American News - Project saved homes from fires, but can it be duplicated?
Channel: American News
Date: 2017-10-16

American News - Project saved homes from fires, but can it be duplicated?
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Lightning started a forest fire one August afternoon near this Oregon tourist town, and it was spreading fast. Residents in outlying areas evacuated as flames marched toward their homes.

Just a few months earlier, the U.S. Forest Service and a group of locals representing environmental, logging and recreational interests arranged to thin part of the overgrown forest, creating a buffer zone around Sisters.

Workers removed trees and brush with machines, then came through on foot to ignite prescribed burns. That effort saved homes, and perhaps the community of 2,500 on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range, by slowing the fire's progress and allowing firefighters to corral it.

Scrutiny of the condition of the American West's forests, and of policies that curtailed logging and suppressed wildfires, has intensified amid a devastating wildfire season that has burned a combined area bigger than Maryland and caused widespread destruction in California's wine country.

Until the advent of aggressive fire suppression at the turn of the last century, forests were historically shaped by low-intensity blazes, with the flames clearing underbrush but not killing tall trees. Forests across the West are now so overgrown they've been called powder kegs.

The work by the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project in central Oregon, where towns and subdivisions sit in a green ocean of Ponderosa and lodgepole pines, shows the potential of forest thinning. And it shows how loggers and environmentalists - normally bitter enemies - can join forces.

But it also highlights the challenges of replicating the forest thinning across the West, where a lack of timber workers and money are among the obstacles.

On a recent morning, Forest Service fire manager James Osborne drove into a section of the Deschutes National Forest outside Sisters that was thinned in May. Widely spaced Ponderosas were blackened to twice the height of a person. But higher up, the bark retained its normal orangey color. Needle clusters shone vibrant green in the sunshine. Four deer trotted through dappled sunlight. This part of the forest looked healthy, not despite of, but due to, the prescribed burn.

"Ponderosa pines are used to low-intensity fires," Osborne said. "Every five to 15 years, a fire would come through. We're trying to take it back to low-intensity fires."

California's situation is different because its wildfires have generally ignited in chaparral - brush that naturally grows densely packed, said Andrew Latimer, plant expert at the University of California-Davis. The temperate coniferous forests that burn in large wildfires elsewhere are historically less dense.

It is the goal of the Deschutes Collaborative, one of 23 projects in the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program created in 2009 by Congress, to restore central Oregon forests to their natural state. Overcoming suspicions and stereotypes was one of its first hurdles.

Deschutes Collaborative member Marilyn Miller, an environmentalist, and former member Chuck Burley, who then worked for an Oregon sawmill, used to call each other names, Miller recalled during a recent tour of Deschutes Collaborative projects. But they got to know each other in Bend, home to more microbreweries per capita than anywhere else in America.

"I hate to say this, but beer really is a good conversation starter," Miller said. "We would sit and talk. We learned we're real humans with real concerns, and what we care about isn't that far apart."

Burley, who's now employed with the Forest Service, said the Deschutes Collaborative made recommendations on where and how much to thin, and the Forest Service almost always adopted them.

"They had a consensus, a starting point," Burley said in a phone interview.

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