Sharon

150 K Folks in Front Range Colorado Have Power Shut Off: TSW PSA on How to Prepare

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Sorry this image is so fuzzy, pulled from news video.

This may be of interest to other folks…. dried grass and high winds are nothing new to the Front Range of Colorado.  However, after the Marshall Fire, a concern over liability on the part of Xcel Energy may well be new, hence.. preventative as well as accidental outages.

From the Denver Post:

The news follows the utilities company’s Sunday prediction that it could take through Monday or longer to restore power to more than 87,000 Xcel customers statewide who were still experiencing outages by 5:45 p.m. on Sunday.

As of Monday morning at 10:25 a.m., over 750 outages were reported by just over 29,000 customers in the Denver area, whereas the Boulder area still saw close to 225 outages affecting roughly 12,000 customers, according to the Xcel electric outage map.

A total of more than 150,000 were impacted by the loss of power — severe weather caused outages for around 100,000 customers, while another 55,000 in six counties had their power shut off by Xcel in an effort to prevent wildfires.

“For the first time in Colorado, Xcel Energy conducted a public safety power shutoff,” said spokesperson Tyler Bryant in a Sunday statement. “While many customers will have service restored later today, with the significant number outages from this weather event, this restoration process will extend into Monday, April 8 and possibly longer for some customers.”

With more than 400 crew members working on restoring power to more than 600 miles of affected lines, the company had addressed the needs of about 63,000 customers by Sunday evening.

Because Xcel changed its system settings during the extreme winds to restrict automatic power restoration, “this safety measure means power outages are likely to last longer than they typically would,” Bryant said.

Since we have both high wind and dried grass in the winter, perhaps electrifying everything is not a very resilient approach? Just a thought.  Also, on the app Nextdoor, there was a certain (large) amount of unhappiness with the way this rolled out (although Xcel had its defenders, and lots of appreciation for employees working to get power restored). A critique From one neighbor:

1. Confusing messages sent out before cutting off our power.

2. No map provided in advance that would have helped know if any businesses, friends, neighbors still had power.

3. Outage map provided after power cut off that is just as useless.

4. Automated emails sent after power cut off assuring us that they are working diligently to get the power back on. Which we know they are not.

5. Another automated email sent out asking what we think of the new electricity rate structure.

6. They have now said that people preemptively shut off have lower priority than those who lost power due to the storm 🤦 Hard to think how they could have done this any worse.

Another thought.. a human being might want to review automated emails prior to sending to  see if they fit the current situation.

You all might remember this piece from the LA Times in 2019-

Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to more than 700,000 customers in 34 counties early Wednesday because of high winds. Some households were without electricity for 72 hours, a spokesman said. Southern California Edison shut off electricity to more than 24,000 customers, also starting Wednesday.

The biggest failure, experts and customers alike said, was communication. Residents complained they did not receive adequate notice of the shutdown or no notice at all and could not get on the utilities’ websites.

Lessons learned from the shutdowns are critical because more will take place, experts said.

“I suspect for the next few years these are going to occur,” said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute. “No one involved in this thing thinks it was a one-time event.”

The California Public Utilities Commission on Monday ordered PG&E to take immediate corrective actions, and Gov. Gavin Newsom called on the utility to give residential customers who lost power $100 rebates.

Commission President Marybel Batjer told PG&E it must try to restore power within 12 hours in the future, reduce the size of outages, develop systems to ensure call centers and the website are accessible and develop a “communication structure” with counties and tribal governments so they can respond to emergencies.

“Failures in execution, combined with the magnitude of this … event, created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated,” Batjer said.

He said the state should create some sort of committee that includes public safety officials, elected officials, utilities and the Public Utilities Commission to make power shut-off calls in the future.

Utilities have sparked fires for decades, but they are now more destructive because of droughts produced by climate change and the movement of people into more remote, highly vegetated regions, experts said.

Southern California Edison’s customers complained the utility failed to give them adequate warning.

They hit the utility with questions about the timing, criticism over lack of immediate notice and outrage over spoiled food, stress-related health effects and fears that trapped cars beneath electric garage doors would leave people stranded in the event of a fire.

“We strive to keep the customer informed always, but we may not be able to depending on circumstances,” said Edison spokesman Robert Villegas.

Anyway, the article has interesting lessons learned and ideas for improvement (that could have helped Xcel) .. but given the warning timeframes, maybe it’s best to be ready for a shutoff, even if you live far from the WUI.

Here’s the PSA from Xcel:

Put together an outage kit
Include things like flashlights, batteries, portable chargers, a phone that does not require electricity, a non-electric clock, bottled water, non-perishable food, a manual can opener and a first aid kit
Make sure your computer is protected from surges
Keep devices charged
“Customers who use medical equipment that relies on electrical service should take steps to prepare for extended outages,” Xcel said.

Other things to consider include lighting options for when the power goes out, using a cooler to avoid opening the fridge and using a generator.

“For customers with power outages, you may want to unplug appliances containing electronic components, such as televisions, microwaves, and computers to prevent damage as power is being restored,” Xcel said.

Last year, Sammy Roth wrote a piece on the problem of reliability with regard to tolerating more blackouts during the transition time to solar and wind energy storage technologies.

