Photo Credit: Chris Arend / Courtesy of USKH Inc.
“Kids,” now in their 60s, who grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, remember Fish Creek as a babbling brook running through Blueberry Bog at the city’s southern edge. It was a place where moose roamed, salmon swam up the creek to spawn, and bears ate berries, salmon, and an occasional roaming moose.
Fast forward 30 years and the landscape had changed dramatically--the babbling brook was gone, replaced with a mostly culverted creek that, where exposed to the air, was in a straight-line ditch. Taking the place of salmon were shopping carts, plastic bags, and construction debris. Drainage structures had been sized for stream flows for the salmon-filled creek, but rapid urbanization of Anchorage’s expanding “Midtown” generated buildings, roads, and parking lots that increased runoff quantities. The result was poor water quality for Fish Creek and, more seriously, flooding of roadways, businesses, and homes.
Separate Issues, One Ultimate Goal
While Fish Creek was degrading, two separate but related efforts were taking shape. First, citizen park activists identified a need for parkland in the rapidly urbanizing Midtown area. Second, public-works officials and water-resource interests joined together to begin the process of restoring waterways to address water-quality concerns and flooding that was becoming more problematic.