Matthew Koehler

Wilderness Watch Questions Landscaping Proposal for the Pasayten Wilderness

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From Wilderness Watch:

Wilderness Watch is urging the Forest Service (FS) to abandon its proposal to plant whitebark pine in the Pasayten Wilderness in Washington. None of the reasons the FS gives in its Quartz Mountain Whitebark Pine Preliminary Environmental Assessment (EA) appear to be valid. The EA states, “There is a need to establish a whitebark pine seed source…for natural regeneration to occur.” It also notes, “…no tree seedlings were observed on the former whitebark site and it is therefore unlikely that whitebark pine will naturally regenerate in the area.” This clearly leads the public to believe there are no living whitebark pines in the area. However, the EA goes on to contradict the earlier statement by saying there are “surviving whitebark pines in the Quartz Mountain area.”

The Quartz Mountain fire that killed whitebark pines was a natural event, and it may take decades for seedlings to be reestablished (a fact recognized by the Whitebark Pine Foundation). The project would have a significant negative impact on the Pasayten Wilderness. Wilderness Watch told the Forest Service to let natural processes—fire, Clark’s nutcrackers, rains, and wind—determine the extent of whitebark pine regeneration. Wilderness is about wildness and that includes letting nature determine when and where seedlings will be re-established. Any experiment of this type should be confined to non-Wilderness lands.

Read Wilderness Watch’s comments here.

Lolo Creek Complex: Rewind the clock, what would you have done?

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Google Earth image showing a pre-fire portion of the landscape now burning as part of the Lolo Creek Complex, currently the nation's number 1 priority fire. For orientation purposes, the picture icon on the middle-bottom of the image is "Fort Fizzle" (a temporary military post erected in July 1877 by the U.S. Government to intercept the Nez Perce Indians [including women and children] in their flight from Idaho across the Lolo Pass into the Bitterroot Valley....and eventually to the Big Hole, Yellowstone and then all the way up to Canada). The road at the bottom of the image is US Hwy 12 and you'll notice a fair number of homes and neighborhoods scattered along the highway. The two other pictures in this post (below) were taken near Hwy 12 and are looking to the north on the slopes above Fort Fizzle. According to a property ownership search on the official State of Montana site, nearly all of the land in this image north and above the highway is owned by Plum Creek Timber Company, although 3/4 of a section is owned by "YT Timber" out of Townsend, MT (likely connected to RY Timber in Townsend) and nearly 1/2 a section is owned by "BFP Partnership" from Missoula (which appears to be a development company). If we could turn back the clock to pre-Lolo Creek Complex what specific land management activities would you recommend in this landscape in terms of restoring the forest, addressing "fuels" or protecting the homes and neighborhoods from the inevitability of wildfire?
Google Earth image showing a pre-fire portion of the landscape now burning as part of the Lolo Creek Complex, currently the nation’s number 1 priority fire. For orientation purposes, the picture icon on the middle-bottom of the image is “Fort Fizzle” (a temporary military post erected in July 1877 by the U.S. Government to intercept the Nez Perce Indians [including women and children] in their flight from Idaho across the Lolo Pass into the Bitterroot Valley….and eventually to the Big Hole, Yellowstone and then all the way up to Canada). The road at the bottom of the image is US Hwy 12 and you’ll notice a fair number of homes and neighborhoods scattered along the highway. The two other pictures in this post (below) were taken near Hwy 12 and are looking to the north on the slopes above Fort Fizzle. According to a property ownership search on the official State of Montana site, nearly all of the land in this image north and above the highway is owned by Plum Creek Timber Company, although 3/4 of a section is owned by “YT Timber” out of Townsend, MT (likely connected to RY Timber in Townsend) and nearly 1/2 a section is owned by “BFP Partnership” from Missoula (which appears to be a development company). If we could turn back the clock to pre-Lolo Creek Complex what specific land management activities would you recommend in this landscape in terms of restoring the forest, addressing “fuels” or protecting the homes and neighborhoods from the inevitability of wildfire?

