Hatchery Flooded

[T.J. Clarke]

I read the hatchery flooded this week due to the rains.   The hatchery manager said he was "optimistic" the impact would be minimal?  

[Skeeter ZX190]

3 hours ago, T.J. Clarke said:

I read the hatchery flooded this week due to the rains.   The hatchery manager said he was "optimistic" the impact would be minimal?  

Some pictures have been posted on Facebook.  Looked like they got slammed pretty hard.  The USGS gauge at Montauk went offline at 4:15 am on November 5.  At that point the rain gauge was showing 10 inches of rain and the gauge height of the water was at 12 feet and rising (normal is around 2).  I saw someone post that the park is closed so there will be no catch & release this weekend while they continue to do clean up.

[bfishn]

As a former trout farmer this hits home so hard it hurts. There are so many things that can go wrong, but if you're on your game you can predictably win. Except for floods. When your contained body of water joins with a surface flow it's all over. I was on my game, but floods wiped me out 2 years out of 10. It should have been some consolation to know that some of my fish were caught on their way to Oklahoma, but it wasn't. 

Then there's the gravel. If any part of the inlet was piped instead of diverted, the pipes are now full of it.  A little water gets thru, but you can't run on it. I was able to cleanout ~100' each of 2 - 6" pipes by feeding a length of mono down thru the gravel. Took 4 months at inches a day. It finally came out the other end and I pulled a 16GA SS cable thru with it, ended up with a rope and a log chain, and I got them opened again. 

I have to feel even sorrier for any hatchery manager working on public funding. Rarely are they allowed to do what they choose, based on their experience at the facility. 

[jdmidwest]

I saw some pics, looked like tons of sand in the runs and around them.  It was a scouring flood from upstream that gouged the sands up from the stream and dumped in the slower parts,   the water below the levees of the runs.

[Quillback]

13 hours ago, bfishn said:

As a former trout farmer this hits home so hard it hurts. There are so many things that can go wrong, but if you're on your game you can predictably win. Except for floods. When your contained body of water joins with a surface flow it's all over. I was on my game, but floods wiped me out 2 years out of 10. It should have been some consolation to know that some of my fish were caught on their way to Oklahoma, but it wasn't. 

Then there's the gravel. If any part of the inlet was piped instead of diverted, the pipes are now full of it.  A little water gets thru, but you can't run on it. I was able to cleanout ~100' each of 2 - 6" pipes by feeding a length of mono down thru the gravel. Took 4 months at inches a day. It finally came out the other end and I pulled a 16GA SS cable thru with it, ended up with a rope and a log chain, and I got them opened again. 

I have to feel even sorrier for any hatchery manager working on public funding. Rarely are they allowed to do what they choose, based on their experience at the facility. 

Just curious how you got cold water to raise trout, how many you raised and where you sold them?  

[tjm]

@bfishn my young son enjoyed catching what I guess were a couple of your fish near White Bluff back then, late '80s? He still mentions it occasionally. 

Did all that gravel in the pipes come from the spring?

[bfishn]

44 minutes ago, tjm said:

@bfishn my young son enjoyed catching what I guess were a couple of your fish near White Bluff back then, late '80s? He still mentions it occasionally. 

Did all that gravel in the pipes come from the spring?

Cool! They wouldn't have been my fish until '90, but I'm sure others lost some too. Heck, there was a pool just across the street in the discharge just above the dump to Little Sugar where I was able to throw-net hundreds of pounds over the years and bring them home. Never considered the legality of that, they were my fish, and they wouldn't last long in much warmer waters below.

Yeah, the cave flooded too, and puked gravel on the big ones. No one had removed any of that forever, so when I got there everything on the upper end was buried in feet of it, and the 4 - 6" lines from the cave box were chock full, and the covered fingerling raceway the pipes fed were abandoned. I made it all work again, only to have a giant oak destroy the roof.

The really bad floodwater didn't enter the picture until you were downstream of the hatchery/fingerling bldgs, right at the head of the feedout raceways. A large hollow draining much of trailer hill rolled in there, and it became way more than a gullywasher at times, bringing all the leaves and debris in the holler with it. The debris instantly plugs the raceway screens and they overflow if you can't keep up with cleaning them. Same thing at the fishout pond. I spent many nights in waders cleaning screens and constantly reassessing the conditions. I largely kept my crop as a result, but then you get one that you have to walk away from.

[bfishn]

3 hours ago, Quillback said:

Just curious how you got cold water to raise trout, how many you raised and where you sold them?  

Wow, I just lost a lengthy reply somehow, and don't have it in me again at the moment. This old Vista article gives a decent summary;

https://bvwv.nwaonline.com/news/2020/jul/01/opinion-trout-farm-part-of-bella-vista-history/

 

[Quillback]

Thanks - All this time I lived here I never knew that place existed.  

[tjm]

Kieth had previously built a similar trout hatchery  at the spring in Cave Springs, IIRC. But in the '50s & '60s almost every spring in the region had a trout rearing setup of some sort at least once. I've thought back to how many there were of those in SWM &NWA and wondered if the governments had run some subsidy programs for them. But there were also many small creeks that got trout stockings for a while, so it may have just been a sort of fad, public fascination with the RBT that eventually wore off.

I don't think that was 71 highway back then either, in Mo it was Mo.88. The US highway went west from Bentonville through Gravette and north through Noel scenic routes were the rule then. Truckers shortcutted through Bella Vista on the state roads.