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GRANTS PASS -- Three years after lightning sparked the biggest wildfire in the nation in 2002, salvage logging is limping along, with no end in sight
The Forest Service said Wednesday it has sold 67 million board feet burned by the Biscuit Fire -- enough to build 15,000 homes -- of which 25 million board feet has been harvested. That compares to 370 million board feet called for in the final logging plans issued a year ago. There is no word on when the bulk of the sales, located in roadless areas that environmentalists still hope to protect from logging, will be offered, if ever.
"It's been meaningful volume to the guys who got it, but given the controversy and the hype, it's been a yawner," said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group.
The money generated for forest restoration has fallen far short of expectations, too. The timber has sold for $5 million, an average bid of $75 per thousand board feet. That is about a third of the expectations of $187 to $250 per thousand board feet last year when the Forest Service declared an economic emergency to allow some of the sales to go forward despite appeals.
"The Forest Service put up the biggest straw man in its history," said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, one of the environmental groups that fought the logging. "It was just to create a political firestorm. I'm not sure there has been any advantage as it played out."
A lightning storm on July 13, 2002, sparked four fires in the Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon. With wildfires raging around the country, there were few resources to throw at it, and the fires grew into Biscuit, the biggest fire in the nation that year. The flames threatened 17,000 people and burned through a mosaic covering nearly 500,000 acres on the Siskiyou National Forest before being controlled Nov. 9, 2002 at a cost of $153 million.
A year after the fire started, the Forest Service was ready to move ahead with logging about 90 million board feet of timber, exclusively from lands which are designated primarily for logging.
But in August 2003, the Forest Service agreed to consider a report commissioned by timber industry supporters. The so-called Sessions report, from a group of forestry professors at Oregon State University, suggested as much as 2.5 billion board feet of timber should be cut.
When the final logging plan was issued June 1, 2004, the Forest Service decided to log 370 million board feet, with the bulk of it coming from old growth forest reserves and inventoried roadless areas, setting up a confrontation with environmentalists.
Biscuit became the focus of an intense political and scientific debate between the Bush administration and the timber industry on one side and environmentalists on the other over whether to log and reforest the millions of acres of national forest that burn every year, or leave them largely to recover on their own.
West and U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey blamed the appeals and lawsuits by environmentalists for delays.
But Stahl and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., point to the Sessions report, which added nearly a year to the planning process, during which time the dead timber continued to rot.
Stahl noted one injunction stopped logging for two weeks after a judge ordered the Forest Service to mark stream buffers, rather than leaving it to loggers. Another lasted five months last fall and winter, when it was unlikely logging would have started.
"To put it bluntly, the environmental lawyers failed to stop the Biscuit project," Stahl said.
DeFazio suggested that someone higher ranking than Rey decided it would help the president politically to create a confrontation with environmentalists over Biscuit. Rey, however, said Forest Service resource managers set the logging plans based on what was best for the forest.
Mike Carrier, natural resources adviser to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, said the Biscuit project points out the need for all sides to create new regulations and laws governing salvage and recovery for burned forests, similar to Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative that made it easier to thin forests to prevent wildfires.
The timber industry is interested in the same goal, said West.
"When a hurricane hits the Southeast, they get on it," said West. "But if it's a wildfire, we're not dealing with the disaster."
Rey said a national consensus has yet to gel on what to do after a wildfire the way it has on thinning forests to prevent wildfire, though he sees the mood of the nation moving his way.
As for the 193 million board feet of timber in roadless areas yet to be offered for sale, the Forest Service said it is continuing to monitor how much the wood is rotting and what prices it might bring in the marketplace.
Stahl said he didn't expect it to ever be sold.
"It's not like there's a hotbed of demand for this timber," he said. "We've got three sold sales sitting out there a year now that have had no logging on them."
The Forest Service said Wednesday it has sold 67 million board feet burned by the Biscuit Fire -- enough to build 15,000 homes -- of which 25 million board feet has been harvested. That compares to 370 million board feet called for in the final logging plans issued a year ago. There is no word on when the bulk of the sales, located in roadless areas that environmentalists still hope to protect from logging, will be offered, if ever.
"It's been meaningful volume to the guys who got it, but given the controversy and the hype, it's been a yawner," said Chris West of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group.
The money generated for forest restoration has fallen far short of expectations, too. The timber has sold for $5 million, an average bid of $75 per thousand board feet. That is about a third of the expectations of $187 to $250 per thousand board feet last year when the Forest Service declared an economic emergency to allow some of the sales to go forward despite appeals.
"The Forest Service put up the biggest straw man in its history," said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, one of the environmental groups that fought the logging. "It was just to create a political firestorm. I'm not sure there has been any advantage as it played out."
A lightning storm on July 13, 2002, sparked four fires in the Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon. With wildfires raging around the country, there were few resources to throw at it, and the fires grew into Biscuit, the biggest fire in the nation that year. The flames threatened 17,000 people and burned through a mosaic covering nearly 500,000 acres on the Siskiyou National Forest before being controlled Nov. 9, 2002 at a cost of $153 million.
A year after the fire started, the Forest Service was ready to move ahead with logging about 90 million board feet of timber, exclusively from lands which are designated primarily for logging.
But in August 2003, the Forest Service agreed to consider a report commissioned by timber industry supporters. The so-called Sessions report, from a group of forestry professors at Oregon State University, suggested as much as 2.5 billion board feet of timber should be cut.
When the final logging plan was issued June 1, 2004, the Forest Service decided to log 370 million board feet, with the bulk of it coming from old growth forest reserves and inventoried roadless areas, setting up a confrontation with environmentalists.
Biscuit became the focus of an intense political and scientific debate between the Bush administration and the timber industry on one side and environmentalists on the other over whether to log and reforest the millions of acres of national forest that burn every year, or leave them largely to recover on their own.
West and U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey blamed the appeals and lawsuits by environmentalists for delays.
But Stahl and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., point to the Sessions report, which added nearly a year to the planning process, during which time the dead timber continued to rot.
Stahl noted one injunction stopped logging for two weeks after a judge ordered the Forest Service to mark stream buffers, rather than leaving it to loggers. Another lasted five months last fall and winter, when it was unlikely logging would have started.
"To put it bluntly, the environmental lawyers failed to stop the Biscuit project," Stahl said.
DeFazio suggested that someone higher ranking than Rey decided it would help the president politically to create a confrontation with environmentalists over Biscuit. Rey, however, said Forest Service resource managers set the logging plans based on what was best for the forest.
Mike Carrier, natural resources adviser to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, said the Biscuit project points out the need for all sides to create new regulations and laws governing salvage and recovery for burned forests, similar to Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative that made it easier to thin forests to prevent wildfires.
The timber industry is interested in the same goal, said West.
"When a hurricane hits the Southeast, they get on it," said West. "But if it's a wildfire, we're not dealing with the disaster."
Rey said a national consensus has yet to gel on what to do after a wildfire the way it has on thinning forests to prevent wildfire, though he sees the mood of the nation moving his way.
As for the 193 million board feet of timber in roadless areas yet to be offered for sale, the Forest Service said it is continuing to monitor how much the wood is rotting and what prices it might bring in the marketplace.
Stahl said he didn't expect it to ever be sold.
"It's not like there's a hotbed of demand for this timber," he said. "We've got three sold sales sitting out there a year now that have had no logging on them."
