Posted on January 5, 2026
Like clockwork after major flooding, a seemingly logical call arises from impacted residents in Whatcom County: manage the water by removing gravel from the Nooksack River.
But scientists and other experts say it’s not the silver bullet people hope it is. The topic has been debated and studied, in a cycle that repeats itself with increasing frequency as the destructiveness of flooding intensifies.
Proponents note that the public demand for river alterations isn’t just a cry for dredging, and that other means of river modification are feasible. But on the Nooksack, progress toward system-wide flood risk reduction is painstakingly slow and requires buy-in from many disparate partners.
The dynamic Nooksack River carries enormous loads of sediment from glaciated headwaters in the North Cascades to Puget Sound, dropping much of that material along the flatter, slower reaches in Whatcom County’s agricultural heartland.
After widespread flooding hit Everson, Nooksack and Sumas in December, in a painful replica of the catastrophic November 2021 floods, the Whatcom Republican Party put out a news release demanding that county and state governments, as well as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local tribes, “immediately launch a joint effort to increase the flow capacity of the Nooksack and Sumas Rivers.” The GOP proposed reducing flood risk by dredging, sediment and gravel removal, log jam clearance and delta channelization.
This map shows the annual sediment load, in thousands of tons, of the rivers that drain into Puget Sound. The Nooksack River delivers more sediment than all the rivers in the region except the Skagit. (Map courtesy of USGS)
The discussion is roiling on social media as it did in 2021, and a petition circulating online has garnered almost 3,800 signatures. Residents recall commercial gravel bar scalping on the Nooksack in the 1960s through the 1990s and say if it was permitted again, it could mitigate flooding.
Although it was a financially viable operation at one point, after some local salmonids were federally listed as endangered species in the 1990s and changes were made to the Clean Water Act, gravel companies found the regulatory landscape too expensive and onerous to navigate.
The downsides of digging
Removing gravel can seem like an obvious answer to increasing the river’s flooding capacity, either by dredging (digging channels in the river bed) or scalping (removing gravel from bars above the water line), but studies and pilot projects in Washington through the years have shown the concept suffers from permitting complexities, environmental impacts and limited efficacy.
“Often I feel like when I hear this conversation, there’s a degree to which the essential problem is pretty well understood, but there are a few subtleties that are really important,” said Andrew Nelson, a geomorphologist with Northwest Hydraulic Consultants.
Those subtleties include the fact that the amount of fine sediment — sand and silt — deposited by the Nooksack is 10 times greater than the amount of larger sediment or gravel.
Sediment build-up is to blame for rising river levels, especially in the lower reaches of the river, Nelson said, but it’s less a product of gravel beds and more the layers of sand being laid down.
The river, which once was a complex multi-thread channel, has narrowed upstream of the Everson Bridge due to human development over the last century and is now a single thread bordered in many places by mature forests, which limit the river’s capacity to move sediment. The narrowing is a product of modifications like the removal of logjams and the addition of armored banks, known as revetments, that prevent natural erosion and lateral movement of the river channel over time.
A log jam forms on the side of the North Fork of the Nooksack River near Kendall in July 2025. (Finn Wendt/Cascadia Daily News)
“We see the channel narrowing in response to the revetments — it’s sediment accumulation but we’re thinking about the wrong kind of material when we focus on the gravel,” Nelson said.
Removing sediment upstream can actually speed up the intensity of water and sediment deposition downstream, and can scour salmon redds and cut off side channels that are prime habitat for juvenile fish.
A 1995 channel capacity study of the Nooksack determined how much material would have to be removed between Nugent’s Corner and Lynden to keep flooding within the streambanks. The study found excavations would need to be 2.7 million cubic yards to contain a five-year flood and 11.4 million cubic yards for a 100-year flood — 10 times the maximum that was ever harvested when gravel removal was happening on the river.
People who support gravel removal often cite other places in the Pacific Northwest where river mining has happened more recently.
In 2023, the University of Washington analyzed modern gravel removal on the Vedder and Fraser rivers of British Columbia and found it provided only minor, local flood reduction benefits while impacting fish habitat — and being subject to a complex and lengthy permitting process.