It’s a smokey, rainy morning here in Missoula. After over three weeks without a computer (well, if you don’t count borrowing the wife’s computer at 5 minute intervals) due to a fairly significant hard-drive crash I’m back in the game, which I’m sure will be of great joy to some people.

Before the hard-drive crash I couldn’t even have dreamed of running something like ‘google earth’ on my computer. But my tech guy has this computer running better than new, so I spent some time on ‘google earth’ this morning. Really, it was Derek W who put the idea in my head, as a comment from him elsewhere on the blog mentioned that the area burned by the West Mullan fire near Superior, MT was now ‘refreshed’ on ‘google earth.’

So at the top of this post is an image of the landscape that’s now burning as part of the Lolo Creek Complex wildfire. I put quite a bit of information in the caption above, including the fact that Plum Creek Timber Company owns almost all the land in the image, so I won’t repeat it here, except to again ask an honest question:

If we could turn back the clock to pre-Lolo Creek Complex what specific land management activities would you recommend in this landscape in terms of restoring the forest, addressing any “fuels” concerns and/or protecting the homes and neighborhoods from the inevitability of wildfire?

Like I said, this is an honest question, especially in the context of all the debates and discussions we’ve had on this blog about the need to “do something” regarding forest restoration or dealing with “fuels” or protecting homes and communities from wildfire.

To date, according to the official Inciwb report on the fire, 9504 acres have burned. Of that 83% is private land, the vast majority of which is owned by Plum Creek Timber Company. There are currently 652 firefighting personnel on the fire and, according to the Missoulian, some of the firefighting crews are being flown in from as far away as Virgina and Michigan. Additional resources include 9 helicopters, 31 engines, 14 dozers and 9 water tenders.

Photo and text from Inciweb.
Photo and text from Inciweb.

Missoulian Fort Fizzle

Lolo Creek Complex: Majority of acres burned owned by Plum Creek Timber Co

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To date, the vast majority of the land burned in the Lolo Creek Complex fire has been heavily logged, roaded and weeded sections owned and managed by Plum Creek Timber Company
To date, the vast majority of the land burned in the Lolo Creek Complex fire has been heavily logged, roaded and weeded sections owned and managed by Plum Creek Timber Company

On Wednesday, the Lolo Creek Complex fire was named the nation’s Number 1 firefighting priority. Over the past few days the fire has made a number of good runs due to winds approaching 50 miles per hour and humidities in the teens. This has all been reported in the media.

What hasn’t been reported in the media at all is the fact that the majority of the acres burned to date as part of the Lolo Creek Complex fire have burned on lands owned and managed by Plum Creek Timber Company. Much of that Plum Creek Timber Company land has been heavily logged, roaded and infested with noxious weeds.

According to the official Inciweb report on the Lolo Creek Complex fire, to date the fire has burned 1,455 acres of the Lolo National Forest and 7,143 acres of private land. For what it’s worth, much of the Lolo National Forest land burned in this fire to date could also be characterized as heavily logged, roaded and infested with noxious weeds.

What Inciweb doesn’t tell us, or show, is that the vast majority of that private land burned to date in the fire is owned and managed by Plum Creek Timber Company.

To verify this fact I used the most current fire perimeter maps on Inciweb and then consulted with a tool called the Montana Cadastral, that I’ll sometimes use during hunting season to confirm land ownership. The Montana Cadastral is a Montana Base Map Service Center, which is a part of the Montana State Library. It provides the most up-to-date information concerning land ownership throughout Montana.

As anyone can clearly see using these tools, section after section of land owned and managed (mis-managed?) by Plum Creek Timber Company has burned as part of the Lolo Creek Complex fire. Currently, over 500 firefighters (and numerous helicopters, bull-dozers, tanker trucks, etc) are battling the fire. What the total cost of this fire to US Taxpayers will be is anyone’s guess. The total cost of all this fire suppression activity that will be paid for by Plum Creek Timber Company is likely a little easier to figure out.

