Forestry Service Planning Big Lumber Salvage Sale in State

The U.S. Forest Service plans to haul more than 1.3 billion board feet of timber out of California’s charred forests and hold the biggest lumber salvage sale in state history.

Ray Wienmann, timber manager for the National Forest Service, said about 85% of the 1.6 billion board feet of commercial trees killed in forest fires will be cut and sold--enough to build a city the size of San Francisco. A board foot measures one foot long, one foot wide and one inch thick.

The lumber can be saved if the trees are removed from the forests during the next two years, before bark beetles and the blue fungus stain the wood and destroy its value. “The longer we wait, the greater the possibility of degradation,” Wienmann said in Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Fires that scorched Northern California for three weeks and are still burning in isolated areas across the West have destroyed or damaged commercial timber stands valued at $240 million by the Forest Service.

California loggers usually take about 1.6 billion board feet from the national forests each year.

“For the next two years most people will cut nothing but salvage,” said Dick Pland, resource manager for Louisiana-Pacific’s Fibreboard Corp. unit in Sonora.

The salvage effort will be larger than one following the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980. Timber companies salvaged 370 million board feet over six years, said Ray Emetaz of the Pinchot National Forest.