I got a similar reaction on Twitter.

Of the hundreds of people who responded to my question, most rejected the idea that more power outages are even remotely acceptable — for reasons beyond mere convenience. A former member of the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners wrote that “someone dies every time we have a power outage.” An environment reporter in Phoenix — where temperatures have exceeded 110 degrees for a record 20 straight days — said simply, “Yikes.”

Moura expanded on his skepticism by noting that modern life is more reliant on electricity than ever before.

Those of us lucky enough to have air conditioning depend on it to stay safe during heat waves — which can already kill thousands of people and are only getting more dangerous as fossil fuels warm the planet. Elderly people and individuals with certain health conditions are more vulnerable to heat illness and sometimes need electricity to power their medical equipment, such as ventilators, dialysis machines and motorized wheelchairs. Our refrigerators, cellphones and internet service all depend on reliable electricity.

“It’s not really about keeping the lights on. It’s about keeping people alive,” Moura said.

Two years ago this month, California narrowly avoided rolling outages after wildfire smoke knocked out electric lines that carry large amounts of power from the Pacific Northwest. The state again toed the precipice during a hot spell last September, fending off blackouts only after officials sent out an emergency alert to millions of mobile phones begging people to use less power.

Again and again, I’ve found myself asking: Would it be easier and less expensive to limit climate change — and its deadly combination of worsening heat, fire and drought and flood — if we were willing to live with the occasional blackout?

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Indeed, solving climate change isn’t as simple as replacing gas and coal plants with solar and wind farms. We need to get tens of millions of electric vehicles on the road, and tens of millions of electric heat pumps in people’s homes. We also need to build a lot more long-distance power lines to move renewable electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed.

More powerlines, more maintenance, more cutoffs, more dependency on electricity.. maybe  it’s time to rethink this?

Scientific Discussion Should Go Online: What I Was Dreaming From My Cubicle in the Ochoco SO in 1987

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We’re not done with our discussion of the 21 inch rule.. but it reminded me of the Ochoco and this piece I wrote for the journal The Scientist in 1987.  No WordPress then, no TwitX, no Substack so to get one’s views expressed, one had to go through journal gatekeepers.  The rich 21 inch rule discussion is an example of why we are all better off.  I think y’all will get a hoot out of how prescient I was (or not), and where it didn’t turn out exactly the way I thought. Still, this happens today, and it’s wonderful.

Here’s a link to the article, I reprinted in full below.

Scientific Discussion Should Go Online

Sharon Friedman

Nov 1, 1987

 Innovation is the key to success in today’s world, with changes in technology, natural and human- caused changes in the environment and sociopolitical change taking place at an accelerating pace. To innovate successfully, we must take advantage of the natural resource sciences. Millions of dollars can be lost while research is waiting to be published researchers end up doing things that are not effective, or wasting opportunities to do things that are. I suggest that we utilize the new communications technology in order to communicate results in a timely manner, conduct training and reduce instances in which scientists reinvent the wheel.

The Silvanet System

To use silviculture as an example, I suggest development of a statewide or nationwide computer network (call it Silvanet) on which researchers at all levels could exchange information. The network would have four sections: reports, ongoing work, ideas and notes on meetings.

Reports, the equivalent of today’s scientific papers, would include unpublished thesis as, negative results and repetitive studies ones in which a technique is tried on a different species or in a different environment). These three kinds of information are difficult or impossible to obtain under the current system. People who submit reports would be encouraged to add two sections in addition to those included in standard scientific papers: one describing the problems they encountered and their solutions, and a “right brain” section for their feelings about their work for which they have no statistical validation. These sections would be invaluable to others working on the same problems.

The ongoing work section would be the equivalent of a project proposal, and would alert people to the existence of others working on the same problem. Currently, researchers engaged in a study often don’t know that others are working on the same problem except through chance meetings or conversations. The use of a network would take some of the randomness out of such communications.

People would put their ideas on the system the day they generate them. For example, new hypotheses could be entered on the system, providing an opportunity for people who have data that might bear on the hypothesis to respond. Researchers attending meetings—especially international ones that relatively few can afford to attend— would be encouraged to take notes and put them on the system for other users.

The priority of an idea or a report would be determined by the time of its appearance on Silvanet. From the day it appeared, there would be no barrier to the use of an idea or report. Individuals would be able to comment on each other’s reports, proposals and ideas in a public file. By reading these scientific discussions, criticisms and rebuttals, natural resource workers could develop their critical faculties.

The Advantages

 Electronic discussion has several advantages over the traditional varieties. First, one has more time to think before replying and to develop more coherent arguments than in personal conversations. Then, too, personality is less important than when the discussion is face to face. Similarly, the sex, race, socioeconomic class and professional status of the participants may not be known, so that people could respond to ideas rather than stereotypes. Foreign languages are easier to understand in writing than when spoken, allowing discourse between two or more people who possibly could not communicate at all through spoken language. In contrast to phone calls, written electronic discussions can include equations, tables, diagrams and possibly, in the not-too-distant future, photographs.

Since natural resource workers with similar interests are often in widely separate locations, meetings are expensive and often only a small proportion of the total number are able to attend. Meetings become regionalized by geography, resulting in reduced interaction between regions.

