ENVIRONMENT : Tug of War Triggered Over Rebuilding Ravaged Forest : After hurricane strikes, 250,000-acre area is open to a fresh start.

When Hurricane Hugo tore through the Francis Marion National Forest two years ago, it left foresters with a massive cleanup job and a question that still rages: How should the 250,000-acre forest be restored?

Widely varying answers are coming from interests as diverse as timber companies and preservationists, bird watchers and duck hunters, hikers and motorcycle riders.

Conservationists complain that the U.S. Forest Service has let lumber companies and papermakers use the forest as their private wood lot. They want the Forest Service to return the woods to the way they were when Europeans arrived 320 years ago, regardless of whether the trees grown would make good paper or wood products.

But wood and paper manufacturers counter that they, through their timber purchases, pay for the forest’s upkeep and that there is plenty of the renewable resource to go around.

The ensuing tug of war parodies disputes in other parts of the nation--especially in the Pacific Northwest--over how the Forest Service manages the 191 million acres in 120 national forests. The service, which is a division of the U.S. Agriculture Department, owns one of every 12 acres of timberland in the United States.

The Francis Marion National Forest is a large, triangular chunk of land extending from Charleston to just north of this coastal hamlet and westward to St. Stephen, S. C. In a few places the public forest touches the waterfront, but mostly, it is undistinguished.

The Francis Marion encompasses flat terrain, a few small ponds and, before Hugo, lots of pine trees. The Forest Service bought the land in the 1930s at the urging of South Carolinians. The land had been owned by paper and timberland management companies and had been cut over and extensively farmed.

For years, few besides timber company executives and loggers paid the forest much attention, foresters said.

Jim Brotherton, one of two U.S. Forest Service district managers overseeing the Francis Marion, explained: “We have never had to respond to much more than hunting, fishing and camping. Most people were going to the beach.”

But as coastal crowds increased and newcomers moved to the Charleston area, use of the Francis Marion surged.

Then came Hurricane Hugo. Flinging 135-m.p.h. winds at towering pines and oaks, Hugo brought down 75% of the forest in just five hours in the early morning of Sept. 21, 1989. Foresters say the downed trees would have built 111,000 houses.

With the loss of the trees came the realization that the wood-products industry’s daily influence in the forest was gone. Conservationists and others believe that they can press for change in what types of trees are planted and what is cut because a new management plan must be written.

“It has become painfully clear that the Forest Service is managing for timber and the public be damned,” said Jane Lareau, the program director for the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League.

Her organization, begun just two years ago to stem the tide of development along the South Carolina coast, wants the Francis Marion reconstructed to resemble the longleaf forest they believe existed before European settlers arrived.

The coastal plain from Virginia to Texas was then covered with dense longleaf forests, totaling 70 million acres. Today, fewer than 10 million acres of longleaf pines remain, according to the Coastal Plains Institute in Tallahassee, Fla.

Before the hurricane, longleaf pines covered 25% of the Francis Marion. Another 25% was in hardwoods and the remaining 50% was the gangly, less attractive loblolly pine, a favorite of papermakers.

“We want to see the Forest Service make these public lands come back as a natural ecosystem,” Lareau said.

But John Jamison, the procurement manager for Umphlett Lumber Co., a small family owned sawmill in Moncks Corner, S. C., said Lareau’s group and others have overreacted and are giving the Forest Service “a bum rap.”

“The Forest Service has always responded to the public’s needs,” he said.

Jamison said the wood-products industry itself is split over what to plant in the forest. Papermakers want loblolly; lumberyards such as his favor longleaf.

“But the main thing is you need to start getting it back into production so it can pay for itself,” he said. “Then you utilize it totally as a multiple-use forest. Everybody deserves a right to use it. If you lock everything up and tie it, you’ll never have it.”

The two foresters, meanwhile, are due to present the first draft of their management plan next summer.