Why the Montana media hasn’t utter one single word about the fact that the majority of land burning in this fire is owned and managed by Plum Creek Timber Company is a real mystery.

P.S. It’s also worth pointing out that another large chunk of the private land burned to date in the Lolo Creek Complex Fire is owned by Illinois-based Potomac Corporation. It’s tough to find info about them on-line, but they appear to be in the cardboard manufacturing business. Calls to their listed 847-259-0546 number have gone unanswered all day.

USFS Fire Lab and Wuerthner: Wind Drives All Large Blazes

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Below are excerpts from a couple of articles about the fact that wind and weather conditions drive all large wildfires.

From the Missoulian:

Larry Bradshaw was riding his motorcycle down U.S. Highway 12 on Monday afternoon when he noted the building smoke and stiffening winds.

It was an acute observation for a meteorologist who has worked at the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula since 1992, and still maintains the National Fire Danger Rating System.

Bradshaw tuned into the scanner a few hours later and listened as chaos unfolded ahead of the West Fork II fire, the blaze jumping the highway he’d ridden hours earlier before making a run east down the Lolo Creek Canyon.

“The winds were really strong out of the west,” said Bradshaw. “The inversion broke there earlier than it did in Missoula.”….

“It was the same recipe used on every fire – it’s dry and it’s windy,” said Finney. “We have a canyon situation and a couple fires low in the canyon. The fires have topography working in their favor – the canyon topography helping with the winds.”

The tools used by fire managers to predict the interaction of wind, topography, weather and fuel were developed here by the likes of Bradshaw and Finney and dozens of other scientists working up and down these hallways, part of the government’s Rocky Mountain Research Station….

“The thing we have to realize is that fires are inevitable. They’re impossible to completely exclude from the landscape,” Finney said.

“By trying to do that and doing it so successfully, what we’ve done is saved up the fires for the worst conditions. When you get rid of all the fires under moderate conditions, all you have left are the extreme ones.”

The other article is a column by George Wuerthner, which appear at The Wildlife News:

As large fires have spread across the West in recent decades, we hear increasing demands to reduce fuels—typically through logging. But logging won’t reduce the large fires we are experiencing because fuels do not drive large fires….

The ingredients found in all large blazes include low humidity, high temperatures, and drought. Assuming you have these factors, you can get an ignition if lightning strikes. But even an ignition won’t lead to large fires.

The final ingredient in all large blazes is wind.

Wind’s effect is not linear. In other words, increasing wind speed from 10 mph to 20 mph does not double fire spread, rather it leads to exponential fire growth and increases the burn intensity….

Most large fires have wind speeds of 30-50 mph or more. Wind makes fire fighting difficult since embers are blown miles ahead of the burning fire front. It is also the reason why wind makes fuel reduction projects ineffective.

Wind drives flames through and over fuel treatments. Even clearcuts with little or no fuel will not halt a wind driven fire. The wind driven fire just dances around and over any fuel breaks.

The biggest problem with fuel reductions is that one can’t predict where and when fires will occur. The likelihood of a wildfire will encounter a treated forest in the time scale when fuel reduction are effective is incredibly low.

The vast majority of acreage burning around the West are occurring in higher elevation forests like lodgepole pine and various fir species that naturally burn at infrequent intervals, often hundreds of years apart. As a consequence, a fuel treatment in such forests is a waste of time because the probability of a fire occurring at all in the time when fuel reductions are effectiveness is extremely low.

Even in drier forests like ponderosa pine that burn more frequently the chances that a fire will encounter a fuel treatment while it’s most effective is around 1-2%.

There is a role for fuel reduction projects. The best ones are targeted near communities and other areas of interest. The idea being one cannot predict where a fire may start, but one can predict what you don’t want to burn up in a fire. So focus fuels reductions adjacent to those places.

