Recovery From Northwest Wildfires a Slow Process : Forests: Most homeowners are rebuilding from the 1994 destruction, and the government is helping nature along in the devastated wilderness.

The foot-tall cowboy, made from nuts and bolts, stands in front of a brass plaque bearing the proud message, “I survived the Tyee Fire 1994.”

The iron figurine was on the living-room mantle when Shorty Long’s house was destroyed, a casualty of the fire that raged across 187,000 Chelan County acres last July and August. It’s the only thing he salvaged from the rubble.

“Life is tough no matter what you do,” said Long, 79, whose wife of 52 years died just a year earlier. “It’s not so bad except you miss so many things. You want to do something and then you realize you don’t have (the tools for the chore).”

Long’s home, on the banks of the Entiat River about 10 meandering country miles from town, was one of just 37 lost in the fires that scorched more than 210,000 acres in central Washington last summer, said Ken Frederick, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman based here.

And no lives were lost.

Most homeowners are rebuilding, although a few chose not to, and the government is helping nature along in the devastated wilderness.

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Crews took care of short-term environmental rehabilitation last fall at a cost of $20 million, Frederick said. They laid logs across 5,000 acres of bare hillsides and aerially seeded winter wheat on 112,000 acres to protect exposed soil from erosion.

Now agency officials are doing environmental analyses to determine what else should be done, he said.

“This work is long term,” Frederick said. “It’s bigger in scope than what we did last summer. We’re thinking about what can we do to set up for a healthy forest 50 to 100 years in the future.”

Driving through a charred section of the Wenatchee National Forest, the fire’s path is clear. Blackened tree trunks showed stark against the March snow covering a hillside. All those trees were dead, Frederick said.

With the loss of vegetation that helps soak up precipitation and prevent mudslides, experts expect floods in the next couple years, said Tim Foss, the Forest Service’s team leader on the recovery project.

“It’s a matter of when, not if,” Foss said. “So many acres that were burnt so badly that they have no vegetation . . . It’s just a matter of time.

“What we’re trying to do here is take a new approach,” he said. “We’re trying to look at the best science as to what help the ecosystem needs to recover.”

One of the possibilities is getting out the smaller dead trees, he said. Loggers generally prefer to remove larger trees, which are more valuable as lumber, but it’s the smaller trees that would fuel future fires, Foss said. They are more likely to fall, adding to debris on the forest floor that feeds and speeds the flames.

“There will be a next fire as long as we have lightning,” Foss said.

As the Forest Service looks to the future, area residents have doubts about the way the fires were handled.

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Chelan County Commissioner Earl Marcellus is organizing a citizen’s advisory committee to critique last summer’s battles.

“The purpose would be to try to come up with a better first-strike fast-attack firefighting network that is locally based,” Marcellus said.

“Part of the problem last year was the fact that there seemed to be time invested in waiting for team leaders from out of the state to arrive on the scene. I just feel there’s enough firefighting talent within Chelan County borders . . . to come up with a very viable firefighting network.”

Marcellus is one of the most vocal critics of the firefighting effort, but not the only one. A town meeting he organized in late February drew angry property owners who believe federal agencies were slow to respond in the early stages, when the fires were still small enough that containment was imaginable.

Fredericks was among the Forest Service officials who attended the meeting but did not address the crowd.

Homeowners and other area residents often don’t comprehend the magnitude of a fire and the dangers involved in fighting it, Fredericks said.

“If you were on a road and saw three or four Forest Service rigs parked and folks watching the fire, it’s easy to say they should have hiked in and tried to put it out,” Fredericks said.

“But the way that fire was jumping, and the steep terrain, those firefighters could have ended up trapped by the fire and unable to get away.

“We’re the last agency who’s going to decide not to fight fires,” he said. “Personally, I like to fight fires, but I don’t run in harm’s way if I can avoid it. And I don’t send others into areas where they’re likely to lose their lives.”

Marcellus said his citizen’s committee won’t include environmentalists.

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“I don’t believe nature let go on its own can produce as healthy a forest as we can do with proper management techniques,” he said. “It’s analogous to thinking if nature does best, why when we feel sick do we go to the doctor or hospital to seek modern techniques to help us?”

The Forest Service began fighting forest fires after huge blazes in 1910 grabbed the nation’s attention. But putting out the fires allows the buildup of brush and dead trees that are “future fires waiting to happen,” Fredericks said.

“Decades of fire suppression have allowed the fires to grow to the point that they’re virtually uncontrollable,” he said.

So there are no easy answers. But life goes on.

Shorty Long built a new house on the foundation of his old one and moved in on his birthday, Oct. 4. He likes to look out from his deck at the Entiat River and the Upper Entiat Mountains. Moving closer to town wasn’t an option.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with myself in town,” he said.

He plans to do his part to help the forest recover. Three planters on his deck hold tiny saplings he grew from seeds.

“You just have to keep going,” Long said.