Waiting to enter the Albany yard, a Portland & Western freight pauses above the log jam on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025.
The growing log jam under the railroad bridge across the Willamette River in Albany is slightly mysterious in at least a couple of ways.
Mystery 1: Why do log jams form on that bridge and not on, for instance, the two Albany highway bridges or the piers of the former steel bridge that now hold up the power lines spanning the river?
Mystery 2, or at least a question: How long will that log jam persist? It’s been there for a few years, getting bigger every winter. Will it eventually break up and float downstream? Or will it have to be dismantled, the way the railroad took apart a similar accumulation on the circular center pier in 2012?
The log jam is one of the sights to see from Albany’s Dave Clark Riverfront Path. I ride the bike there often, which is why here you see yet another story about this particular attraction.
A Google search took me to a scientific paper: “Formation, Growth, and Failure of Debris Dams at Bridge Piers.” It started this way:
“The accumulation of large wood debris around bridge piers obstructs the flow, producing increased upstream water levels, large horizontal structural loadings, and flow field modifications that can considerably exacerbate scour. These effects have frequently been held responsible for the failure of a large number of bridges around the world, as well as for increased risk of flooding of adjacent areas.”
When last I checked, in February 2023, spokesmen for the Portland & Western Railroad and the Oregon State Marine Board told me the Albany log jam was of no concern.
The way I understood the 2018 scientific paper by Diego Panici and Gustavo A.M. de Almeida, debris jams go through three stages: unstable, stable, and critical.
They go critical when the debris on one side of the pier becomes considerably bigger than the other side. And when that happens, they are likely to break free and float away.
So far there’s no sign of the critical stage on this one in Albany. But maybe if we wait long enough, this pile of logs, limbs and branches will go away on its own. (hh)
Here’s a closer look at the log jamon Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025.
This thing almost resembles a beaver dam.
Just a random thought/suggestion:
If there’s enough concern about this (& it’s not a personal safety risk) perhaps during the summer, when folks float down the river, they could gradually remove pieces of the log jam? It could be posted on social media just to get the word out? Like I said, just a random thought (idea) popping in my brain, lol
I get what you are saying, but a very bad idea. How most drown on the Santiam. Get washed into these snags on their floaties they can’t control, drug under, hung up on the branches and drown. Avoid!
Rather typical thinking…we’ll just wait until something breaks and then we’ll fix it. I prefer the “let’s maintain something so it doesn’t break” form of thinking. But, no, they’ll just wait for the chaos a failing bridge supplies…some humans are idiots that way.
It’s probably a simple cost factor of not bad enough yet. Consider the expense of all the union workers + floating “vessels”. You have to contain & remove the debris vs just dislodging it and sending multiple projectiles down the river. Else hope for a flood that might dislodge it and add to the projectiles floating down the river.
Really interesting story. Hopefully the original engineering of the bridge, especially those pilings underneath, were designed to hold the buildup.
Maybe the city is waiting for it to get big enough to sell to a land developer and build some condo’s.
Hope we don’t end up with an even bigger load of fertilizer in the river… The archaic standards these outfits get to abuse need overturned and updated,
Set it on fire