Dead Trees Fail to Bring Life to Forest

Little has gone according to plan in the Red Star Restoration Project on the Sierra Nevada’s wooded slopes near Lake Tahoe.

Private timber companies were to pay the federal government millions of dollars in fees to log several thousand acres of dead trees blackened in a 2001 wildfire. As is often the case after a forest fire, many of the dead trees retain commercial value.

The U.S. Forest Service would use some of the revenue to pay for replanting and to clear out small, worthless deadwood that could stoke future blazes.

It’s an approach that the Bush administration is promoting across the West and one that underlies the forest legislation the president signed into law last week. Give commercial loggers more leeway to cut trees, the administration maintains, and they will help thin overgrown woodlands, reduce the wildfire hazard in the region’s vast federal forests and save taxpayer money to boot.

But it’s not working that way in the Tahoe National Forest’s Red Star project, about 15 miles west of Lake Tahoe, and in a number of other so-called salvage timber operations in California. Commercial loggers are bidding low or not at all. The revenue envisioned by the Forest Service is not pouring into the government’s coffers. The smallest trees, which pose the greatest wildfire threat, are not being cleared out, and the larger, more valuable and least flammable ones are hauled away. Limbs and treetops left from timber cutting remain strewn across the landscape like giant piles of kindling.

It is a scene, repeated up and down the Sierra, that raises questions about the degree to which the federal government can rely on commercial logging to help with its fire prevention work.

For one thing, the commercial strategy assumes a vibrant logging economy that does not exist in California. It also implies that when commercial logging makes a healthy profit, money will be immediately available for clearing out the smaller trees and flammable debris. In fact, much of that revenue, especially from salvage sales, is by law earmarked for other uses. Last year, salvage harvests made up nearly half the timber volume cut in California’s 18 national forests.

California’s timber industry has shrunk dramatically, forest economists say, hurt by cheap Canadian competition, a steep drop in timber output in national forests in the 1990s and the cost of doing business in the state.

“The basic problem is that the industry in California, especially production in the Sierra Nevada, has just gone away in the last decade,” observed Rich Thompson, a resource economics and management professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “The number of mill closures is phenomenal. They’re gone. The few [companies left] know they practically have the wood basket to themselves and ... don’t have to be competitive.”

In 1992, there were 56 timber mills in California. Today there are 29. Many of the remaining operations are owned by a single company, Sierra Pacific Industries, which has for years been the biggest purchaser of federal timber in the state.

Fewer mills mean fewer bids. Records compiled by Timber Data Co. of Eugene, Ore., show that timber sale after sale in California national forests attracted little or no interest from loggers this year. That was true of offerings of live green trees and those killed by fires, insects or storms.

“It is something that is becoming more common. It is really an effect of the global market,” Jim Pena, supervisor of Northern California’s Plumas National Forest, said of the anemic bidding situation. Parts of a salvage project in the Plumas were offered three times this year without getting a single bid.

In the Klamath National Forest in northwestern California, seven separate timber sale offerings last summer failed to attract any bids, according to Timber Data. In the Modoc National Forest in the state’s northeastern tip, silence greeted an October appeal for bids on portions of a 9,000-acre salvage project.

The weak appetite for federal timber is not confined to California. In a recent newsletter, Timber Data owner Doug McDonald tracked the average number of bids on federal sales in the far West. In many states, they had fallen from six per sale in 1980 to two in 2002.

As in any market, timber prices fluctuate, and they have enjoyed something of a rebound this fall. While admitting he was concerned “that we’ve got very few mills left,” Jack Blackwell, the regional forester who oversees California’s national forests, said he was optimistic. “I guess I’m of the opinion the market probably is picking up.”

But when the bids came in on the first round of Red Star timber sales last summer, they were a fraction of what the Forest Service had predicted: two cents a board foot instead of 11 1/2 cents. And instead of cutting trees as small as 11 inches in diameter, which the Forest Service proposed, the timber companies wanted only bigger trees at least 16 inches in diameter.

Red Star prices were low because much of the wood was rotten by the time the Forest Service had finished its environmental analysis and offered it for sale nearly two years after it was burned, said Dan Tomascheski, vice president of resources for Sierra Pacific.