Journals can be very useful, but many publish only a small subset of original research and can be slow to transfer vital information. Often, readers would benefit from criticisms of these papers. Electronic communication is not a substitute for meetings or published papers, but could be a powerful addition to them.

How to Do It

 The question becomes how to implement such a system. Each natural resource (or other) organization could develop its own network, but information transfer generally is already fairly good within a given organization. This is especially true if the organization has its own electronic mail system, such as the one the USDA Forest Service has successfully implemented throughout the United States. The true value of a network would be to link people who do not get a chance to meet. Therefore, the most logical place would be through a state government or a state university—institutions that often Scientific Discussion Should Go Online already have responsibility for technology transfer for all natural resource organizations within the state. At some point the states could connect their networks into a national, and ultimately international, system.

To illustrate how this would work, let’s take a real-life example. A co-worker of mine employed by a small timber company found some work in physiology that he thought might apply to the problem of selecting trees for a genetics program. He contacted a researcher at the local university, who was not interested in the problem. However, from the standpoint of the economics of his company, it was an important problem. If a statewide Silvanet had existed, he could have put his idea on the system and obtained feedhack from a variety of people, including many with different kinds of experience and interests. He might have decided to pursue the problem further, and requested suggestions and data he could use to test his hypothesis from people on the network. He then would have contacted the state biometrician for help with experimental design and begun to write a proposal to be put on the network. He might have gotten more discussion on the proposal, and located potential collaborators using Silvanet. Finally, the results of the study—whether or not the new technique worked to improve tree selection—would have gone onto the network as a report.

Ultimately it would be best for the network to expand worldwide, perhaps with the industrial countries paying the connection costs for the developing nations. Information on technical issues usually is difficult to obtain in a timely manner in these countries. Scientists in these countries would have the expertise of their colleagues worldwide available at the touch of a keyboard. Scientists in developed countries could assist the developing nations on a timely (same-day) basis, and scientists who are unable to travel for periods of time could also participate. This would expand the talent pool available substantially. Through the establishment of such a system—which would have to include training in the scientific method—we could truly “teach people to fish” instead of “giving them a fish”—in this case, a piece of technical information.

Friedman is a plant geneticist at the Ochoco National Forest, P0. Box 490, Prineville, OR 97754.

From Fire Suppression to Forplan to Carbon Sequestration: The Historical Advance of Grand/White/Hybrid Firs East of the Cascades in Oregon

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https://forestpolicypub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/39073908085_83128c2cde_h.jpg

The above photo is from 2007, by R6 State and Private Forestry of western spruce budworm defoliation. It wasn’t identified to location as far as I could see.

This one is on the Deschutes.  For those interested, there is an extensive historical record of photos about various spruce budworm projects here. If you worked on any of those projects you might find a photo of yourself!

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I think we’re having a great discussion about the East-Side screens and the 21- inch diameter rule. Here I’d like to throw in an Old Person observation from my time on the Ochoco during the 80’s.  It’s an Old Person observation about what seems to have changed and what has not changed in 40 years.  I worked for four forests (the Fremont, Winema, Ochoco and Deschutes), but I’ll focus on the Ochoco.

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Historical aside: The Ochoco Supervisor’s Office at the time was a large open, cubicle puzzle space.  I sat in the silviculture zone, next to the irrepressible Duane Ecker, the forest silviculturist, Don Wood and our boss, the Timber Staff,  Chuck Downen. But thanks to the wonders of the cubicle environment, I often heard conversations of the Law Enforcement Officer (finding that particularly interesting things were said when he lowered his voice.. “the perpetrator…”).  We all had Data Generals (DG’s). Unfortunately, but sometimes entertainingly, our Public Affairs Officer, Joe Meade (who was visually impaired),  had a DG that read his email out loud .. in a tinny.. monotonous.. slow… voice.  Apparently headphones were too technically or financially difficult to procure.

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At the time, people were running Forplan, and somehow we were involved in the tree-growing part.  It could have been John Cissel, our Forplan soothsayer or Bill Anthony, his Deschutes counterpart , who told us “Forplan tells us to cut the ponderosa pine and grow grand fir, because they grow faster and ultimately produce more volume.” Or something like that.  I know there are folks here who know more about what Forplan was supposed to be doing than I do.

So we silviculture folks explained why we thought that that was not a good idea.   White fir/grand fir/ hybrid (WGH) firs aren’t fire resistant.  They have a tendency to get spruce budworm, Doug-fir tussock moth, fir engraver, and a variety of root and other diseases.

So flash forward to today.. now “growing faster” is good idea-wise due to carbon.In this story about a study that Anonymous referred to:

“This is why specifically letting large trees grow larger is so important for climate change because it maintains the carbon stores in the trees and accumulates more carbon out of the atmosphere at a very low cost.”

The study highlights the importance of protecting existing large trees and strengthening the 21-inch rule so that additional carbon is accumulated as 21-30″  trees are allowed to continue to grow to their ecological potential.

As a former silviculture worker, this feels pretty much the same as the Forplan idea of 40 years ago.  Assume- no fires, bugs, diseases, drought (conceivably made worse by climate change) and the firs will do fine by themselves! No openings for establishment of PP or WL necessary.