The most important fuel reduction projects should occur in the communities themselves. Removal of wood piles from adjacent to homes. Clearing pine needles from roofs. Getting rid of flammable building materials like cedar shake roofs.

Reducing the flammability of homes are the kinds of “fuel reductions” that work and should be encouraged. If these fuel reductions were implemented religiously, we wouldn’t have to worry about wildfires in the hinterlands, and we could permit these blazes to do the important ecological work they perform without continual interference from humans, yet feel secure in the knowledge that our communities were safe from wildfires.

West Fork 2 Fire, Lolo National Forest

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Official image from the federal government's InciWeb site showing the landscape burning as part of the West Fork 2 fire on the Lolo National Forest. The flame on the bottom portion of the image shows the general location of the start of the fire.
Official image from the federal government’s InciWeb site showing the landscape burning as part of the West Fork 2 fire on the Lolo National Forest. The flame on the bottom portion of the image shows the general location of the start of the fire.

Consider this post sort of a companion piece to Larry’s “American Fire, Tahoe National Forest” post below. The West Fork 2 wildfire started via a lightning strike early Sunday morning. Yesterday, was yet another 90+ day in Missoula (adding to the record total number of days over 90 this year). By mid-day humidity bottomed out at 16% and the winds gusted from the west at 40 mph.

As a result the West Fork 2 fire – burning through a heavily fragmented, clearcut, logged, roaded, weeded landscape just west of Lolo, Montana – ripped pretty good, burning some houses and dumping smoke, ash and charred bark into the Missoula Valley.

Here’s another image of the general location of the fire from a wider angle, showing more of the heavily fragmented landscape.

WestFork2_Wide Pan

P.S. And thank goodness the Tar Sands megaloads came through – and blocked all traffic – on US Highway 12 a few days ago…and not during the course of this wildfire incident. One has to wonder how the evacuation of homes, people, pets and belongings and the response of firefighters, sheriffs and emergency personal would have been impacted a few days earlier with the Tar Sands megaloads blocking the highway.

Will Enviro ‘Collaborators’ Support Rep Daines Mandated Logging Bill?

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Senator Jon Tester’s (D-MT) mandated logging bill, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, has certainly been discussed and debate on this blog, and elsewhere, since it was introduced in the summer of 2009. See here, here and here for some of the past posts and discussions.

Back in December 2009 I had the honor of representing the Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign (a coalition of organizations, small-business owners, scientists, educators, 5th generation Montanans, hikers and backpackers, hunters and anglers, wildlife viewers, outfitters and guides, veterans, retired Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management officials and former loggers and mill workers dedicated to wildlands protection, Wilderness preservation, and the sound long-term management of our federal public lands legacy) before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The fact that I was invited to deliver testimony by the Committee Chair, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) obviously didn’t sit very well with Senator Tester, who was hoping for more a rubber-stamp dog-n-pony show hearing, not a hearing based on the substance of the bill. (For an interesting account of the hearing read award-winning outdoor writer Bill Schneider’s piece, “What Tester’s Outburst Tells Us.”

Fast-forward to May of this year when Missoulian opinion columnist wrote a piece titled, “Tester’s Forest Jobs Bill Plus Daines Bad for Conservation.” Ochenski, certainly one of the greatest conservationists and environmental, tribal lobbyists in Montana history, ended his piece with this prophetic statement:

“It’s a mystery why the conservation collaborators failed to understand these elementary principles of the legislative process. But if Tester’s bill ever clears the Senate – and Congressman Daines (R-MT) has his way in the House – they are about to learn a very hard and environmentally costly lesson. And more’s the pity for Montana.”

