Logging Towns Find Economic Boom in Western Forest Fires

When flames roared high in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest this summer, Jim Zacharias saw opportunity.

Here was a way to use some of the $2 million in mechanized logging equipment sitting idle around his yard.

Quickly contracting with the U.S. Forest Service to haul water to the hot spots, he jury-rigged 2,500-gallon tanks onto the backs of a couple of forwarders--six-wheel-drive, balloon-tired behemoths that haul logs out of the woods.

Unfortunately for Zacharias, rain doused the Carrol Creek fire before it reached 3,200 acres. His back-country tankers were out of business.

But for Joseph, a town of 1,300 in remote northeastern Oregon, the $2.6 million the Forest Service expended fighting the fire over one week--much of it spent locally on everything from bulldozers to sack lunches--was more than three times the annual payroll of the one shift still working at the town’s last surviving sawmill.

“It’s sad to say everybody gets excited when the fires burn,” Zacharias says. “It’s about the only boost in our economy anymore.”

He says he could make more in a week fighting fires with one of his forwarders than in a month of logging.

When national forests around the West burned this summer, timber towns like this one felt bitterness mixed with hope that the hated Clinton administration decisions to cut back logging in the cause of protecting habitat for fish and wildlife were coming home to roost.

Bob Zacharias, Jim’s father, was so mad when the Forest Service asked him to enlist his logging equipment in firefighting that he suggested they call on the environmentalists whose lawsuits had put so many of his friends out of work.

“I don’t go into federal fires,” he said. “They don’t let us in the woods, so why should we help them?”

The summer’s wildfires burned more than 6.8 million acres of Western forests and range. The younger Zacharias thought public uproar over the fires might persuade the federal government to change its ways. Many of the fires involved unnaturally dense stands of young trees, the legacy of more than a century of unwise logging and a policy to snuff out all fires, large or small, which forests actually need to regenerate.

“All these fires are probably the best thing that’s happened to the timber industry,” Jim Zacharias says. “There are getting to be enough forest fires burning that people are beginning to say, ‘Why is this?’ ”

Even some environmentalists acknowledge it’s time to rev up the chain saws to help thin the forests and put them back in balance with fire.

The fires have become a hot topic politically.

Late last month six Western governors--five of them Republicans--agreed to work with the Clinton administration to lobby Congress for the extra $1.6 billion the president wants to help the West recover from what Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt calls the worst fire season since 1910. That includes $257 million to thin forests and do prescribed burns to reduce future fire risk.

The Sept. 18 meeting was a truce of sorts for the governors of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming and South Dakota, who have previously criticized federal management of forests and range lands.

And now a House-Senate conference committee wants to spend even more--$1.8 billion on top of President Clinton’s original request for $1.1 billion, for a total of $2.9 billion. About $413 million of that is earmarked for thinning and prescribed burns.

But Clinton has threatened to veto that bill because so many anti-environment riders have been attached.

The national forests were created at the turn of the century as a reserve against the cut-and-run logging practices of the time. The timber barons countered that by logging lightly in the forests in the early 1900s to keep prices high for logs cut on their private lands.

That all changed after World War II, when returning GIs built homes and pushed up demand for lumber. National forests produced prime timber as well as valuable jobs in rural areas. Logging boomed into the 1970s and ‘80s as the Reagan administration sought to maximize exploitation of natural resources on public lands.

It all came crashing down in the mid-1990s when a growing number of endangered-species listings and court victories for environmentalists made it clear that industrial forestry had met the limits of nature and law.

Environmentalists, fresh from winning logging limits on the west side of the Cascade Range in the name of the Northern spotted owl, next negotiated deals to protect big trees and habitat for a range of fish and wildlife east of the Cascades.

In 1994, Boise Cascade shut down its big log sawmill in Joseph for lack of ponderosa pines, the huge, golden-brown “yellow-bellies” whose clear grain is so prized for moldings and window frames: The pines were long gone from its own lands and were now off-limits in the national forest.

