Poor Forest Management Blamed For Flood Damage
Logging should be suspended on federal forests in the Northwest until there is a tally of damage from recent flooding in heavily logged areas, environmental groups said in a letter Thursday to President Clinton.
Much of the flood damage has been caused by poor forest management, the Idaho Conservation League and 17 other groups said in the letter.
“We must first understand what has caused the problem before continuing with problems that may simply recreate or exacerbate the problem,” the letter said.
In North Idaho, meanwhile, state and private timber officials say the damage would have been much worse if they hadn’t been aggressively improving roads in recent years.
A perfect example of the damage is found on state and private land around the Floodwood State Forest, environmentalists say. The area is an important source of timber for mills in the St. Maries area and the slides are making it more difficult to get trees to the finishing saws.
There are between 50 and 100 slides in the Floodwood and the devastation appears worse than what appeared in the Clearwater National Forest after November rains, said Larry McLaud of the Idaho Conservation League.
“Most all of the slides started at a road and go downhill,” McLaud said after flying over the area Tuesday. The largest slides are in the largest and most recent clear-cuts, he said.
The rain storms melted snow too rapidly and caused flooding, “but the hand of man was also working here,” McLaud said. “You can’t look at it as a natural event with regard to the roads, the mudslides and the silt in the streams.”
State and private timber officials acknowledge it’s the worst damage in memory. They say roads and clearcuts added to the problems, but put much of the blame on Mother Nature.
“On balance, considering the amount of water we had and the warm winds that came through, I expected worse,” said Sam Charles of the Idaho Department of Lands. And “this does happen in a virgin forest.”
Most of the slides happened on old roads and most happened on private or federal land, Charles said. The state changed its road building standards in the early 1980s and that prevented a much worse disaster.
“Had this event occurred 10 to 15 years years ago, it wouldn’t have been pretty,” he said.
Potlatch sustained heavy damage to its 670,000 acres, some of which is intermingled with the Floodwood State Forest, spokesman Mike Sullivan said. You can’t blame logging and roads, he said.
“In such an event, with such a massive amount of precipitation, land is going to move,” he said. Potlatch foresters estimate that at Bovill, for example, there was 5-1/2 inches of precipitation in recent storms.
That’s one-fifth of the total annual average precipitation, Sullivan said.
“These are not natural events,” countered Barry Rosenberg of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council. “If we did not have roads and clearcuts, we would not have this much dirt in the creek.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Map of mudslide area
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