But silviculturists, forest pathologists and entomologists, and fuels practitioners are dealing with the same biophysical realities-  that trees don’t grow- whether to be cut as in Forplan, or to sequester carbon-  if they’re dead and /or burned. It’s interesting to see that the body of resource professionals’ knowledge  haven’t changed much over time (the interaction of trees, bugs, diseases and fire), while ideas about what practitioners should be doing from Forplan to carbon..seem to come from, and have the imprimatur of, people (however well-meaning) generally from elsewhere; places, apparently where fire, bugs, diseases and drought are not a big thing.

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If you want to see how much people already knew in 1994, there’s an excellent round-up, at least as far as the Blue Mountains go, by  by the Malheur Forest Silviculturist, David C. Powell,  in 1994- 30 years ago now.  Same old..

White fir, the favorite food of spruce budworm, has flourished in the fir stands that have encroached on ponderosa pine sites over the last 80 years. By controlling natural underburns, land managers were inadvertently swapping ponderosa pines and western larches for white firs and Douglas-firs. (p. 5)

Ponderosa pine depends on fire to clear away accumulations of needles and twigs so its seeds can find moist mineral soil, and to kill encroaching firs that prevent seedlings from getting
the unobstructed sunlight they need.

By controlling natural underburns, land managers allowed fire-resistant pines and larches to be replaced with shade-tolerant, late-successional species. Many of the replacement species are susceptible to the effects of western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir tussock moth, Indian paint fungus, Armillaria root disease, and other insects and pathogens. (p. 19)

And there’s an interesting section on Native American burning practices:

Although some of the underburns were started by lightning storms in mid or late summer (Plummer 1912), many others were ignited by native Americans (Cooper 1961, Johnston 1970, Robbins and Wolf 1994). When analyzing early journals from the western U.S., Gruell (1985) found that over 40 percent of the fires were described as being started by native Americans.

Two major factors led to conversion of pine stands with underburning to laddered stands with shade-tolerant species.  One was fire suppression:

Many land managers would agree that wildfire suppression was a policy with good intentions, but it was a policy that failed to consider the ecological implications of a major shift in species composition. White firs and Douglas-firs can get established under ponderosa pines in the absence of underburning, but they may not have enough resiliency to make it over the long run, let alone survive the next drought. This means that many of the mixed-conifer stands that have replaced ponderosa pine are destined to become weak, and weak forests are susceptible to insect and disease outbreaks (Hessburg and others 1994).

By controlling natural underburns, land managers allowed fire-resistant pines and larches to be replaced with shade-tolerant, late-successional species. Many of the replacement species are susceptible to the effects of western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir tussock moth, Indian paint fungus, Armillaria root disease, and other insects and pathogens. (p. 19)

The other reason was the attraction of cutting pine and leaving the GWH firs.  Powell provides some detailed explanations of why that seemed like a good idea at the time (mo clearcutting, no expensive tree planting)(p. 27) . And there were interactions between controlling underburns and reducing tree vigor due to competition, so then they would want to take these stressed pines.

Since old pines often have low vigor and little resistance to insect attack, they were harvested before being attacked and killed by western pine beetle or mountain pine beetle. One reason for low vigor in oldgrowth pine trees was competition from a dense understory, an understory that would not have been present if underburning had been allowed to play its natural role.

In 1994 folks were thinking about climate change:

Reestablishing ponderosa pine and western larch on sites that are suitable for their survival and growth, and a thinning or prescribed fire program to keep those stands open and vigorous, would probably do much to address global warming concerns. Using a plan like that one would not only restore much of the pine and larch that was removed by partial cutting (see fig. 21), but it could also create healthy forests with an increased resistance to a variety of insects and pathogens.

And they were also thinking about (healthy=preEuro times) (p. 34)

Perhaps an appropriate yardstick of ecosystem health is natural variation: are the changes caused by budworm consistent with the historical range of variation for similar ecosystems and vegetation conditions? For the mixed conifer forests of the southern Blue Mountains, the answer is probably “no.” It seems that 80 years of fire suppression and 50 years of selective harvesting have resulted in vegetation conditions that differ significantly from those of presettlement times (Table 3).

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If some think that the FS wants to cut larger GWH fir unnecessarily, why would they want to do that?

Foster (1907) White fir, though occasionally used for fuel when no better species are available, makes poor fuel wood, while for saw timber it is all but valueless owing to the fact that nearly all mature trees are badly rotted by a prevalent polyporus, and the wood season-checks badly. (p.30)

Forest Service employees have sometimes been called p— firs due to the “badly rotted” characteristics of white fir.

Choosing a Fire Future: Lessons from Southwest Colorado

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Excellent story from the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network. While some of us think that NEPA via plan amendments would be good, the work that the San Juan is doing without a plan amendment is also good.

 Assessing local fire danger, weather data, and utilizing Risk Management Assistance (RMA) analytical tools, the Forest developed a plan to bring the fire out to the prescribed fire unit/POD boundary. The local team conducted a structured risk-based conversation using the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP) framework, where agency administrators and local stakeholders collaboratively evaluated critical values at risk, developed strategic actions, documented risks to responders, and determined the probability of success.

