Fire and Fuels

4-Forests Restoration Initiative Update: A sinking feeling the Forest Service has done it again

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There’s more fall-out from the Forest Service’s questionable decision to award a massive 300,000 acre timber harvesting contract as part of the Four Forests Restoration Initiative (4FRI) in Arizona to an under-the-radar Montana timber corporation represented by a retired Forest Service official.  The 4FRI is a showcase forest restoration project for the Obama administration under what’s known as “the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act” and program.  Late last Friday, the Center for Biological Diversity sent out this press release.

Tommie Cline Martin, County Supervisor for Gila County, Arizona and a member of the 4FRI, had this to say.

“In my opinion, the Contract that was selected is bogus in several ways: If in fact, an agency insider that was involved in setting policy and advising potential contractors in the process and knew the particulars of the other bidding proposals, then “retired” and helped craft the winning bid is true, this is a perversion of our public trust at the highest level.

Meanwhile, yesterday the Grand Canyon Trust – a founding member of the 4FRI – issued this press release, which among other things said:

[W]e were shocked – and to honest – extremely disappointed that the Forest Service did not choose Arizona Forest Restoration Products (AZFRP) as the contractor responsible for implementing 4FRI treatments over the next decade….AZFRP did not receive the 4FRI contract. Pioneer Associates [from Montana] did. We, and the rest of the northern Arizona community, know almost nothing about the rationale for this decision, and know even less about Pioneer Associates. Some of what we do know is not at all encouraging. Pioneer Associates offered $10 million less than did AZFRP in the bidding process – a sum that would significantly address the critical shortfall in funding currently faced by 4FRI….We at the the Grand Canyon Trust find the recent contracting decision made by the Forest Service extremely problematic and worrisome….

We believe that the Forest Service should, for the sake of transparency, release all information regarding the decision-making process and rationale underlying the contract decision. Similarly, we believe that Pioneer Associates should follow the transparency lead modeled by AZFRP and share, in detail, their business model, implementation strategies, and plans for collaboration. Finally, we believe that an independent and transparent review of the bidding and contract award decision-making process is warranted and should be conducted with all due haste.

Yesterday also saw this hard-hitting editorial from the local newspaper, the Payson Roundup under the title, “We have this terrible, sinking feeling that the Forest Service has done it again” below are some snips from the editorial:

Last week the Forest Service somehow managed to turn the most hopeful and visionary consensus on how we can save our forests and our communities into yet another muddled controversy….So after all that preparation, study, waiting and hope — the Forest Service announced its choice: Pioneer Forest Products — an out-of-state [Montana] wood products company. The company plans to partner with Marlin Johnson, formerly the chief Forest Service logging industry supervisor in the Southwest.

The choice proved instantly controversial, mostly because Johnson spent years battling the very environmental groups whose agreement made the 4-FRI approach so promising. Johnson and groups like the Centers for Biological Diversity fought one another to a deadlock, largely over whether the Forest Service should let the timber companies continue to cut a large share of the remaining old-growth trees.

Even conservative, pro-industry experts like Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin have expressed concern about the choice, although they have focused on other elements of the contract — like the assumption that Pioneer can make a go of using a lot of the brush and small trees in a relatively untested process for making diesel fuel from wood products….

Now, we hope we’re wrong. We hope that the Centers for Biological Diversity is overreacting when they condemned as ‘cronyism’ the inclusion of Johnson as a partner with a company he used to regulate….But we have to admit, we’re unnerved by the immediate outbreak of controversy and the Forest Service’s stubborn refusal to accept the advice of local officials, conservationists and other stakeholders. Other bidders seemed to offer a much closer working relationship with those groups at a seemingly lower cost to the taxpayers.

We hope it blows over. We hope the Forest Service and Pioneer find a way to quickly reassure the critics, who have worked so hard and so long to achieve the agreement that this choice of contractors threatens to unravel.  But we’d certainly feel better if this didn’t feel so familiar — and if we could put out of our minds the unnerving recollection that it was the Forest Service’s cozy and short-sighted relationship with industry that got us into this mess in the first place.”

Yet another “controlled” burn escapes!

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http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2874/

Sadly, it appears that fire folks can’t be trusted to safely accomplish prescribed fires. Their overconfidence has again resulted in destroyed homes and damages to private property. This area is well known for its terrain-enhanced winds, known as the “Washoe Zephyr”. High winds had been forecast, as well, and it appears that fire crews didn’t make sure the fire was fully extinguished. Gusts of 35 mph are expected for today, and the fire is burning towards more difficult terrain. It always seems like firefighters are more concerned with “good burning conditions”, rather than public safety. Perish the thought that it might be too wet for “complete combustion”.