Much of the “support” for Senator Tester’s mandated logging bill is being manufactured and orchestrated by the Montana Wilderness Association with the ample assistance of over 1/2 million dollars from the Pew Foundation’s Campaign for America’s Wilderness. That amount of money goes a long ways in a state like Montana, with collaborator environmental groups like the Montana Wilderness Association spending the money on internal focus groups, one-sided internal polling (which is presented to the public as independent and unbiased), “public” presentations where only supporters of the bill are allowed to present and plenty of TV, radio and newspaper ads flooding the state. All the while, MWA has engaged in a pattern of censorship and removal of any substantive comments on their social media sites which mention anything critical about Tester’s mandated logging bill.

Well, here we are a few months following Ochenski’s dire warning to the environmental “collaborators” supporting Senator Tester’s mandated logging bill. This summer, MWA staff have been heavily courting Rep Steve Daines (R-MT) to introduce Tester’s bill in the House. People may have noticed that the Montana Wilderness Association has been actively getting their members to submit glowing Letters to the Editor about how great Steve Daines is and how he should join Sen Tester and Sen Baucus to support mandated logging of national forests in Montana. In fact, this website was recently launched by MWA.

Yesterday’s Missoulian article, “Daines makes additions to U.S. House bill to speed timber harvests” gives people in Montana and across the country (especially those who value Wilderness and public lands) an indication of 1) just where Rep Daines wants to take national forest policy; and 2) just how irresponsible and naive the environmental “collaborators” are if they think Rep Daines will be their big Wilderness and public lands protection champion.

According to The Wilderness Society, which also ironically supports Senator Tester’s mandated logging bill, Rep Daines and Rep Hastings (R-WA) “Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act” would establish “Forest Reserve Revenue Areas” as a replacement for the current Secure Rural Schools (SRS) county payments program, simultaneously creating a legally-binding logging mandate with no environmental or fiscal feasibility limits, and reestablishing the discredited 25% logging revenue sharing system that was eliminated over a decade ago with the creation of SRS.

Furthermore, under Rep Daines and Rep Hasting’s bill, public participation and Endangered Species Act protections would be severely limited. The bill creates huge loopholes in NEPA and such biased ESA requirements that in practice these laws would almost never meaningfully apply. For example, any project less than 10,000 acres (that’s 15.6 square miles) would be categorically excluded from environmental analysis and public participation, and the Forest Service would be required to submit a finding that endangered species are not jeopardized by any project, regardless of its actual effect on the species.

Obviously, while politically mandated logging of America’s national forests is a terrible, dangerous precedent for the environmental community to push for, it goes without saying that Rep Daines and the GOP would make the bad provisions within Senator Tester’s mandated logging bill that much worse. It will also be interesting to see if any of the environmental “collaborators” supporting Tester’s mandated logging bill will actually rise up and speak out against Rep Daines mandated logging bill, or if they will continue to generate favorable Letters to the Editor about Rep Daines on public lands issues.

Research rejects past fire suppression & “unnatural” fuel build-up as factors in the size & occurrence of large fires in So Cal

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The following press release and new scientific review arrived in my in-box yesterday via the California Chaparral Institute. If you have questions about the press release, or the new scientific review, please direct them to the California Chaparral Institute’s Director or Conservation Analyst listed below. Thank you. – mk

For Immediate Release, August 1, 2013

Contact:  Richard W. Halsey, Director, (760) 822-0029
Dylan Tweed, Conservation Analyst, (760) 213-3991

Fire Service Unfairly Blamed for Wildfires
 
Research rejects past fire suppression and “unnatural” fuel build-up as factors in the size and occurrence of large fires in southern California

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – A new scientific review and five major studies now refute the often repeated notion that past fire suppression and “unnatural” fuel build-up are responsible for large, high-intensity fires in southern California. Such fires are a natural feature of the landscape. Fire suppression has been crucial in protecting native shrubland ecosystems that are suffering from too much fire rather than not enough.

The research has also shown that the creation of mixed-age classes (mosaics) of native chaparral shrublands through fuel treatments like prescribed burns will not provide reliable barriers to fire spread; however, strategic placement may benefit fire suppression activities.

