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which ties the soil together on the steep mountain slopes, has not regained 

 its anchoring properties. Without the support of tree roots, heavy rains 

 become a lubricant that allow whole paths of soil to slide as a mass down 

 hill. Some slides would fill thousands of dump trucks. Slides as large as a 

 hundred dump trucks are common. These mud slides inevitably work their 

 way into the streams bit by bit over a long period of time. Forest Service 

 research has concluded that the rate of slides from logging operations 

 increases by a five fold factor over the rate in uncut areas. Buffers are a last 

 line of defense against the slides and a first line of defense against broken 

 banks and log plowing during logging operations. Buffers on class II and III 

 streams will guard against gross and obvious impacts to water quality from 

 logging. 



A second effect which is not as easily detectable, but is equally detrimental, 

 is the change in both winter and summer stream temperature extremes. 

 Buffers act as insulation. Layers of tree boughs rise up to two hundred feet 

 on many 500 year old trees. These layers help prevent stream temperture 

 from rising above a maximum of 60 degrees, a point at which salmon begin 

 developing stress. The trees also prevent streams from freezing in winter, 

 thus killing the salmon eggs incubating in the pebbles. 



Finally, as the National Marine Fisheries Service research has established, 

 buffers are the store house for big trunks, branches, and root systems. Buffers 

 are to salmon streams what bones are to people, the structure which 

 supports them . These large pieces of wood hold banks in place and prevent 

 mud from running into the stream, they provide pools for fish, they absorb 

 the surge of heavy rains, they prevent the stream from becoming a race way. 

 Without a buffer strip at least 100 feet wide, there is no way to furnish the 

 stream with a continuous supply of big trunks and branches. I heard a 

 Forest Service hydrologist state at a conference that it was not practicable or 

 desirable to try to anchor trunks to streams. Floods inevitably pull the 

 anchors out. With no practical alternative to leaving the trees alone, buffers 

 should be legislatively mandated. 



Water Monitoring and Research 



For the 19 years that I have been an Alaskan resident and commercial 

 fisherman, the Forest Service has not conducted scientific monitoring for 



TESTIMONY OF ALAN STEIN 



