Dear Mr. Smoot,
Forty years after the Flood of ’85, it’s understandable that memories still run deep. But reading that some now want to “dredge” the South Branch or surrounding rivers and remove their fallen trees and natural debris is troubling and concerning.
The South Branch is one of West Virginia’s truly wild rivers. The logjams and snags people call “problems” are what create fish habitat, stabilize banks, and shape the river’s natural flow. Removing them to “speed up or open up” the water only increases erosion downstream and destroys the very character that makes this river special.
It’s frustrating to hear local officials frame federal environmental laws as red tape, when in truth those safeguards exist because we’ve seen what happens when we treat living rivers like drainage ditches. The Clean Water Act isn’t the enemy — it’s the reason the South Branch is still worth protecting. There isn’t a desire to raft and recreate in the concrete waters in Los Angeles but there is here in West Virginia.
Instead of dredging or “clearing” the river, we should focus on resilient infrastructure and better floodplain planning, not turning a wild river into a channel.
Let’s honor the lesson of 1985: you can’t out-engineer nature.
Jason Manning
Bridgeport/Onego