The story is worth reading in its entirety, I just excerpted the lessons learned below.

Key Lessons Learned

Identify windows of opportunity: Fuel and weather conditions and resource availability are dynamic. Thinking outside the box can help realize opportunities to manage wildfire differently. Additionally, this year’s large incident can be used as the next fire’s best holding feature – as demonstrated during Trail Springs. Incorporating new disturbances into pre-response planning can help maximize their potential as holding features.

Provide clear leader’s intent: Without clear intent from agency administrators, firefighters and IMTs default to their experience and often suppress fires at the smallest possible size and earliest possible opportunity. Clear intent is required to consistently execute an alternative approach, and ensure we leverage our highly skilled fire workforce in pursuit of strategies that will more effectively reduce long-term ecosystem, community and firefighter risk.

Invest in stakeholder engagement: Working with partners and local collaboratives well before a fire starts is imperative to fostering a sense of shared responsibility. Ongoing communication and dialogue with stakeholders before, during, and after fires is critical to a successful, long-term fire management strategy. These efforts build social capital to better support complex decisions both now and in the future.

Leverage analytics and facilitate risk-based dialogues: Using analytics to facilitate strategic, risk-informed, and transparent dialogues can improve alignment between incident leadership, land managers and firefighters on the ground, resulting in higher quality decisions and increased trust.

Be prepared: Facilitating and participating in collaborative pre-season strategic planning efforts, such as Potential Operational Delineations (PODs), can help prepare a landscape to manage fires more proactively by creating a common operating picture and institutionalizing local fire knowledge. Additionally, actively preparing for long-duration events, anticipating, and mitigating late-season workforce fatigue, and building local fire management programs with the needed skill sets to manage long-duration fires can help develop local capacity and evolve the fire management paradigm.

Communicate the “why”: Good decisions may come with considerable institutional and personal risk, but with thoughtful, inclusive, and transparent processes risks can be considered more holistically. Understanding the “why” behind decisions provides critical context and can help create alignment between land managers, incident teams, firefighters, and the local community.

Two Sides to Every Story: What’s the Other Side? Housing for Employees at Seeley Lake

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Thanks to Nick Smith, I ran across this from Scott Snelson in the Hungry Horse News. I know there are many Region 1 retirees out there, so would appreciate any info you would be willing to share, either in the comments or by contacting me directly via email.. “sharon at forespolicypub.com”.
In my experience, there are always reasons for peoples’ actions.

The lack of vision from the U.S. Forest Service Regional Supervisor, as well as her staff, helped sink Pyramid Lumber, with it taking the livelihoods of over 100 Montanans along with rich opportunities to help the climate and reduce fire fuel hazard risk. Solid and innovative solutions to significantly help the housing issues in Seeley Lake and other communities have been presented to Regional Leaders for years without any meaningful action.

A group of U.S. Forest Service District Rangers from the Northern Region began meeting in 2021 to work on solutions to the housing crisis faced by existing and future USFS employees. It was painfully apparent to the rangers that our ability to attract and retain high quality employees and get the public’s work done was unreachable unless we found solutions to the high cost of housing.

At the same time, it was clear to the rangers that unless there was an expanded market for small diameter wood, our ability to treat meaningful acres of overstocked stands to reduce wildfire risk was also unreachable.

The nexus of these challenges also provided incredible opportunity for the communities in the Seeley/Swan Valley and the Flathead. An emerging small diameter cross-laminated timber (SDCLT) industry that utilizes the very type of wood we need to remove from our stands for fire hazard reduction, could have been further catalyzed by the purchase of “temporary” panelized houses. These units could be rapidly deployed on USFS administrative sites to give Forest employees and others an opportunity to transition into tight local housing markets. Should the housing crisis wane, the SDCLT units are designed to be easily dismantled and easily moved to other locations. This type of construction is wood (carbon) intensive and stores the carbon for the life of the panels (designed to last decades longer than traditional frame construction).

The District Ranger at Seeley Lake had identified approximately 20 acres of USFS lands that could have been rapidly developed for USFS and other community housing to meet the housing crisis. These concepts were presented to the Regional Forester and her team years ago and were met with the standard chorus of excuses why the status quo needed to be maintained.

Providing employee housing at administrative sites is far from novel. Until the 1980s, it was common for the USFS.

In my nine years as a USFS line officer in Region 1, I haven’t seen any indication there is meaningful leadership capacity in the USFS Regional Office to face the multiple crises we are encountering; climate, fire hazard, housing, and employee recruitment and retention. The guardians of the status quo have circled the wagons and armed themselves mightily against change and innovation.

Are Forest Products on the Way Out in Montana? And How Does the Wood Innovations Program Intersect With Struggling Producers?

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Roseburg Forest Products’ Missoula particleboard plant will close on May 22, the company announced Wednesday, March 20, 2024. Credit: Credit: Roseburg Forest Products

Before we dig into the timber details I talked about last week, and some examples of what I like to call “Post Timber War Convergence” (like my agreeing with Andy Kerr on something), I’d like take a look at the situation from the 30,000 foot level (as my former boss, Richard Stem, would say).

