When fire & forest health came to town: The forest service hopes its national fire plan can restore woodlands while benefitting local economies

American Forests, Wntr, 2002 by Mark Matthews

Dawn breaks. Loggers fan out across a low-elevation, dry Western forest, avoiding the healthiest, biggest timber to cut brush and small-diameter trees from the crowded understory. Lightweight skidders drag downed trees to a loading deck where a machine shaves off the branches. As the thin trunks are piled onto trucks, other workers throw branches into a chipper, which sprays thumb-sized pieces of wood into a dump truck.

'The trucks deliver the logs to a local mill, where some become furniture, others paneling, flooring, posts, poles, or logs for small buildings. On the other side of town, the wood chips are delivered to a co-generation plant where they're burned into a gas that powers a motor that turns an electric turbine. The electricity passes to the woodworking plant and throughout the neighborhood of well-kept homes.

That's the dream of many Westerners living near public forests, but these hopes hinge on an innovative federal land-management project with a twofold mission: to restore forest health and make rural communities safer from catastrophic wildfires.

But the National Fire Plan (NFP) has a third agenda. "The NFP has a great opportunity to benefit the local community," says Diane Snyder, executive director of Wallowa Resources, located on the eastern front of Washington's Cascade Mountains. "It's the first time there's been a written edict from Congress to benefit local economies from restoration work and to get some commercial return from public lands."

OVERSTOCKED FORESTS

In 1999 the General Accounting Office warned Congress that 45 million acres of low-elevation, dry forests were primed to fry in catastrophic crown fires, putting western communities in jeopardy. The reason for the risky situation can be traced to 70 years of aggressive fire suppression. Historically, every five to 17 years low-intensity ground fires cleared debris and small trees from these forests, most dominated by fire-resistant Ponderosa pine. But since the 1920s public foresters have tried to put out every fire--before they could do their janitorial work.

Now, with broken branches littering the ground and small understory trees growing thickly together, allowing fire to easily climb into the crowns of mature trees, simply reintroducing fire into the ecosystem is not an option. For now, much of nature's work must be done by human hands.

The 2000 fire season was a wake-up call for many Americans, including politicians. Nationwide, fires scorched 7.4 million acres, almost twice the 10-year average. As the charred western hillsides smoldered under last autumn's rains, Congress allocated $1.9 billion to a National Fire Plan (NFP). Some of that money bolstered firefighting resources, but a large percentage was earmarked for making communities safer from the wildfire threat.

"The aim (of the restoration work) is to put the right kind of fire back in these woods: low-intensity, cool fire," says Jerry Williams. director of fire and aviation for the U.S. Forest Service.

TALL TIMBER, SMALL TIMBER

The easiest way to reintroduce cool fire would be to thin the ladder fuels, then set prescribed burns. But a lot of wood fiber would either be left rotting on the forest floor or burned in slash piles. Driven by desperation, some western communities used to cutting tall timber are now recognizing small-diameter trees as a valuable commercial resource.

In central Oregon, when the surrounding forests were shut down in the early 1990s because of threats to endangered Chinook salmon, the community-based group Wallowa Resources began looking for ways to bolster the county's economy while diversifying the wood-products industry.

"By 1994 there was no timber harvest," Snyder says. "Three sawmills shut down. The level of fear and frustration in the community was very high."

The next year Snyder's group raised money for a fuels-reduction project and in the process discovered some value for Douglas-fir. Wallowa Resources, which eventually invested money in the nearby Joseph Timber Co., started making 2x4s and 2x6s out of Doug-fir. Then, after consultations with the Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, other products followed: flooring, paneling, teepee poles, posts and poles, round wood for log homes, and temporary telephone poles. The group is currently expanding its research in small-diameter wood products with a $176,000 grant through the NFP. They hope NFP thinning projects, manned by local loggers, will provide a steady supply of wood in the future.

The scenario is being mirrored in communities throughout the West.

In California's Trinity County, where 75 percent of the landscape is made up of public land, the Watershed Research and Training Center brokered an agreement with the Forest Service, timber industry, and environmentalists to get workers back into the woods in the mid-1990s.

"Everything was way out of whack," says executive director Lynn Jungwirth. "We thought that maybe if we could create a use and put a value on submerchantible timber material, we can create an economic incentive to clean up the forests."