Council gets Cache Fire monitoring results
CLEARLAKE >> The Lake County Water Resources Division presented Cache Fire post-fire monitoring results during the Clearlake City Council regular meeting Thursday. Mayor Dirk Slooten, who is currently in vacation, still took part in the streaming virtually.
According to the Invasive Species Program Coordinator at County of Lake and Certified Lake Manager, Angela De Palma-Dow, the post-fire water quality monitoring response to the Cache fire (a quick-moving wildfire in Lake County which burned at least 60 homes and forced evacuations in the communities of Lower Lake and Clearlake last year) implemented by the division, is “fast and affordable”.
De Palma-Dow said the department had to “scramble and get some funds for this project. Everybody here pitched in: California Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, government of Yolo County, Yolo County Flood Protection, Watershed Conservation District, City of Clearlake and then some Insource Funding here at the county.”
A lot of the homes that were adjacent directly to the creek were built prior to 1975, a concern that was brought to the attention of Water Resources. “This was before a lot of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) standards were in place. There's a lot of materials in some of these homes that were very concerning for water quality, such as asbestos, heavy metals, lead, mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs),” she said. “The community that burned with these homes was basically structured to funnel water directly into the creek when there are rain events,” she said, adding that issues were exacerbated with the sloped landscape.
According to De Palma-Dow's report to the council, the extensive work after the incident included talking to neighbors to get an idea of the conditions where water flows and what happens when there is a storm event. “We work closely with the state and the city and any of the response agencies to look at the land activities that
were expected to occur, so we can get an idea of that mitigation,” she said.
De Palma-Dow also recalled last October and the atmospheric river events: “The creek filled up with water faster than the lake did, so all the water went backwards actually, flowing toward the lake.”
This year, the Lake County Water Resources Division started a stormwater monitoring program with help from the City of Clearlake. “Some of the monitoring challenges we had — low water levels — made it very difficult to determine when was the best time to sample. At the beginning of the season, there was not much water there. We wanted to make sure that we actually captured ambient screen conditions when we were sampling here, and not just a puddle that had been sitting there all summer long. That wouldn't give us accurate data about what the stream conditions are when we're comparing to fire impacts,” she added.
“And then we have the Cache Creek phosphorus. We care about phosphorus because that can drive cyanobacteria algae blooms. We had some influx, but not a whole lot, and slowly decreasing over the time post-fire too. The other ones that significantly popped out were calcium, barium, manganese, magnesium and vanadium. Usually after fires like the Mendo complex, we would see things like iron, aluminum, maybe some arsenic. We saw some of those in the first flush, but not in the next round of samplings and nothing really too concerning,” she concluded.
Clearlake City Council meets the first and third Thursdays of each month at Clearlake City Hall Council Chambers 14050 Olympic Drive. During the pandemic, meetings are available via zoom and YouTube Live. Agendas, minutes and meeting documents can be found online at https://www.clearlake.ca.us/143/City-Council.