Are YOU ready to welcome a prescribed fire in your “neighborhood”?

Update: The TV news says that more structures are threatened.

Forest Service Awards One of Largest-ever Timber Contracts to Agency Insiders

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From the Center for Biological Diversity:

Center for Biological Diversity ecologist Jay Lininger displays the core of 180-year-old ponderosa pine marked for logging at the Jacob Ryan timber sale. CBD photo.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz.— The U.S. Forest Service awarded one of the largest-ever tree-cutting contracts in the history of the national forest system today to a timber company represented by a retired Forest Service official. While he was a federal employee, the official was the agency’s liaison to that same company’s timber-sale inquiries in the same region. The contract calls for timber harvesting on approximately 300,000 acres of ponderosa pine in northern Arizona as part of the Four Forests Restoration Initiative, a showcase forest restoration project for the Obama administration under what’s known as “the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act” and program.

Speaking of today’s contract award, Taylor McKinnon, public lands campaigns director with the Center for Biological Diversity, which has led the charge to reform logging in the Southwest, said, “The decision stinks of cronyism.”

“Much of the Southwest’s last old growth was liquidated on Marlin Johnson’s watch during his years at the Forest Service—it was wrong then and it’s wrong now, and the fact that Mr. Johnson is wearing a different hat this time underlines that fact,” he continued.

During his tenure as the southwestern region’s silviculturist, Marlin Johnson was one of the agency’s liaisons for Pioneer Forest Products’ timber-sale inquiries; within a year of retirement, in 2008, Johnson began representing Pioneer’s inquiries to the same Forest Service office in which he had worked. Since then, representing Pioneer in Four Forest Restoration Initiative stakeholder meetings with the Forest Service, Johnson has openly pushed to log old-growth trees and forests.

As regional silviculturist Johnson presided over an attempt to loosen regional limits on logging mature and old trees and forests in Arizona and New Mexico without public or environmental review. Without officially changing the forest plans that guide management of the public’s forests, and over the concern of staff and other agencies about lawfulness and impacts to wildlife, the Forest Service’s southwestern regional office under Johnson tried to sharply reduce the amount of mature and old forest the agency is required to leave on the landscape after logging.

The southwestern region has tried to follow this guidance since Johnson’s retirement, and because logging intensities violate wildlife protections in forest plans, several of those timber sales have crumbled under internal review prompted by administrative objections from the Center. In its collaboration on the Four Forests initiative, which has suffered at the hands of regional micromanagement, the Center has warned the Forest Service not to deploy Johnson’s guidance; it’s unclear whether or not the Service will do so.  Last week the Center sued the Forest Service for using that guidance at the Jacob Ryan timber sale, which would log old growth trees near Grand Canyon’s north rim.

Pioneer Forest Products, a Montana corporation, was one of four bidders on the contract. Another, Arizona Forest Restoration Products, had advanced a plan solely focused on using small-diameter trees, and signed an historic memo of understanding with conservation groups committing to a common goal of ecological restoration as a step to restoring healthy, fire-maintained forests and native biological diversity.

“Today’s decision, among many other signs, suggests that the Forest Service’s leadership, after all these years and despite mountains of restoration rhetoric to the contrary, remains hopelessly mired in an antiquated age of agricultural forestry.”

Using Wood from Our Forests: Why or Why Not?

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2012 Fisker KARMA EcoSport Sedan

A couple of months ago, a world atlas from the 40’s. was circulating around our office. One of the categories about each country was “natural resources”. In the past, I remember it used to be a good thing for a country to have natural resources, but it seems like now they are to be protected and if a country needs to use them, they should be imported from other countries. Since it seems like people not using resources at all (at least in this astral plane ;)) is fairly impossible.

Bruce Ward, in an op-ed in today’s Denver Post, asks the same question, but just about trees and wood.
Here’s the link.


Guest Commentary: Harvesting, replanting best way to a healthy forest
Posted: 04/28/2012 01:00:00 AM MDT

By Bruce Ward

The smoke is gone, but the fear remains.

We have lived in Denver’s “wildland urban interface” for decades because of our love of Colorado’s beauty, but now the yearly “fire watch” causes us pause as we hold our breath, hoping the forest around us doesn’t burn.

