Published: Sunday, October 02, 2011, 12:00 PM
View full sizeA wildfire southeast of Sisters burned August. The "red zone" in the Klamath and Lake counties avoided any catastrophic fire this year, but with the forest hit by an infestation of pine bark beetles, residents are worried that could change quickly, with a new climate report says the risk of wildfire may be greater next year and with many beetle destroyed trees for fuel. A pine bark beetle infestation has decimated vast stands of lodgepole pine there, providing plenty of explosive fuel. Foresters and firefighters held their breath when lightning storms swept through in August, sparking numerous fires but sparing the Fremont-Winema.
Although a decade or more in the making, the beetle infestation and resulting damage is getting a fresh look. The Oregon Board of Forestry toured the red zone Sept. 8, and industry groups have asked the board and Gov. John Kitzhaber to intervene with federal agencies. Private timber owners have twin worries: The beetle outbreak has damaged their trees, and they believe a monstrous fire in the federal forest will consume their land as well.
Environmental groups and some forestry professionals view the beetle damage, while severe, as a natural, cyclical occurrence. Forests across the West are struggling with the beetle plague.
"Bugs in lodgepole, that's kind of what they do," said Sean Stevens, spokesman for Oregon Wild. "The public looks at it and gasps, but in 50 years there will be a new lodgepole forest growing up in its place."
The U.S. Forest Service is clearing "safety corridors" along roads and has long-range plans to strategically reduce the fuel load of dead trees in the Fremont-Winema, Deputy Forest Supervisor Rick Newton said.
"Certainly we're very concerned," he said. "It's hard to watch a beetle epidemic such as this one move across an area."
Lodgepole pine grows fast and thick, and has less commercial value for wood products than Ponderosa pine. It's more susceptible to insect damage, Newton said. Damaged trees can be used to make wood chips, in bio-mass operations or for firewood.
Many in the timber industry believe the red zone is an indictment of a federal forest policy that is hobbled by legal gridlock. The infestation could have been stopped years ago, they argue, and timber now useless could have been salvaged.
"That situation down there is just a tinderbox waiting to explode," said Jim Geisinger, executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers. The Forest Service has to move more quickly, he said.
"They can't spend years and years preparing (environmental study) documents to acknowledge what's obvious to anybody who knows about the forest and natural processes."
Rex Storm, a forester with the logging association, said the red zone could have been harvested and reforested years ago. "They waited too long," he said. "This is just a symptom of a larger disease, and the disease is broken federal policy."
Bob Zybach, a former reforestation contractor turned wildfire expert, said the Forest Service should be removing dead wood from the forest on a "massive scale" of 10,000 to 40,000 acres a year rather than a patchwork of projects.
"This passive management is unprecedented, and it's led to highly predictable bug outbreaks and catastrophic wildfires," he said.
Collins Companies of Lakeview, which owns timber 25 miles outside the acknowledged red zone, found beetle damage in its forest, said Paul Harlan, vice president of resources. Lodgepole pine makes up 10 percent of the tree species on Collins' land, and beetles damaged 80 percent of them, he said.
The company spent three years cutting and removing lodgepole, Harlan said. "We went right after it," he said.
Federal forest managers can't move that quickly, he said, and two-thirds of the dead or dying pines in the red zone are "just sitting there" as a result. The Forest Service has limited resources, Harlan said, and he supports its decision to create safety corridors and clear dead trees in selected areas. Reducing the fuel load "mosaic" could interrupt a fire's spread, he said.
Stevens, of Oregon Wild, said the Forest Service's limited funding makes it important to correctly prioritize work in the Fremont-Winema. Thinning projects provide jobs and help restore the forest's health, but in beetle-killed areas it makes more sense to "let nature do its thing."
Newton, the deputy forest supervisor, said the Forest Service is clearing lodgepole pine within 150 feet on either side of selected road segments. The work will clear up to 7,500 acres of safety corridors, assure trees won't fall across roads and create access and staging areas for firefighting crews, he said.
The Fremont-Winema also is implementing the "Deuce Project" to help private landowners create defensible spaces on forests adjacent to the red zone, Newton said.
The prospect of an explosive red zone fire actually decreased in recent years, he said. Dry needles in the dead trees provided a fuel path for fire to spread quickly up to the crown, and from there to surrounding trees. The dead pines have since dropped their needles, Newton said.
"From that standpoint, we dodged one of the bullets," he said.
But as the trees topple and break, they provide fuel for what could be a hotter ground fire that would be harder to fight and more damaging to the soil, Newton said.
"We're in this for the long run," he said.
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