KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
What Salvage Sales Tell Us About Using Timber Harvest to Reduce Wildfire
The State of Montana is planning huge timber harvests on 5,200 acres of the Sula State Forest that burned this summer. Those state lands were just part of the 212,000 acres that wildfires swept across in the nation’s largest wildfire this summer, the Valley Complex in the Bitterroot Valley outside of Darby. The State Land Board is eager to get into the area and harvest at least 27 million board feet of fire-killed trees before the US Forest Service begins selling its fire-killed trees, flooding the market, and driving timber prices down.
The fact that forest fires can produce a flood of commercially valuable fire-killed trees tells us something important about the role of timber harvest in controlling wildfire. You will recall that Montana’s governor created a storm of controversy when he blamed this summer’s wildfires on the Clinton Administration’s failure to keep timber harvests high on National Forest lands over the last eight years. The timber industry and its political allies emphatically made the same point: They blamed the summer’s fires and the loss of homes on environmentalists and their friends in the federal government who had brought timber harvests on federal lands to a near standstill.
There may appear to be some logic to this position. After all, logging removes substantial amounts of wood fiber from the forests, the same type of wood fiber many of us also collect as firewood. If potential fuel is being removed from the forest, doesn’t the fire danger decline? The answer is provided in a visually dramatic way by the burned over lands that the State of Montana is hurrying to harvest. Think of the pictures you have seen of burned forests. After raging fires swept through, destroying everything green in their path, the commercially valuable trees are still standing, blackened, but valuable for lumber nonetheless.
The wood fiber that the loggers would have removed is still there. It did not burn. What burned instead was the material that the loggers would not have taken: the pine needles, the branches, the brush, the small trees, etc.
That’s the problem with the assumption that logging helps reduce fuel loads. Loggers remove the most fire resistant part of the forest; the part of the forest that doesn’t burn even in a hot, tree killing, fires. The most flammable part of the forest, the small branches, the pine needles, the smaller trees, etc. are left on the ground after the loggers leave. Then, with the reduced competition because of the removal of the large trees that were logged, new trees, brush, and grasses grow rapidly to fill the site. The sun now can shine directly on the forest floor and the wind can blow freely through the drastically thinned forest. In really dry, hot, conditions these lighter forest fuels that are far more flammable than the trunks of the large trees can easily feed a rapidly spreading wildfire. That’s why wildfire was able to spread so rapidly through the recently logged Darby Lumber Company lands and heavily logged US Forest Service lands in the Valley Complex Fire.
When fire scientists model forest fuels and forest fires, they do not even treat the trunks of the larger trees, the part of the forest loggers would remove, as part of the fuels that determine fire behavior.
Of course, one can remove absolutely all of the trees and still not eliminate the threat of destructive wildfires. The two Canyon Ferry fires that destroyed 13 homes, started in grasslands. The Maudlow-Toston fire that destroyed one home, started in the middle of a farmer’s field. The Ryan Gulch fire was human caused and burned through heavily logged private industrial timber lands.
We have known for a very long time that timber harvest can add to the dangers of catastrophic wildfire. The deadliest wildfire in American history, one that took more than 1,200 lives, broke out in northern Wisconsin in 1871 on private land that had been heavily logged. The mix of logging slash, brush, farmers fields, and forests exploded in flames during a very dry period and swept across the town of Peshtigo, burning it to the ground, and damaging 16 other towns, burning a total of 1.2 million acres.
If logging removes wildfire fuels, then, in the aftermath of those wildfires, there must be no fire-killed but commercially valuable trees to justify salvage logging. The wildfires must have consumed all that fiber and left nothing to harvest now on those burned over lands. On the other hand, if there actually are substantial numbers of trees to harvest from burned forests, then the trees that commercial loggers seek must not burn in wildfires and logging them must not remove the fuels that feed wildfires. Logging’s advocates can’t have it both ways.