Winter maintenance in full swing on irrigation project
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ARLEE — Progress never comes easily, as several residents along Arlee’s Jocko Road found last week. When Merrill and Sunni Bradshaw got home Thursday evening, their back yard “looked like a bomb went off,” Merrill said.
After some investigating, the Bradshaws learned that they weren’t under attack, and the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project was responsible for the downed trees lining two canals in the couple’s yard. Clearing brush and cutting trees is necessary to maintain clear waterways, project manager Gordon Wind explained, and the shock value of the operation stems from the fact that very little maintenance has been done on most of the FIIP canals and ditches over the past 30 years.
“We’re trying to make a concerted effort to clear the canals. We’re just trying to get it back to the way it should be,” Wind explained. “Tree removal and vegetation removal is a normal process for irrigation systems … we’re just unlucky enough to have a lot of timber and tree growth.”
Last April, the Bureau of Indian Affairs officially turned over control of the Flathead Indian Irrigation Project to a cooperative management entity composed of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and the Flathead Joint Board of Control. The FIIP services 128,000 acres on the Flathead Reservation, with 17 dams and reservoirs and 1,300 miles of ditches and canals, and much of the system is more than 100 years old — making catching up on 30 years of neglected maintenance quite a task for Wind and his ditchriders.
“We’re trying very much to notify our landowners beforehand,” he said. “But you know we’re not perfect, but we’re trying.”
The FIIP owns a right-of-way defined in BIA law from the 1930s: “Rights-of-way reserved for the project’s irrigation system are of sufficient width to permit passage and use of equipment necessary for construction and proper operation and maintenance of the project’s canals, laterals and other irrigation works.”
“Basically it’s the width necessary to provide access … for equipment,” Wind explained.
“Typically we feel that a 16-foot width on most canals … is what we need.”
In addition to needing to maintain a clear path for access to the canals and ditches, “we would want to clean out the entire inside edge of the prism,” or canal bed, Wind said. That means all vegetation, even 20- or 30-year-old trees, will be removed from the immediate edges of the waterways.
“The trees are actually probably causing clogging of our water flow,” he said.
Currently, the FIIP doesn’t plan to do any re-vegetating along the canals, since “we can’t keep up with (the work) we have,” Wind said. But as a landowner, Wind said he understands that losing the aesthetic value of trees along the canals can be disconcerting.
“I would hope (landowners) would replant outside that (right-of-way) boundary,” he said.
Some Jocko Road residents were also concerned that their property would be damaged as FIIP workers drove through to reach the irrigation ditches.
“My biggest concern was that they haven’t defined the easement necessarily,” landowner Bryce Christian said.
About 300 or 400 feet of a lateral irrigation ditch runs through Christian’s property, and he worried that workers would drive through his fields of native plants to access the canal. But after he communicated his concerns to the project supervisor, Christian said workers were courteous and avoided damaging his plants — just the kind of outcome Wind hopes to achieve with all the maintenance work.
“We don’t want to be a big footprint and impact the folks out there — we work for them,” Wind said. “We want to be good neighbors, and we want to do our job.”
This type of canal maintenance will be an ongoing event all over the Flathead Reservation for at least the next several years, Wind added. Winter is the best time for ditchriders to clear vegetation obstructing the waterways, but “it’s gonna take us several years to catch up.”
“We will leave a clean right-of-way when we’re done,” Wind said. “It’s not our intent to leave a mess … we have to come back and take care of all the slash piles as well.”
If landowners would rather have the trees for firewood, they’re welcome to keep them, Wind said, or they can have FIIP workers pile the debris in an out-of-the-way spot. It may take a year before workers can burn the slash piles since the wood is green and burning is restricted during certain times of the year, he added.
