Red Oak Park rocks wrapped in chainlink divert water, eroding streambank

PLEASE click on photo to enlarge it and see detail.
Dumping assorted debris into a stream, such as stones, seldom improves the situation. Even the Army Corps of Engineers has made mistakes in managing waterways. So why would a developer or landowner imagine that dumping rocks in a stream this way would do anything but make the situation worse?

Streams work best when they meander. Ditching streams and damming streams seldom is wise. In this case, the powerful flow created by intense development at the headwaters of the usually dry bed of this stream in Fayetteville's Red Oak Park has been driven off course by the rocks in the creek and has eroded the vegetation and topsoil and revealed the nasty red-dirt base of the lot next door. If the flow from the south continues to increase with further development, a privacy fence few feet away will become more debris washing downstream toward the Illinois River.

Water quality in the Illinois all the way to Lake Tenkiller is affected by such new developments in Northwest Arkansas. In fact, it is actually surprising that Oklahoma hasn't filed suit against county and city governments in Northwest Arkansas for failing to manage stormwater to prevent siltation. I guess that Arkansas' resistance to eliminating pollution from chicken litter, hog feed lots and slow effort to clean up sewage-plant effluent makes Oklahomans believe we just don't care about their formerly spectacular scenic river.

I doubt the two Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality inspectors assigned to the new office in Calypso Crossing in Farmington have had a chance to visit Red Oak Park. They have to provide state inspection of pollution sites in Washington, Madison, Carroll and Benton Counties. Both were on vacation when I visited the office Friday to find out what they had to say.

How much is high-quality water worth? How much is preventing such mistakes as have occurred upstream from Red Oak Park worth? We'll get an idea when Dave Evans' revised report goes to the city council.

One has to realize that those inspectors aren't out checking our streams and rivers and lakes or construction sites except when there is a complaint from a citizen (or maybe from a concerned non-citizen). They spend several times as much effort on paper work as on site inspections.

They have to put together a report on a complaint and send it to Little Rock headquarters and wait for someone there to decide whether the report ought to be investigated. If someone in LR says go inspect, then they'll schedule a site visit. And sometimes they'll actually find the source of the problem. But the reporting citizen must pursue the subject or it may just slip through the cracks.

What this means is that the cities and counties must pass ordinances and hire inspectors and create maps to show potential developers what the limits of appropriate development on the region's land actually is, preferably before the developers buy the property and start destroying it and offering some more pie-in-the-sky to make NWA Arkansas into Gotham City.

Two state inspectors couldn't keep up with the environmental errors occurring in even one of NW Arkansas small towns much less four counties.