen,” Mr. McGrail contended.

“When we had the natural riverbed, you could drive your cars through it and it didn’t silt up behind you. I really don’t understand why he did this. If he’d have left the damn thing alone, and driven his trucks over it like it was, he’d be far, far ahead of where he is now with this siltation problem.

“Granted, at this point, what do you do? You pull your hair out and say ‘what’s the best we can do?’ Well, we have to try and rebuild it . . . and that’s what he’s agreed to do.That’s all you can say.”

His chief complaint, he said, was the lack of environmental controls on the operation. “I don’t care,” Mr. McGrail said, “if the man gets punished or not. I just want to know that you can still drink the water.”

Mr. McGrail said that before the timber was sold Mr. Jenkins called him and asked for a right-of-way to the property. He said that he agreed, provided Mr. Jenkins grant him three conditions: (1) a 200-foot scenic easement alpng the creek along the east side of the timber cut to prevent erosion from the logging operation from washing into the creek; (2) post a bond of $2,000 for a period of four years in a local bank, in an account under his control, for the maintenance of environmental runoff barriers, such as haybales, on direct watersheds between the logging and the river; and (3) reinforce state Route 632 with heavy rock to keep the flatbed logging trucks from tearing up the roadbed.

In return for those concessions, Mr. McGrail said, he was prepared to grant Mr. Jenkins a permanent, deeded easement to him, his family and heirs for “personal, family-type traffic;” and a one-year easement at a mutually agreed-upon place to get the timber out, “where it wouldn’t tear things up.”

The agreement was never negotiated, Mr. McGrail said.