Last month an environmental engineer from Phillips 66 contacted me, right before I was set to leave for the Colorado trip. She explained that there was a beaver dam flooding an access road to one of their facilities in Rodeo, California and asked about installing a pond leveler. Later that day we toured the site, and I found this “dam”. It’s pretty small—maybe 20′ across, by 2-3 feet tall, but enough to make a little pond across the road.

She was very clear about wanting to keep the beaver in the creek. This is very exciting news, and I hope that the project can make it through the permitting process, but this is by no means a done deal. A lot of great ideas get killed in the paperwork department.

Right now it looks pretty good, although the unwelcome specter of million-dollar insurance has appeared. It seems excessive to me—I can assemble the whole thing off-site, and will be off the road for the whole build. That said, liability can be a real barrier for some folks, and I’ll have to figure this one out eventually.

Side Note: I’ve noticed a tendency toward unnecessary complexity in the planning process. As a result, I’m posting this as a kind of FAQ for anyone in the crowd who might be involved with permitting (to be updated as needed):

Some important notes about pond levelers.

1. Beaver “dams” are nothing more than soft, leaky piles of sticks and mud that briefly slow down the flow of water. They don’t actually stop the water, they’re not anchored to anything solid, and they won’t survive high flow events.
2. Pond levelers are very simple. A pond leveler is a small cage made of fencing, and a short length of flexible pipe. An experienced person, working alone, can make and install one in 4-5 hours using simple hand tools.
3. Therefore no concrete or engineering is required. It’s a small, flexible pipe installed through a soft pile of sticks and mud. During high flow events that briefly overwhelm the pond leveler’s flow capacity, the beaver “dam” it is installed through will be first overtopped, and then washed downstream entirely if flows are high enough.
4. A pond leveler is not a siphon. In fact, these systems are specifically designed to make sure that siphoning is impossible. The entire top of the pipe is perforated, ensuring that no vacuum can form.
5. It can’t build any pressure. There is zero “head”, because the inlet for the pipe is below the outlet. The pond leveler simply acts as an overflow for the beaver dam, no differently than an open spillway.
6. And it can’t drain the area. Since the pipe is installed in the top of a beaver dam, it will only lower the water as far as the bottom of the pipe. The installer and landowner determine the final water height. This allows the beavers to stay in the area, prevents flooding, and retains valuable habitat for all the other species that depend on the beaver ponds.

Many thanks to Sue Smith for being an early adopter! This was my first beaver management device installed in California. Kate Lundquist of OAEC’s Water Institute coordinated, Jim Coleman of OAEC shot all the photos, and I did most of the build and install. Sue’s a dream client—very clear about what she wanted, super helpful and glad to lend a hand. Plus she’s got a friendly dog and some longhorn cattle who watched us coolly from afar. The install went smoothly, although I could see it was killing Sue not to take the fencing pliers away and show me how a real rancher does it…

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the rain. This is no trivial matter, given the “driest year on record” status of the escalating drought. Which brings up the delicate question of the ever-dwindling Sierra snow pack. What do we imagine will happen when what little snow we usually get turns to rain? My guess is we’ll get epic flooding early, leaving California parched in the dry season because there’s no long melt cycle feeding the rivers. My suggestions are simple:

1. Get beavers as high up in the Sierras as we can to trap all that water, and do it just as soon as we can.
2. Quit shooting our solutions! Let’s employ non-lethal management methods so beaver can do what they’re good at: controlling flooding and sequestering water.

Update 2/8/14

After the driest year on record, we’re now setting records in the other direction, but only locally. With 6.5″ of rain falling in 24 hours, parts of Sonoma County are getting the 4th wettest day in 20 years. Right now, the storm is still dumping, and another 3 inches and change have fallen in the last 10 hours. This is making the case better than anything I could make up. Put simply: we need more beavers to help manage both droughts and flooding. And if we can’t bring in beavers, we need to BE beavers. Note that this lifesaving Pineapple Express has done Southern California (the breadbasket, etc.) no good at all.