Although thousands of tourists flock to Joseph each summer to see its spectacular mountains or visit the art galleries and bronze foundries that have grown up in the last 10 years, they don’t make up for the loss of big timber, says grocery store owner Jerry Lagosz.

He opened a brew pub to cater to tourists, but the best week of business he had in years was during the Carrol Creek fire, when his store made 1,100 sack lunches a day to feed firefighters.

“We know how to tighten up our boots, but we need our timber,” he says.

Grants of $3.5 million have transformed the downtown with new sidewalks, repaved streets, flower beds and six bronze statues. But over breakfast at the Cheyenne Cafe, Wallowa County Commissioner Mike Edwards says locals worry Joseph will become another Jackson Hole, Wyo., where tourism’s “second wave” of wealthy home buyers, drawn by the new amenities, pushed up land prices and pushed out local people.

“We don’t want to step back to [the logging practices of] 25 years ago, taking the best and leaving the rest,” says Edwards, who owned a motel before being elected commissioner. “But we’ve got to get out of this sense that logging is bad. People’s homes burned up in New Mexico and Montana.”

A second Joseph sawmill has hung on, buoyed by the Forest Service’s promise that it would thin the national forests’ dense second-growth stands, creating a new supply of smaller logs. Joseph Timber invested millions on the latest technology, which combines laser scanning and automation to make 2-by-4s out of logs just a few inches in diameter.

But last spring an appeal by the Hells Canyon Preservation Council held up two Wallowa-Whitman timber sales because the Forest Service had failed to adequately consider the impact on soil and wildlife. With the log pipeline sputtering, Joseph Timber in August laid off one full shift of 30 people with a payroll worth $800,000 a year.

“We were quite successful for three or four years,” says Steve Krieger, an Orange County, Calif., businessman who bought into the mill and moved here after falling in love with northeastern Oregon. “The question is, are we going to get the federal timber? I think we’ve got a shot at it, but [the supply] is getting pretty skinny.”

Krieger’s partner, Dave Shriner, is frustrated that a comprehensive thinning program that would have produced exactly the kinds of logs their mill is built for might have warded off the fires.

“Good people are losing their jobs, and we’re burning up a resource,” he says.

Ric Bailey, a former logger turned environmentalist who heads the Hells Canyon Preservation Council and lives next door to Bob Zacharias, is not impressed by the call for intensified logging to reduce fire danger and save jobs.

“Could mechanical thinning be part of a restoration strategy? Yes, it could,” Bailey says. “But we can’t just go in and thin all the forests as if we were trying to manufacture a fireproof ecosystem.”

Although widely spaced pines did historically dominate the forest landscape here, there have always been some dense clumps, which elk use to shelter from winter storms and hunters, Bailey says.

“Every study that’s been done that we know of . . . concluded that more often than not, logging increases the intensity of wildfires . . . by reducing the shade cover, resulting in drying ground fuels,” he says. “It also does it by decreasing the size and diversity of trees in the forest. We have to have a long-term plan for restoring the forest ecosystem.”

It is hard to argue against thinning when the flames are roaring. On the second day of the Newberry II fire in central Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest, the flames took off through the crowns of a second-growth stand of young ponderosa pine.

When the fire hit a unit that had been thinned 10 years ago, it dropped to the ground and crept through the brush and seedlings; it scorched the thick-barked trunks of larger trees but left their crowns green and alive. When it hit another dense stand, the fire jumped back into the crowns, killing everything in its path.

The Forest Service has long recognized the need to return fire to the forests, and has been steadily increasing the acres subjected to prescribed burns and thinning.

Its credibility hurt by past timber sales that cut large trees in the name of reducing fire danger, the Forest Service is starting to change the way it does business.

Without the big trees needed to make a timber sale pay, the Wallowa-Whitman is designing a project that combines a small timber sale with a service contract to thin out small trees. A mill will pay for the logs that can be turned into lumber and wood chips. And a logger will get paid to remove the trees too small to be sold.

Jim Zacharias figures he’ll just hold on, traveling as far as New Mexico and Alaska to keep his logging equipment working.

“You keep thinking they’ll straighten it all out and there will be a need for us, because we’re good at what we do.”