There have been many stories in the past few weeks about mills closing in Montana. Here’s an excellent one, thanks to a TSW reader.

Within the span of six days, both Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake and Roseburg Forest Products’ Missoula particleboard plant had announced they were shutting down permanently and eliminating a combined 250 jobs. The closures mark the final knockout punch locally to an industry that helped build Missoula and put food on tables here for over 150 years.

To put it another way: Sawmills were once as ubiquitous in Missoula as marijuana dispensaries are now.

There are smaller businesses in the area that still make wood products, there are still lumber mills operating in Montana, logging will still continue in the region and Pyramid Mountain Lumber’s facility could still be purchased and operated again in the future. But to many industry watchers, last week’s news was the final nail in the wooden coffin of the sector that’s paid the wages of tens of thousands of workers over the last century and a half.
“I mean, it’s huge, what’s happened to the wood products industry in Montana in the last five years,” said Zach Bashoor, the chair of the Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce, when asked how big of a deal last week’s news was. “Pyramid was the last sawmill in Missoula County and Roseburg was the last wood products manufacturing facility here.”
Bashoor has actually worked for both Roseburg and Pyramid in the past.

“When a mill closes there’s a whole contractor base built around those mills that’s going to be affected, too,” he explained. “There’s a contractor out of Seeley that told me he thinks he’s going to hang up his hat.”

By contractors, Bashoor is referring to loggers who have a contract to sell logs to Pyramid. Oftentimes, they’re doing forest thinning for wildfire risk management or forest ecology restoration projects that require thinning.  “They make a living out of selling timber to the mill, that’s how the system was built,” he said. “The demand of land management has changed to much more of a restoration aspect.” Bashoor owns a company called Montana Forest Consultants that services landowners and agencies doing forest management work.
“Without those (loggers), there’s no way to get our work done,” he said. “If they’re not around we can’t do things like watershed restoration projects or thinning small trees for hazardous fuels
reduction.”

In places in the West, say with Blue Mountains Forest Partners, or the Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions folks, sawmills and their downstream ilk are thought to be useful partners. In my own neck of the woods, an entirely private fuelbreak project is being supported by landowner donations, state grants and .. selling logs.

Without forest products industry around, we can expect fewer fuel projects to be done on federal land, they will cost more to the taxpayer, and less private mitigation is likely to be done. That’s just the cost element. What else will be done with the material removed? Will it be burned in piles, giving off smoke and carbon? And perhaps the old “fuel treatments and creating openings for species diversity are just an excuse for logging” argument will be at rest (as it currently is in places without mills). How would that change the litigation environment?

Meanwhile, the Congress/USDA/Biden Admin (wherever bucks come from) is giving out funding to help:

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service is making nearly $50 million in grant funding available for proposals that support crucial links between resilient, healthy forests, strong rural economies and jobs in the forestry sector. Made possible by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, a key pillar of Bidenomics, this funding will spark innovation, create new markets for wood products and renewable wood energy, expand processing capacity, and help tackle the climate crisis.

“A strong forest products economy contributes to healthier forests, vibrant communities and jobs in rural areas,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Thanks to President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, we are investing in rural economies by growing markets for forest products through sustainable forest management while reducing wildfire risk, fighting climate change, and accelerating economic development.”

This announcement is part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to generate economic opportunity and build a clean energy economy nationwide. The grants are made possible by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in history and a core pillar of Bidenomics, as well as President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, an historic investment to rebuild America’s aging infrastructure.

The above paragraph may take the prize for number of mentions of President Biden per word.

The open funding opportunity comes through the Forest Service’s three key grant programs to support the forest products economy: Wood Innovations Grant, Community Wood Grant, and Wood Products Infrastructure Assistance Grant Programs. The agency is seeking proposals that support innovative uses of wood in the construction of low carbon buildings, as a renewable energy source, and in manufacturing and processing products. These programs also provide direct support to expand and retrofit wood energy systems and wood products manufacturing facilities nationwide.

(Note that 2023 funded proposals are listed here.

Let’s compare Colorado, Montana, and Oregon.

I just looked at these three states and noticed grants to the Endowment and the Gates Family Foundation in Colorado.  It seems like the USG is giving grants to.. traditionally grant-making groups. I also wonder if there is a bias toward “starting new things” vs. “helping keep existing things going” perhaps something like a “forest products facility rescue” as in reality TV.

Maybe our economist friends can help me here, if there isn’t a way for the USG to help keep sawmills open rather than letting them close and starting over with something new in the future. I think of nurseries.. we wanted them, we got really good at them (and reforestation), then we assumed natural regen would take care of everything, so we lost the capacity and the know-how and basically have to start over, now that the people have retired and the infrastructure has been sold off. Resilience, it seems to me, requires some redundancy and keeping skills and some infrastructure on board. Though that’s not actually redundancy in the engineering sense. Maybe it’s more like making sure that useful skills. knowledge and workforce are maintained at some level.

