Summer Fires Fuel Logging Debate Controversial Program Will Get Big Test Next Year

TESTED BY FIRE Special report

The smell of smoke inside the Country Trading Post near Sula, Mont., still chokes owner Darlene Lister.

But the store, protected by fire-retardant foam, survived a massive August wildfire that claimed some 70 homes in the Bitterroot Valley.

The Listers readied for fire by taking away its fuel. They cleared brush from around their house, located a half-mile from the store. They thinned trees nearby.

“If we hadn’t cleaned out around it, I’m sure it would have burned,” Darlene Lister said. She’s relieved to be seeing 30-degree temperatures return to the valley connecting Lost Trail Pass and Missoula.

That backyard strategy — logging to beat future fires — is about to be tested on a much larger and more controversial scale. Some say it won’t work outside of people’s yards.

The Clinton administration wants to spend $1.8 billion to pay for the summer’s fire suppression and rehabilitation efforts on federal forests and rangelands. As proposed, $277 million will go toward “fuel reduction” — logging to prepare forests for controlled burning — to reduce fire risk across the West.

Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and other western Republican leaders have backed the proposal, blaming past inaction by the Clinton administration for what they call a catastrophic wildfire season.

“It may be just as devastating next year if we do not begin to remove the fuel load,” Kempthorne told the House Agriculture Committee last week.

But a fire ecology expert says fuels treatment will do nothing to prevent fires on as much as three-quarters of the Intermountain West’s forests.

That strategy works in dry, Ponderosa pine forests like those found around Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, according to Leon Neuenschwander, a University of Idaho fire ecologist.

Such conditions typify only about a quarter of the region’s forests, according to Neuenschwander.

“I think that point can’t be overestimated,” he said. “We aren’t really talking about the vast majority of the forests in Idaho, Montana or eastern Washington.”

Forest Service officials acknowledge fuels treatment won’t work everywhere.

The Clinton Administration proposal calls for small-tree thinning to prepare thick forests for the reintroduction of fire.

But rather than logging in remote areas, the agency’s top priority is clearing forests around people’s homes and communities, a Forest Service spokesman said.

“It’s not our intent to go out and do a bunch of thinning in the general forest and then tell everybody the forest is now fire-safe,” said Chris Wood, aide to Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck. “The intent is to take the most immediate action right around homes.”

Kempthorne and timber industry backers, however, say dense western forests need much more aggressive logging. Republicans in hearings this fall are urging fellow members of Congress to increase timber harvests.

Frank Carroll, a spokesman for Potlatch Corp., criticizes the administration’s fuel reduction strategy as underfunded and inadequate.

Carroll walked a thinned forest owned by Potlatch near Bovill last week. Widely spaced trees contrasted with a dense, less-managed federal forest nearby.

“You literally could not walk through it,” he said. “People have got to decide: there’s only one fate for that forest. It’s either destroyed by insects or fire.

“If you want to see a particular forest alive in the West today, you’re going to have to do something to see that it lives.”

Such concerns - that federal fuels treatment won’t go far enough - have Western governors arguing for local control of whatever treatment occurs on federal lands.

Idaho is better than the Forest Service at preventing fire on its land, Kempthorne says.

“We do manage our forests better at the state level,” said Kempthorne spokesman Mark Snider. “Almost every month, the land board approves thinning or removing infested trees. On the federal level it takes forever.”

Environmentalists challenge the state’s push for more control.

Mark Petersen, with The Lands Council in Spokane, challenges the state’s contentions regarding sound forest management, pointing to state holdings east of Upper Priest Lake and on the Floodwood Forest on the North Fork of the Clearwater River.

“They’ve hammered those areas,” he said. “It’s irresponsible what they’ve done.”

Any federal funds should target ways to make buildings as fire-resistant as possible, Petersen added.

“Fuels reduction is a great idea if you want to fireproof structures. Thinning to prevent forest fires out in the national forests probably won’t do anything to protect communities or private homes.”

Wood, with the Forest Service, said fuels treatment decisions will be made locally, by each National Forest supervisor. But the agency can’t legally give authority to the states, he said.

