Road Plan Called A Washout It’s Dumb To Rebuild Flawed Forest Roads Without Redesigning Them, Official Says
Forest Service roads are falling apart across North Idaho this winter due to poor maintenance and inadequate road design, not because of unseasonably high rainfall, the Idaho Fish and Game Department says.
And using emergency federal money to rebuild some of these roads is “resetting the time bombs” for the roads to crumble again during the next big rain, acting regional Fish and Game Supervisor Steve Agte wrote to Panhandle Forests Supervisor Dave Wright. These washouts are part of what makes watershed problems a more serious threat to forest health than salvaging dead and dying trees.
Wright disagrees. But he won’t elaborate until he has an opportunity to reply directly to Fish and Game’s Jan. 5 letter.
“That letter is full of many, many inaccuracies,” Wright said. “I just want to respond to them individually instead of through the paper.” That’s been delayed by the federal shutdown and resulting furlough of employees.
The Panhandle Forests are asking for $500,000 to repair roads damaged by November and December rains. When the damage inventory is complete, forest managers expect to need more than $750,000 to deal with culverts that plugged and washed out, or roads that were overloaded with rain and went pouring down slopes.
That’s a fraction of what will be needed to repair roads on the Clearwater National Forest to the south, which was hit even harder.
The Federal Highway Administration keeps a special fund for repairing any federal roads damaged by floods. But some feel the rules dictate that the money can only be used to replace exactly what was there before.
That may mean a culvert that was too small to handle a rainstorm is replaced with the same size culvert, explained Chip Corsi, state fisheries biologist. “This is the type of thing that allows people to build back in the flood plain on the Mississippi River.
“We’ve got watersheds out there that are falling apart, losing native fish populations and recreational fishing opportunities,” Corsi said. “Let’s not reset something because there’s one type of money that says we have to reset it.
So far, Panhandle Forests officials have put the primary blame for the problems on nature. November delivered higher than average precipitation, but nothing out of the ordinary, Fish and Game said.
“For this reason we believe the road failures were not necessarily acts of nature, but rather a result of underdesigned stream crossings and a forest road system which is seriously undermaintained,” Agte wrote.
These road failures inflict damage on area watersheds that are so beleaguered that they are a more serious forest health problem than dead and dying timber, Agte wrote.
“Until routine maintenance becomes a priority with the Forest Service and those making the decision on how Forest Service budgets are allocated, we will continue to watch watershed conditions deteriorate in some of our most valuable aquatic ecosystems.” It’s a problem the Fish and Game brings up on almost every timber sale, officials said.
More than 50 percent of the watersheds on the Panhandle Forests are in poor condition or moving that direction, Corsi added. But local Forest Service officials aren’t necessarily to blame. Whoever is making the budget decisions, however, hasn’t allocated enough money to maintain the 18,000 miles of Forest Service roads in North Idaho for years.
Meanwhile, Congress has made salvage logging a priority. So while there’s money for new logging roads “they are still not addressing the need to maintain roads over time and that’s why they are falling apart,” Corsi said.
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