When the Forest Service has “to go through all those hoops and construct an environmental document that is so extremely bulletproof, the whole thing takes time,” said Tomascheski, whose firm logged some of the Red Star land. “It’s barely economical when it’s time to sell the timber. And then the environmentalists say, ‘See it wasn’t worth anything.’ ”

Yet, even where timber sales have not been tied up in such lengthy environmental reviews, prices have been low. A salvage sale on Native American tribal land in Arizona -- of which Sierra Pacific bought a substantial portion and which began soon after that state’s extensive 2002 wildfires -- fetched the same price as Red Star, according to a forest manager for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

With the skimpy revenue from Red Star, the Forest Service now says it lacks the money to do much of the cleanup and restoration work it planned. The logged hillsides remain littered with thick tangles of deadwood. Armies of small charred trees stand poised to fall in the next few years and join heaps of highly flammable logging debris on the ground. The fire hazard is higher now than immediately before the loggers went to work.

But even if the Red Star wood had sold for what the Forest Service projected and forest managers had done everything they had originally proposed, they said, they would still lack the money to clean up nearly half the site. As a result, their own documents acknowledge that the wildfire threat would remain dangerously high for decades to come on land that borders a reservoir and a healthy old-growth forest that is a haven for the California spotted owl.

“It is realized,” the Forest Service wrote, “that after all the proposed activities have been completed, the resulting fuel loadings over a majority of the burn area would create conditions that may allow another large, severe wildland fire in this area during the next 20-30 years.”

During a Sacramento court hearing last summer, U.S. District Judge Morrison England Jr. described the logged Red Star land as having the makings “of one heck of a barbecue.” A Bush appointee, Morrison then issued a temporary order, still in place, that blocked the Forest Service from selling timber in another part of the project while he reviewed an environmental lawsuit challenging the project’s cutting of big trees.

Forest managers insist that Red Star and similar projects are nonetheless worth doing. Better to remove what they can from burned-over forests than nothing, they argue.

“The key is that all of the material would have been on the ground and a lot of brush would have grown up and you would have a tremendous fire hazard,” said Tahoe National Forest Supervisor Steve Eubanks, who approved the Red Star project. “In 40 years, we’ll at least be better off than if we had not done anything. We certainly will not be worse off.”

The Forest Service also says that small material provides needed ground cover to prevent erosion on burned-over soil.

But environmental critics contend that the agency is cutting the wrong trees. “They’ve got the whole thing turned on its head,” said Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project, an environmental group that helped mount the legal challenge to Red Star and closely monitors national forest salvage sales in California.

In interviews, fire scientists said that the larger dead trees harvested in Red Star and other California salvage operations had presented much less of a fire hazard than the smaller wood the Forest Service was allowing loggers to leave behind in those same projects.

“The kind of stuff they’re taking off [in Red Star] is the least flammable and the least problem,” said James K. Brown, who retired from the Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana in 1995 after nearly four decades of fire research. “The very large pieces -- although there’s a lot of material there in terms of tons per acre -- it doesn’t contribute that much to fire, to intensity and soil heating.”

By contrast, leaving large quantities of small deadwood less than 10 inches thick “causes quite a bit of trouble,” added Brown, who co-wrote a just-published Forest Service paper that discusses the levels of deadwood that can be safely left at salvage sites.

Red Star is not the only place in which salvage sales are removing larger commercially valuable trees, but leaving piles of small fire-ready deadwood on the mountainsides.

At the Burnt Ridge Restoration Project in the Sequoia National Forest, the Forest Service proposes to commercially log fire-killed trees of at least 11 inches in diameter. Many of the rest would simply be felled and left on the ground, a situation that a Sequoia fire management officer said would create conditions for a “damaging fire” over the next 15 years.

A proposal earlier this year for the North Fork fire salvage sale in the Sierra National Forest called for helicopter logging of medium and large dead trees, but for leaving logging debris and smaller trees. “It would be extraordinarily expensive [to remove them] and the few dollars we have for that type of cleanup are better spent in areas where we have a higher fuel hazard problem,” explained District Ranger Dave Martin.

Regional Forester Blackwell says he recognizes the need to better coordinate fuels cleanup with logging projects. And McDonald, of the Oregon data firm, says forest thinning sales on state land in Washington and Oregon are attracting multiple bids and decent prices. The federal government, he suggested, has to prove it will be a reliable supplier.