“We intend to work in full cooperation with the governors. However, decision-making authority ultimately has to rest with the Forest Service. That’s our legal mandate.”

This year’s fires started with a deepening pool of cold water in the Pacific Ocean known as La Nina that led to drier than usual conditions last fall, winter and spring.

Drought conditions, coupled with summer lightning storms, fueled fires that cost the region’s economy millions of dollars.

Along with about 84 Montana homes that burned, about 35 ranches and cabins were lost to fires in the Idaho communities of Atlanta, Burgdorf Junction, Panther Creek, Challis and Salmon.

Outfitters in Idaho and Montana estimate they lost a total of $41.5 million to lost river trips and guide services, according to a preliminary regional Forest Service report.

The Montana Department of Commerce estimated that fires and forest closures resulted in roughly $5 million in lost wages for lumber and wood products workers. However, some of those wages were retrieved when locals were hired to battle the flames. Fighting regional fires as of last month cost an estimated $378 million.

Today, residents of Salmon are trying to get back to normal living.

The fires didn’t burn into town but ran through the mountains above and below Salmon.

Tourism in town dropped precipitously.

Economically, the town could still face hardships through winter and spring as businesses founder under slow summer revenues, said Lanny Sloan, the city’s administrator.

But the fire also brought good news: the town is working with the U.S. Economic Development Administration to diversify away from a tourism and natural resource economy.

A business park luring start-up companies drawn to the beauty and relaxed pace of the area is one possibility.

“We have to think up new ways to make money in Salmon,” Sloan said. “It’s obvious we can’t depend on the forest for a livelihood any more.”

The nearly 7 million acres of wildfires across the country - and more than 2.2 million acres in Idaho and Montana - didn’t scorch everything in their path.

Most fires burned in patches, scorching a mosaic pattern that left charred embers mixed with green trees and range.

“We are getting a sense it’s quite patchy,” said Jim Clayton, director of the Boise Forestry Sciences Laboratory. “Some stuff burned quite hot and some didn’t. That’s typically the way wildfire works.”

In places in the Bitterroots and central Idaho, fires burned so hot the soil fused into a water-repellent layer, setting the stage for landslides next spring if fire-seared slopes aren’t stabilized now.

Fires this summer burned hot enough in places to warrant some concern over the next few years.

But officials say the so-called “hydrophobic soils” are only a flood or erosion risk if other factors such as a deluge or steep slopes are also involved.

“The concern we have generally is for high-intensity thunder storms or spring runoff that comes abnormally fast,” said Jeff Amoss, resource staff officer on the Bitterroot National Forest. “We’re looking at the biggest effects being next spring or summer.”

Before the flames were out, scientists like Jim Mital hit the fire lines to start emergency recovery work.

Mital served as a Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation team leader.

Normally the Clearwater National Forest’s forest ecologist, he sifted through the ashy duff left by the Crooked fire near Lolo Pass at the Montana border.

The rehabilitation teams develop quick-turnaround plans to stave off threats to life and property and limit erosion and flooding.

Federal guidelines give them only seven days after a fire is controlled to come up with a plan.

The work is supposed to start before the first fall rains hit fire-scarred earth, causing erosion that threatens fish and increases risk of landslides.

“Normally we get out while the fire is still burning,” said Mital. “We don’t wait. We’re wearing Nomex gear and hard hats just like the fire crews.”

The Crooked fire, a blaze started by logging equipment that burned nearly 5,000 acres, is a good example of the work the teams hustle to do.

Mital submitted a rehabilitation plan for the Crooked fire requesting $97,000 in federal funds - he got $81,000 - with several recommendations:

Remove a culvert on a creek flowing into the Crooked Fork River because it can’t handle higher postfire stream flows. Along with water sluicing from hydrophobic soils, the fire destroyed trees that previously absorbed water.

Plant conifers to reduce the risk of landslides.

Cut down trees and place them parallel to the slope of steep hillsides to trap sediment, keeping it out of the water where it chokes fish.

The fire also did some good.

“Bear grass is resprouting. This, in one of the driest summers in recorded history,” Mital said. “Snags will create really great bird habitat for cavity nesters. In many ways, the fires really are doing a lot of good in some areas.”