The most recent fire — the Lower North Fork — claimed three lives, destroyed or damaged 23 homes and charred more than 1,400 acres.

The obvious question is: “Who is to blame?” Yet we should also ask: “Why are we suffering such fire catastrophes?”

The good news: We reduce or prevent future fires by promoting forest health. The bad news: We may have to give up the easy answers of either blaming one person for “setting” each fire; and there is nothing we can do to prevent these fires. Understanding the cause and addressing it give us the ability to stop tragic fires.

We need to stop thinking trees live forever. Like all living things, they have finite life spans. This radical idea of recognizing the cycle of life means forest health is contingent on new trees. This requires us to challenge our belief that cutting trees is not “environmental” or “green.” The old ethos of “let nature take its course” and “in 500 years, the Earth will have healed itself” must be seen as flawed.

The problem has roots from when the West was being settled and clear- cutting was considered expedient and necessary. We were more focused on creating a civilized West. The unintended consequence of endless fire suppression is now manifesting itself.

Native Americans commonly set fires every spring, knowing it kept the trees and animals within the areas stronger. They saw fire as a tool used extensively before the white man’s encroachment and restrictions.

The documented excesses of tree harvesting without environmental limits in the 19th and 20th centuries created a culture that reacted by believing that cutting any tree was sacrilege, using products made from trees wasteful and uneducated.

People then believed that tree-killers should feel guilty about their role in hastening the destruction of our planet.

We know many trees in nature would have life spans not much longer than the longest living human, yet we protect geriatric trees whose very nature is turning them toward fire and replacement. We can see the effects all around us as nature pushes to return to a balance allowing new trees to replace the old.

The time has come to dispel that well-intentioned but wrong environmentalist mantra that forbids killing trees and realize that interfering with nature is what creates the problem.

Now is the time to embrace a new environmentalist culture that embraces planting new trees; that enjoys wood products from local sources because they come from renewable resources; provide jobs to rural economies; and most important brings our environment back into balance.

Undersecretary of Agriculture Harris Sherman asked me to help increase awareness of the mountain pine beetle epidemic and engage the private sector in finding solutions to deal with millions of acres of pine trees dying and turning brown — our own potential “Katrina of the West.”

I reached out to stakeholders who shared views on the complexity and unprecedented magnitude of the epidemic. I found caring citizens who were using Rocky Mountain Blue Stain wood, a community of environmentalists, lumbermen, builders, lumber yards, pellet mills, and furniture-makers, all working together to take our blue wood and turn it into products that would help the forest heal.

But even these efforts struggle against the mistaken belief that using wood is somehow bad.

The time is now to change decades of outmoded public perception that the only good forestry goal is to let our forests age, and realize how sustainable forestry is married to utilizing wood products in order to plant and grow new trees.

Bruce Ward is the founder of Choose Outdoors and a White House Champion of Change for Rural America. He lives in Pine.

Meanwhile, a colleague ran across this highly green (and expensive) car which advertises that it uses “, and rescued wood trim retrieved from the 2007 firestorm in Orange County, California.” I guess one person’s “rescue” is another person’s “salvage.” The whole question of “when it’s OK to use wood” seems to be worthy of further exploration; it has a variety of social, philosophical and environmental implications that we could potentially parse out.

Bozeman Daily Chronicle on Bozeman Watershed Project

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NICK WOLCOTT/CHRONICLE
Hyalite Reservoir is pictured on March 12, 2012.

Link to entire article here.

For those of you who haven’t been following this, it turns out that papers appreciate it when blogs link to their articles and quote snippets rather than the whole thing. So given that press releases don’t have those restrictions (and the USG doesn’t have press releases giving their side of the story). I will focus on snippets that show viewpoints not aligned with the plaintiffs’ point of view. Matthew posted that press release here.
Nice reporting IMHO, you can see the discussion we have on this blog take place.