The research will be presented during a special California Board of Forestry hearing, August 8, 2013, 8am, at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel, in Ventura, California.

Advocates of the fire suppression/mosaic view often misinterpret the research and ignore contrary information. For example, the recent Mountain fire near Idyllwild in the San Bernardino National Forest was blamed on 130 years of fire suppression. More than half of the area had burned in the 1980s. A 770 acre portion had burned five years ago. The 2007 fires in southern California re-burned nearly 70,000 acres that had burned in 2003. The majority of southern California’s native habitats are threatened by too much fire rather than not enough. This is especially true for chaparral, sage scrub, and desert habitats. Fires less than ten to twenty years apart can convert native shrublands to highly flammable, non-native grasslands.

“All of us need to take responsibility in making our homes and communities fire safe,” said Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute. “Political leaders also need to find the courage to prevent developments from being built in high fire hazard locations. Blaming the fire service for large, intense fires because of their past efforts to protect lives, property, and the environment from wildfires is counterproductive and contrary to the science.”

The scientific review can be found here

Additional Information

1. August 8, 2013 Board of Forestry Meeting Agenda

2. The five key research papers refuting the fire suppression/mosaic perspective:

Keeley, J.E. and P.H. Zedler. 2009. Large, high-intensity fire events in southern California shrublands: debunking the fine-grain age patch model. Ecological Applications 19: 69-94.

Lombardo, K.J., T.W. Swetnam, C.H. Baisan, M.I. Borchert. 2009. Using bigcone Douglas-fir fire scars and tree rings to reconstruct interior chaparral fire history. Fire Ecology 5: 32-53.

Moritz, M.A., J.E. Keeley, E.A. Johnson, and A.A. Schaffner. 2004. Testing a basic assumption of shrubland fire management: Does the hazard of burning increase with the age of fuels? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 2:67-72.

Keeley, J.E., Fotheringham, C.J., Morais, M. 1999. Reexamining fire suppression impacts on brushland fire regimes. Science Vol. 284. Pg. 1829-1832.

Mensing, S.A., Michaelsen, J., Byrne. 1999. A 560 year record of Santa Ana fires reconstructed from charcoal deposited in the Santa Barbara Basin, California. Quaternary Research. Vol. 51:295-305.

3.  The Science Basics on Fire in the Chaparral

Lawnmower Sparks Fire Near Missoula

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Mill Creek

According to today’s Missoulian:

FRENCHTOWN – A wildfire sparked by a lawnmower northeast of here quickly spread to 720 acres on Thursday afternoon, displacing livestock and prompting authorities to issue evacuation notices to hundreds of homes.

The Mill Creek fire started in tinder-dry grass before blowing up across a ridge into scattered timber and homes. Air support arrived quickly and in force, hitting the fire with water and slurry as evacuees ran for cover.

As of 9 p.m. Thursday, the fire was zero percent contained.

According to Inciweb the fire started around 2pm as the lawnmower apparently hit a rock and sparked.  The Missoula airport sits a few miles from the location of the fire and yesterday afternoon the airport reported a high temperature of 97 degrees, relative humidity down to 11% and winds gusting to 23 miles per hour.

Inciweb reports that the fire is burning in grass, brush and timber and around homes. So far, 175 firefighters are on the fire and it looks like helicopters and slurry bombers are also on the the fire. Maps indicate that the fire is burning on State of Montana land and private land and is heading headed Plum Creek Timber Company land and also US Forest Service land.  There’s also a chance that this fire will burn into the 2007 Black Cat fire area, as well as some recent Forest Service fuel-reduction projects. No word yet on the taxpayer cost of this human-caused fire. Today’s forecast for Missoula is for sunny skies and a high of 95 degrees.