The ‘Mother Tree’ idea is everywhere — but how much of it is real? And Variable Tree Retention as a Current Practice, But Maybe Not in BC

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After experimenting with different approaches to retention, the Plum Creek Timber Company found aggregated retention, as seen here on the Cougar Ramp Unit, was an effective approach to integrating environmental and timber management objectives. This cutting opened the senior author’s mind to the potential of aggregated retention, which today is generally viewed as the most important approach for conserving a broad array of biota (according to Franklin and Donato (2020)

It’s always fun to look at another scientific controversy around trees and forests.  TSW had posts on various facets of this issue, here, here and here. Thanks to Nature for making this article open source!

A brief recap:

Their concerns lay predominantly with a depiction of the forest put forward by Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, in her popular work. Her book Finding the Mother Tree, for example, was published in 2021 and swiftly became a bestseller. In it she drew on decades of her own and others’ research to portray forests as cooperating communities. She said that trees help each other out by dispatching resources and warning signals through fungal networks in the soil — and that more mature individuals, which she calls mother trees, sometimes prioritize related trees over others.

The idea has enchanted the public, appearing in bestselling books, films and television series. It has inspired environmental campaigners, ecology students and researchers in fields including philosophy, urban planning and electronic music. Simard’s ideas have also led to recommendations on forest management in North America.

What’s the role of scientists in presenting their and others’ work?

Then, a third academic, mycorrhizal ecologist Justine Karst, took the lead. She thought speaking out about the lack of evidence for the wood wide web had become an ethical obligation: “Our job as scientists is to present the truth, as close as we can get to it”.

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Simard says of her critics.. “They’re reductionist scientists,” she says when asked about criticism of her work. “They’ve missed the forest for the trees.” She is concerned that the debate over the details of the theory diminishes her larger goal of forest protection and renewal. “The criticisms are a distraction, to be honest, from what’s happening in our ecosystems.”

It seems to me that there are robust and fun scientific discussions to be had.  As depicted by this journalist (Simard might not have been quoted accurately), Simard thinks having discussions about science distracts us from what seems like advocacy. 

Roger Pielke Jr. has written (much, here’s one example) about what he calls “stealth issue advocacy” in the scientific community.  This doesn’t seem stealthy at all. It seems like sometimes you have to pick a lane between science and advocacy; and I’d prefer if scientists picked science.
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There’s a description of the differing scientific views. There are technical differences, and even apparently emphasis or focus differences.

Johnson’s view is that it “makes complete sense” that there are CMNs linking multiple forest trees and that substances might travel from one to another through them. Crucially, he says, this is not due to the trees supporting one another. A simple explanation, compatible with evolutionary theory, is that the fungi are acting to protect the trees that are their source of energy. It is beneficial for fungi to activate a tree’s defence signals, or to top up food for temporarily ailing trees. Pickles, who spent six years working with Simard before moving to the University of Reading, UK, says Simard’s ideas are not incompatible with competition, but give more weight to well-known phenomena in ecology, such as mutualism, in which organisms cooperate for mutual benefit. “It’s not altruism. It’s not some outrageous idea,” he says. “She certainly focuses more on facilitation and mutualism than is traditional in these fields, and that’s probably why there’s a lot of pushback.”

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Simard maintains that her critics attack her in the academic literature for imagery she has used only in public communication: “I talked about the mother tree as a way of communicating the science and then these other people say it’s a scientific hypothesis. They misuse my words.”

She argues that changing our understanding of how forests work from ‘winner takes all’ to ‘collaborative, integrated network system’ is essential for fixing the rampant destruction of old-growth forest, especially in British Columbia, where her research has focused. Indigenous cultures that have a more sustainable relationship with forests have mother and father trees, she says — “but the European male society hates the mother tree … somebody needs to write a paper on that”. “I’m putting forward a paradigm shift. And the critics are saying ‘we don’t want a paradigm shift, we’re fine, just the way we are’. We’re not fine.”

But does a “network system” “Indigenous culture-based” worldview lead us anywhere different in practice than the “ecological forestry” of the lower 48? Can the same kinds of practices be invoked, or even carried out, without a what we might call a “myco-centric” worldview? And if everyone used VRH, what would the scientific controversy be about.. would it be more theoretical (how important is mutualism vs. competition generally?) or more specific (more mycological experiments in the field?).

But what about variable retention harvesting as espoused by Jerry Franklin? In this open-source paper by Franklin and Donato (2020) (from the abstract):

Variable retention harvesting evolved in the Douglas-fir region of the Pacific Northwest gradually in response to increasing dissatisfaction with the ecological consequences of clear-cutting, from the standpoint of wildlife habitat and other important forest functions. It is a harvesting technique that can provide for retention (continuity) of such structures as large and old live trees, snags, and logs. Variable retention is based on the natural model of the biological legacies that are typically left behind following natural disturbances, such as wildfire, wind, and flood

This approach actually sounds more holistic (plants, animals, viruses) than one solely focused on CMNs, while providing opportunities for CMNs. Franklin seems to be in the camp of aggregated variable retention rather than dispersed. Conceivably the Mother Tree approach would be dispersed, which might be good for CMNs and possibly not so good for other ecosystem values.

According to Franklin and Donato’s historical narrative, aggregated retention was seen to be effective at conserving a broad array of biota around 1987 with experiments by the Plum Creek Timber Company. Perhaps these ideas did not migrate north to BC? But later in the history there is mention of the Clayoquot Sound Science Panel.

