Salvage Operation Under Scrutiny Boise National Forest Officials Admit Mistakes Were Made

Congressmen from New York and Minnesota want federal investigators to examine allegations that state and federal laws were broken during a huge salvage logging project in the Boise National Forest.

Brian Haaser, an assistant inspector general for the Department of Agriculture, said Tuesday that his staff is reviewing the request and probably will decide within a week whether to pursue an investigation.

Boise National Forest officials acknowledged on Tuesday that mistakes were made during the salvage operation. Some 800,000 firedamaged trees accounting for more than 100 million board feet of timber were removed from 256,000 acres swept by the Foothills Fire east of Boise in August 1992.

But a forest spokesman called the mistakes minor and maintained that the salvage operation overall was unusually well planned and executed.

“Yes, in an operation over an area a third the size of Rhode Island, we made some mistakes here and there,” Frank Carroll said. “In our view, the errors were so small that they in no way diminished the power of an almost epic human effort.”

Carroll said the Forest Service learned lessons from the Foothills project and used them in developing its plan for the salvage logging of 77,500 acres of forest burned in last summer’s Star Gulch fires. For example, he said, the agency now plans to require that larger trees be left standing.

Ron Mitchell of the Idaho Sporting Congress, who outlined 2,200 alleged violations of state and federal law in a March report, said the mistakes are far more significant than the Forest Service concedes.

“This project is a monster, and they’re trying to cover it up with double-speak,” Mitchell said. “They never suspected in their wildest dreams that anyone would think to check up on them.”

Mitchell’s report alleges the Forest Service repeatedly logged too close to streams and took other actions that violated guidelines agreed to in an environmental assessment.