Reader support for B&G Farms

To the editor:

In July of 2012 came a rain and hail storm, the likes of which I’ve never seen before in the Columbia Basin dating clear back to 1952.

Rainfall like this I have only experienced firsthand in the path of East Coast hurricanes.

Walking through the sagebrush on land that has never been tilled you can still see ruts in the soil from the July storm runoff.

My driveway, was fabricated with a foot deep layer of caliches rock, packed with a 7,000 pound roller, a roller so heavy it breaks rocks. Yet this rain storm washed ruts in the road that had to be repaired.

Could any measure of care have prevented Mike Brown’s dirt slide? Perhaps, but only if he had a lagoon, a gigantic swimming pool, across the entire bottom of his circles that would have been able to contain all the water and dirt. But this time I really doubt it.

Besides, it isn’t the first time there have been slides even on undisturbed areas of Saddle Mountain. For as long as I can remember Saddle Mountain has been plagued with fires that destroy vegetation, leaving the soil exposed to erosion even from small amounts of rain.

Water is a powerful force, just look at what it did to create the scab lands, moving a mountain of basalt hundreds of miles long. The old entrance to the Saddle Mountain ice cave has long since been made impassable from rock slides which occurred long before Mike ever dreamed of farming the bench.

So how much water was it anyway? Using the size of a typical 640-acre circle covered with two inches of water, here’s the math:

One acre-inch (one acre covered with one inch of water) = 27,154.285 gallons x 2 inches x 640 acres = 34,757,484.800+ gallons of water. Add an equal amount of dirt = 69,514,969.600 gallons.

That's at two inches of rainfall. It was reported to be 2.5 inches.

According to the internet, an Olympic sized swimming pool holds 660,430 gallons of water. That calculates to 105.257 Olympic sized pools to contain the storm's runoff from just one circle.

So do you think Mike contributed to the Crab Creek erosion problem. Probably.

But do you really think he could have prevented this freakish severe storm from causing so much damage?

Dale Hellewell

Royal City