After floods in 2006 and 2009, Pierce County explored dredging and scalping on the Puyallup River following public demands. The county made a decade-long effort to test sediment removal before deactivating the project in 2019 due to permitting challenges and the expense of routine mining. (The pilot project was estimated to cost almost $5 million, not including habitat mitigation.)
Ander Russell, the co-executive director of conservation nonprofit RE Sources, said the region is dealing with a “two-headed hydra” — the legacy of a century of land-use decisions and the compounding effect of climate change. Russell noted the topic of gravel bar mining or dredging comes up every few years, usually after a major flood.
“The desire to find quick solutions after such a disaster makes sense but the facts are that dredging both above the high water line and within the river does not help mitigate flooding,” Russell said.
University of Washington models show that, with heavier rains and higher temperatures in fall and winter, today’s 100-year floods could potentially be 25-year events by the end of the century.
“It’s not going to get easier, or cheaper, as climate change compounds things,” Russell added.
If not deeper, wider
Everson Mayor John Perry acknowledged in an interview that dredging is “a politically charged word” but clarified it’s not what most people are calling for when they talk about gravel removal on the Nooksack. He believes something must be done to increase the capacity of the river, and if that means the county, tribes and state agencies are willing to permit gravel bar harvesting, “great.”
“But if we can’t, let’s go wider,” Perry continued. “If it’s easier to go wider than deeper, let’s go wider. We’re gonna have to cut into some farmland and create another side channel. Let’s do that. Whatever is the fastest way to accomplish the goal is what I want to do.”
In 2017, Whatcom County established the Floodplain Integrated Planning team (FLIP), a collaborative effort with local tribes, cities, state and federal agencies, the agricultural community and universities to develop long-lasting solutions that reduce flood risks to cities, farms and public infrastructure, while also protecting the environment and fish habitat.
Since the floods of 2021, FLIP has focused on the flow split, the spot near Everson where water sometimes jumps the banks of the Nooksack and wreaks devastation to the north and east, from Whatcom County into British Columbia.
The county has been working on solutions to deal with a changing river, with targeted smaller capital projects such as improved levees and berms, engineered log jams and new side channels, but Perry said “the speed isn’t fast enough” and there’s been “no effort” to come up with temporary flood protection measures for Everson, Nooksack and Sumas.
Whatcom County Public Works rebuilt a bank along the Nooksack River in Everson that was destroyed by the 2021 floods as water rushed across the farmland. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
Whatcom County public works spokesperson Mandy Feutz said the county understands people want to see risk reduction actions move as quickly as possible, but efforts at this scale require careful planning, review, funding and coordination across many jurisdictions.
“We continue to listen to community concerns and are focused on moving this work forward as responsibly and effectively as possible,” Feutz said.
Nelson, the geomorphologist, agrees with the “go wider” concept Perry cited — familiarly called the “Widen the Funnel.”
In June, Nelson’s firm completed its Everson Corridor Sediment Modeling Investigation for Whatcom County, in tandem with an in-depth investigation of several flood risk reduction concepts by another consultant, Herrera. The sediment study recommends a Widen the Funnel project that would combine levee setbacks and revetment removal near Everson to restore the river to a more natural state and increase its flood conveyance capacity to historic conditions. The project could take a decade at least, Nelson estimates.
And it’s not a simple proposal, because there are always tradeoffs — making the overflow corridor less flood-prone will put more water downstream toward Lynden, Ferndale and Bellingham Bay.
“In a fundamental way, I would say there’s a political problem here, not a technical problem,” Nelson said. “The things we could do to change that are fairly straightforward, but fundamentally they’re reallocating flood risk, and we can’t do that willy-nilly even if it might make economic sense. We have to do that through the kind of work the county is investing in that brings everybody to the table.”
He believes Whatcom County has shown “incredible leadership” in working toward a long-term solution in partnership with the many stakeholders impacted by river management.
“They’re doing heroic work to bring the whole community and the river co-managers and the Lummi and Nooksack tribes to the table to work collaboratively,” Nelson said. “Nothing we do won’t affect everyone when it comes to this central problem. It is the definition of a wicked problem in a technical sense. You can’t solve part of it without solving everything.”
Cascadia Daily News reporter Annie Todd contributed to this article.
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
