Viewpoint: Repealing roadless rule threatens clean drinking water

Ben Rigby

Turn on your tap and clean water comes out. It’s that simple, right?

Not even close.

I’m a water-treatment expert and third generation water professional. I know what goes into providing clean, clear, and safe drinking water for our communities.

Repealing the Roadless Rule, as decision makers in Washington, D.C. are trying to do, threatens the foundation of our drinking water infrastructure. Since 2001, the Roadless Rule has helped prevent unnecessary road building and development across more than six million acres of undeveloped national forest lands in Montana, many of which directly support municipal and rural drinking water systems.

It’s logical: Roads and their associated uses increase contamination. At the same time, they reduce the ecosystem’s ability to remove that contamination. That means we need more treatment, more chemicals, more backwashing, and more staff time for water treatment. That means higher costs for ratepayers. It means more risks to public health, especially in communities without the resources for advanced filtration systems.

Roads, especially unmaintained backcountry roads, affect clean water in two primary ways.

First, they increase erosion, sedimentation, and contamination high in our watersheds. Even minor activities can markedly increase the amount of sediment water treatment plants must filter out. Roads also increase contamination from hydrocarbons, including gas, diesel, oil, and other substances that leak or spill from vehicles and must be removed before water is safe to drink. Pollutants like this can make water essentially untreatable until the contamination is removed.

During my time with the City of Helena, diesel-soaked woodchips made their way downstream into the treatment plant. We had to shut the plant down to clean out the woodchips, protect the system, and protect Helena’s water. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s what happens when activity creeps into headwaters. It costs ratepayers money and hurts water quality.

Second, road building and the increased activity that comes with it weaken the natural filtration processes that keep our water clean.

Consider Helena’s Tenmile Creek watershed. The watershed is divided between protected roadless areas and roaded areas. Tenmile’s water quality is generally good, but its few roads sit on steep slopes and are built from native materials, making them difficult to maintain. These roads act like gutters, short-circuiting the watershed’s natural filtration: After spring melt or a hard rain, washouts send fine sediment racing down the roadbed instead of soaking into the forest floor. Water reaches the intake cloudy and loaded with sediment, making it slow and costly to clean up.

It’s a double hit, and it doesn’t need to happen. Roadless areas are a crucial part of our water treatment infrastructure. Keeping roadless protections in place reduces the chance that pollutants ever enter our headwaters in the first place, and it provides layers of protection if pollutants do find their way into the system. Roadless areas store water in soils and forests, slow it down, filter it, and deliver it to our intakes cleaner and more reliable.

Montana is fortunate to have numerous critical watersheds protected by the Roadless Rule. The headwaters of the Gallatin River and Hyalite Creek, which supply much of Bozeman’s water, are protected roadless areas. The headwaters of the South Fork Flathead and Clearwater rivers, crucial to the northern Flathead Valley and the Seeley-Swan, flow from roadless areas, as do Ashley Creek near Thompson Falls and the North Fork of the Blackfoot near Ovando. Roadless areas in the Highland and Boulder Mountains help supply Butte’s drinking water.

Repealing the Roadless Rule would put these watersheds at risk of contamination and fragmentation, compromising the quality of our drinking water. From the operator’s chair, the stakes are simple: protect roadless headwaters and you protect both water quality and ratepayers.

Instead of stepping backward, we should continue to support common-sense conservation efforts that protect our natural resources and strengthen the long-term health and resilience of our communities. The cheapest, most dependable treatment is the kind nature provides upstream when we let forests and soils do their job.

Ben Rigby is the executive director of Montana Rural Water Systems and former water treatment superintendent for the City of Helena.