. This was part of a governmental response to major social disorders over the logging of old-growth forests in this region led by Native Americans (known in Canada as First Nations) and participated in by other Canadian citizens. The science panel conducted its activities and completed its report over the next year (Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound 1994). The Clayoquot Sound Science Panel recommended adoption of the “variable-retention silvicultural system” for all timber harvesting on Crown Lands in the region. The panel actually created the term “variable retention” to reflect the reality that the amount and other details of retention should vary depending upon management objectives and the nature of the stand being harvested. The panel recommended that harvests should “retain a minimum of 15% of the original stand on all cutting units … [excepting] very small cutting units” and that the retention should “retain a representative cross-section of species and structures of the original stand.” In areas with very high values for resources other than timber (such as wildlife habitat, slope stability), the panel recommended retention levels of at least 70%. Hence, the Clayoquot Sound Science Panel contributed significantly to the concept as well as the name “variable retention.” The panel’s recommendations also helped set the stage for MacMillan-Bloedel Corporation’s decision to replace clear-cutting with variable retention a few years later (Beese et al. 2019).

Anyway, this post started out by being about mycological networks and the scientific controversies therein, and that article is certainly interesting. But I also thought the Franklin/Donato paper, being historical in perspective, also deserves a look by those among us involved during those time periods. And am I the only person who remembers “big messy clearcuts”? Was that the same as “variable retention” or different?

Hidden stories of fire: tree rings reveal fire histories of Pacific Northwest rainforests: FS Webinar April 25

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Historical fire regimes and the 2020 Labor Day fires on the west side of Oregon and Washington with locations of large (>10,000 ha) and small fires (<10,000 ha), b) Reburns following the 1902 Yacolt Fire in 1902 in the western Washington Cascades,

Historical fire regimes and the 2020 Labor Day fires on the west side of Oregon and Washington with locations of large (>10,000 ha) and small fires (<10,000 ha), b) Reburns following the 1902 Yacolt Fire in 1902 in the western Washington Cascades, c) Reburns following the 1933 Tillamook Fire in the Oregon Coast Range.

2020 fire perimeters and mapped extent of “stand-replacing fire” in 1902 and perimeters of known large westside fires.

2020 fire perimeters and mapped extent of “stand-replacing fire” in 1902 and perimeters of known large westside fires.

I know many folks are interested in this topic…here’s the link.  We might have talked about these studies before. Thanks to Nick Smith !

Hidden stories of fire: tree rings reveal fire histories of Pacific Northwest rainforests

Webinar Date
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Andrew Merschel and colleagues at the Pacific Northwest Research Station and Oregon State University have constructed dozens of new fire histories in the western Cascades of Oregon and Washington. These histories refine our understanding of historical fire regimes in Pacific Northwest rainforests. For the first time, this research pairs direct evidence of historical fires with precisely dated tree establishment data. The novel fire and forest development histories reveal tremendous diversity in the tempo of historical fires and their influence on forest development and conditions.

Contrary to conventional theory, many old trees and forests in the Pacific Northwest were shaped by recurrent low- to moderate-severity fires. Across these landscapes, variation in the number of fires, their timing, and their effects increased diversity in forest successional conditions (e.g., ages) and diversity in tree structure and species composition. Many of the remarkable and beloved features of old forests in the Pacific Northwest including old trees with enormous and complex crowns, multi-layered canopies, and a diverse mixture of tree species developed with fire, not without fire.

In some study locations, exceptionally high fire frequency prior to European colonization is indicative of Indigenous fire stewardship practiced for millennia by Indigenous cultures. This highlights the critical role that Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest had in stewarding and shaping the old trees and forests that contemporary forest management is aiming to restore and conserve. Merschel’s innovative research is sparking a shift in how we think about fires in the Pacific Northwest. Tune in to this webinar to learn some surprising things that we are learning about historical fire regimes and forest dynamics, and how this information might inform restoration of old-growth forests, fire mitigation, and adaptation to a warmer and drier climate.

Does Anyone Have the Rest of the Story? Navajo Nation Lawsuit Over Forestry Management Program

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Hopefully someone out there has more information on this one from Law 360. I can’t access it.

Law360 (March 27, 2024, 7:09 PM EDT) — The Navajo Nation claims the U.S. Department of the Interior unlawfully withheld more than a million dollars in funding for its contracted forestry management program, telling a D.C. federal judge the department should be forced to provide the money and accept the funding ..

That’s all we get.

If we look at the past, we have this..from Holland and Knight in 2020:

Native American Law Partner Philip Baker-Shenk is representing the Navajo Nation in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) claiming the department is illegally holding back money for the tribe’s forestry program that the government owes under a self-determination contract. In its complaint, the Navajo Nation said that the DOI’s Bureau of Indian Affairs violated the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act by failing to deliver over $700,000 under a funding agreement for the tribe’s forestry management program, even though a representative for DOI Secretary David Bernhardt had recommended that the tribe’s proposal be approved.

Now if the DOI Sec at the time recommended it.. and the government isn’t sending it.. there’s an interesting story of some kind out there.  Does anyone have access or further info? If so, please share in the comments.