About the Jetty Creek Timeline

The Jetty Creek Timeline is a call to action to all Oregonians who care about drinking water, social justice, and public health. Jetty Creek is the poster child for Big Timber’s ongoing assault on drinking water sources, but it also illustrates a much bigger problem. Private timber companies own 48 percent of the watersheds in western Oregon that supply community drinking water systems. The modus operandi of these companies is clearcutting followed by aerial pesticide spraying. These practices are sanctioned by the Oregon Department of Forestry, even though 59 percent of drinking water systems recently tested in Oregon had pesticide detections, and 64 percent of coastal public water systems have had multiple “alerts” for carcinogens that are produced when sediment-laden water reacts with normal treatment plant chemicals.

The Jetty Creek Timeline begins in 1994 with aerial photographs showing clearcuts as they cover the watershed, which is the primary source of drinking water to Rockaway Beach, a town of 2,600 residents on the north coast of Oregon.

The Jetty Creek Timeline was authored by Betsy Herbert, Ph.D. to document the efforts of North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection (NCCWP) to save its drinking watershed.

Along with the clearcuts, the Jetty Creek Timeline reveals:

* A relentless series of highly toxic pesticide sprays

* A record number of state-issued water quality alerts for carcinogens in the town’s drinking water, caused by sediment combining with disinfectants during the treatment process.


* Economic impacts to the residents of Rockaway Beach who must now pay for a new multi-million dollar treatment plant, which was legally required to treat the polluted water


* Community efforts to stop the environmental assault on their drinking water


* Failures of government at all levels to address the degradation of drinking water caused by state-sanctioned, failed forest practices


* News articles, scientific research and government reports and that shed light on the threats to drinking water from current forest practices