Montana’s $7.2 million (and rising) West Mullan Fire human-caused

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This satellite image shows the general location of the West Mullan Fire near Superior, MT. As anyone can see, much of the Lolo National Forest lands, as well as private lands, north of Superior have been heavily logged and roaded. Some of the larger clearcuts and roads built on top of one another are impressive examples of the type of habitat fragmentation common in many areas of our national forests.
This satellite image shows the general location of the West Mullan Fire near Superior, MT. As anyone can see, much of the Lolo National Forest lands, as well as private lands, north of Superior have been heavily logged and roaded. Some of the larger clearcuts and roads built on top of one another are impressive examples of the type of habitat fragmentation common in many areas of our national forests.

This morning the Missoulian is reporting that:

A fire that has burned nearly 10 square miles north of Superior was human caused.

Officials with the West Mullan Fire said Tuesday that the fire that started on July 14 was human caused, but no further information was released.

According to Inciweb the human-caused fire started on July 14th at approximately 5pm and has burned 6,300 acres.  To date, this human-caused fire has cost $7.2 million and there are currently 821 people battling the fire.

Payson Roundup: 4FRI Contract Bombshell

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This blog has had numerous posts, debates and discussions about the Four Forest Restoration (4FRI) in Arizona, including this article, “Is the US Forest Service killing the last best chance to save the Southwest’s forests?”

Well, the latest development via the in-depth reporting of Pete Aleshire with the Payson Roundup in an article yesterday titled, “Forest Contract Bombshell.” Below are extensive snips from that article:  [Note: emphasis added – mk]

Amid fresh furor, the U.S. Forest Service is considering letting a troubled timber company transfer the biggest forest restoration project in history.

The Forest Service announced on Monday that it has received a request from Pioneer Forest Products to transfer the 10-year, Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) contract to thin 300,000 acres in Northern Arizona to another, unnamed company.

“We are in the process of reviewing the application,” said Cathie Schmidtlin, media officer for the Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service, “to determine whether the transfer of assets is in the best interest of the government. If we determine it is not, the contract would stay with Pioneer. If it is determined to be in the best interest of the government, then the contract liability would transfer to the new owner, who would be contractually obligated to carry out the terms and conditions of the 4FRI contract.”….

At least one of the key groups that helped develop the 4FRI plan immediately responded to the announcement by calling for an inspector general’s investigation of the “potential irregularities” in the award of the contract.

“Many of us saw this one coming right from the start. Pioneer’s business plan read like a fantasy novel,” said Todd Schulke, with the Center for Biological Diversity, which helped develop 4FRI in collaboration with representatives of the timber industry, forest health researchers and local officials like Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin. “But the Forest Service chose Pioneer despite having more realistic options. Either Pioneer misled the agency about its financial viability or the Forest Service chose to look the other way when there were serious questions. Why?”

Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin said, “this could be the best thing that has happened to 4FRI — or it could be abysmal business as usual. Anyone who has the financial backing to buy this contract, the willingness to ‘take on’ the whole social functioning/disfunctioning that has grown around it and the desire to fulfill it definitely has my attention … and my respect if they can actually pull it off.”….

The Forest Service awarded the contract to Pioneer more than a year ago. The contract originally required Pioneer to thin about 15,000 acres in 2013 and 30,000 acres annually after that. The plan called for feeding those small-diameter trees into new mills in Winslow to produce biodiesel fuel and a type of “finger-jointed” furniture.

Several months ago, the Forest Service modified the terms the contract so that Pioneer only had to thin 1,000 acres in the next 18 months, amid reports that the company was having trouble getting financing for its proposed mills in Winslow.

The Forest Service statement released on Monday said “we cannot disclose the names of the potential new owner as this information is confidential while the proposed agreement is under review. The first task order of the contract, the Ranch task order located on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests is progressing satisfactorily and expected to be completed ahead of schedule.”…..

The stakeholders generally expected Berlioux Arizona Forest Restoration Products (AZFRP) to win the bid for the contract, since he had helped develop the approach behind 4FRI.