Officials have said that a severe wildfire could put so much sediment and ash in the creeks that intakes for the water utility could clog, and the city could be cut off from its water.
Garrity said he believes the odds of a major fire striking those particular drainages are very low and that even then, a major fire would have to be followed by heavy rains.
If new roads are built, however, he said there’s a 100 percent chance that sediment will end up in creeks, hurting trout habitat and polluting drinking water.
Gallatin National Forest spokeswoman Marna Daley said historical fire records show that there have been a number of lightning-caused fires in those drainages. The use of the drainages, particularly Hyalite, also creates the potential for human-caused fires, she said.
Garrity said there’s “no science that proves that thinning the watershed will fireproof it.”
Daley said the purpose of the watershed plan is not to fireproof the drainages, but to reduce the intensity and severity of a wildfire.
“We’re recognizing that a fire will happen in those drainages,” Daley said. “It is inevitable that it will happen… We just want it to be more controllable and less extensive and severe.”

and

The East Boulder project would be located outside Big Timber, Daley said, and is intended to increase safety for firefighters and the public, as the drainage has only one way in and out.
She said the Forest Service feels both projects were fully analyzed and concerns were addressed.
“The Forest Service worked very hard to listen to their concerns during all the public input, not just during the appeal and litigation,” Daley said. “We’ve invested a substantial amount of time and energy to be responsive to their concerns.”
She noted that the Bozeman watershed plan was seven years in the making, and three years were spent planning the East Boulder project.
“We believe these are very important projects with great benefits to the public,” Daley said. “We’ve worked hard to address individuals’ and organizations’ complaints and concerns. It is a bit disappointing that we’re to the place where it appears the only resolution we can find with these groups is in the courtroom.”

With regard to Garrity’s 100 percent chance sediment will end up in the water, here is where I posted the section of the ROD on sedimentation.

Here are a couple of other posts related to this project.

Effects of fuels treatments on the spatial probabilities of burning and final size of recent wildfires across the United States -webinar

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This webinar was interesting, also the questions and responses. Here’s the link to the recording of the webinar.

One of the things that stood out for me was how hard it was for the researchers to get information- still – in this day and age. The other thing that stood out is how much of understanding complex issues depends on modeling rather than observation. That’s what makes it post-normal science, and why trust of scientists, and scientists maintaining trust, is so important.

For me it was just fun to hear about people studying something we’re all interested in and having a seminar for folks from all over the country. And quite a break from the legal issues of the day.

You might also want to check out the Lessons Learned Center here, or firescience.gov, for related information.

Fire Retardant Again- on the Lower North Fork Fire

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Lower North Fork Fire. PHOTO COURTESY JEFFCO SHERIFF

Previously, I remember Andy saying that fire retardant doesn’t really work and only feds use it. So I have been keeping track of people who use it (when I hear about it). And of course, I hear about this fire, since evacuees are staying at my house. From Bob Berwyn here :

SUMMIT COUNTY — The Lower North Fork Fire has grown to 4,500 acres and claimed a second life, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff, which is posting its latest updates on an emergency blog and via Twitter.

The sheriff’s office confirmed the second fatality at 11:15 a.m. and also said that 16 structures have burned. As of 9:20 a.m. containment was still reported as zero, but officials said they’ve fire fighting strategy has changed from point protection to active fire suppression.

More real-time fire information is streaming via Twitter at the #LowerNorthForkFire hashtag, though the JeffCo sheriff is urging people to be cautious when retweeting posts from unofficial sources.

The fire is burning in grass, shrubs and downed pine needles, along with standing ponderosa pine forest. Heavy tree canopies combined with high temperatures and a lack of humidity are all contributing to the volatile conditions.

Hot Shot fire crews are on the way from Utah, Arizona and South Dakota and air support is also being mustered, with two National Guard helicopters en route from Buckley Air Force Base to do water drops.

As of 12 p.m., a Single Engine Air Tanker (SEAT) and a heavy P2V airplane started dropping fire retardant over the Lower North Fork Fire Zone.

Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit Department: Wildfires

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My fun day at work included talking about which forests want to revise, the wisdom of working with BLM on broadscale assessments and other topics. Midafternoon I received a text message from the sheriff’s department telling me to evacuate, but it didn’t seem to know what subdivision I was in. After a full day of planning work, I stepped out of the office at 6:15 to a large smoke plume to the southwest and the smell of smoke.

I just received a note from a relative that they are getting out buckets and they are evacuating two miles away from their house. They ended up being evacuated and spending the night (a cat) at our house. The point of this post is that living in fire country is an experience that first, affects more than the people evacuated; it affects the broader community, and second, am perhaps cannot be adequately communicated to people in the wet West and to the east coast.

A poem..
Eyes watering red
Evacuated cat here
Must leave for work soon

On a mildly related subject, there is an interesting webinar tomorrow on this paper. Here’s the website of of the Joint Fire Science program in case these other links don’t work.