A scientific disagreement whose arguments are more easily, if only intuitively, grasped by the layperson as this is hard to find. The Sacramento Bee‘s Matt Weiser reports from a hearing where a parade of academics told reps of the Army Corps of Engineers that the latter’s policy to remove big trees and brush from levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is exactly backwards. The corps has its guidelines. They say that regional water and levee managers better remove those trees because their roots destabilize the barriers’ soil. Other experts, geotechnical engineers and the like, retorted that trees stabilize the dikes. Some offered data to show so. Another big issue locally is the levee tops’ roles as riparian wildlife abodes.
Most readers, doubtless, will root for the trees.
-CP
Leave a Reply