Instead, the Forest Service’s contract review office in Albuquerque awarded the contract to Pioneer Forest Products. One of the principals in the company was Marlin Johnston, who was a longtime Forest Service official who formerly ran the agency’s regional timber harvest office. In that post, he battled demands of environmentalists that the Forest Service quit cutting the remaining old-growth, fire-resistant trees.

Supporters of the 4FRI approach, like Supervisor Martin, questioned the award of the contract to Pioneer. She noted that Berlioux had not only offered to pay more money to the Forest Service for the contract, but had also agreed to monitor whether the thinning projects had the intended effects on tree growth, fire patterns and wildlife.

Moreover, Martin and others questioned Pioneer’s plan to compete with overseas markets in making finger-jointed furniture and use branches and slash to make diesel fuel, although previous efforts had failed.

By contrast, Berlioux proposed using the trees to make Oriented Strand Board — a sort of high-tech plywood that currently represents a $2 billion industry. Berlioux ran Europe’s first OSB factory.

Moreover, Pioneer principal owner Herman Hauck, 84, hasn’t operated a timber company or mill since Hauck Mill Work Company went bankrupt in 1969, according to an investigation by freelance writer and radio reporter Claudine LoMonaco, published in The Santa Fe Reporter, an alternative weekly. She had prepared a story on Pioneer’s dubious background for the public radio station in Flagstaff, but station officials killed the story.

The Forest Service contracting office declined to release many key details of Pioneer’s proposal and has never explained why it awarded the contract to the company that offered to pay the least.

Forest Service officials on Monday remained tight-lipped. In an e-mail to the Roundup accompanying the release Schmidlin said “this is all the information I’m able to provide at this time. The Forest Service will gladly share additional information in the near future, when the review process is completed. I don’t know how long the process will take.”

The swirl of questions about the contracts have forced the very people who developed the 4FRI approach to become increasingly vocal critics of the Forest Service’s implementation.

Martin, in an e-mail exchange on Monday, said she hopes the Forest Service will now seek expert, outside help. “The FS track record on the business side of this contract conversation has been so poor that unless they get ‘outside’ help evaluating the situation, the proposal and bringing business science to bear  — I’m skeptical of the outcome … even knowing that a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while!”

Moreover, she said “for me there is still the whole social agreement concerning big tree/old tree retention that was agreed upon by the counties, enviros, industry and others that the FS have completely thrown out the window and claim that us wanting to leave them all ‘is not good science.’ Nonsense!”

She said old-growth trees constitute just 3 percent of the trees in the ponderosa pine forest of Northern Arizona, even though the Forest Service management plan calls for increasing that tally to 20 percent. “For instance, the 33,000-acre Rim Lakes thinning portion of the 4FRI proposal by Heber has only an average less than one old tree per acre to start with!”

She said she hopes the Forest Service will now agree to leave virtually all of the trees larger than 16 inches in diameter. “We’re asking that they leave ALL the big/old trees (with few exceptions) — get rid of all the dog hair thickets and get ahead of the fire danger curve — and then go back to the drawing board and see if there needs to be more mosaic, more age/structure classifications, etc. within the treated area. They claim their science shows restoration occurs faster/better with some of the old growth gone — again I say nonsense! First let them show me where they have restored a forest — ANYWHERE — and then we’ll talk about it.”

Schulke made the same point. The Center for Biological Diversity has battled the Forest Service for years attempting to prevent the harvest of old-growth trees in an effort to save endangered, old-growth dependent species like the Mexican spotted owl and the Northern goshawk. But the group promised to go to court to support 4FRI if the Forest Service agreed to leave the remaining old-growth trees.

“Ignoring the collaborative agreement was an outright breach of the social license that enabled 4FRI in the first place,” said Schulke. “Large trees are not only critically important to the survival of an array of endangered and threatened species, they’re also more fire resistant — they help to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires. We fully support 4FRI. But the Forest Service bungling has put communities at risk from the fire unnecessarily. It’s time to demand action.”