Logging Biscuit Fire Site Lost $9 Million - Congressional Analyst

[hatrack]

GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- The U.S. Forest Service lost more than $9 million logging trees burned by the massive 2002 Biscuit fire in southwestern Oregon, a review coordinated by the World Wildlife Fund has found.

The conclusion, derived from an analysis by a retired forest policy expert for the Congressional Research Service, comes on the heels of a study out of Oregon State University that found salvage logging on Biscuit killed most of the seedlings that had generated naturally and increased fire danger in the short term.

"This is a lose-lose, economically and ecologically speaking," said Dominick DellaSala, a forest ecologist for the World Wildlife Fund and lead author of the report, "The Facts and Myths of Post-Fire Management: A Case study of the Biscuit Fire, Southwest Oregon." "If Congress continues to pursue salvage logging legislation we could see the Biscuit case played out in other places around the nation."

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Jim Golden, deputy Northwest regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service, did not dispute the conclusions of the Biscuit report. But he said the economic results would have been much better if the Forest Service had been able to sell the burned timber one year after the fire, rather than three, by which time a lot of it had been lost to rot, particularly the smaller trees. "The economics of these projects vary widely," said Golden. "We don't always expect to make a profit. Sometimes what we are trying to do is minimize your losses when you consider the broader restoration bill you are faced with after some of these catastrophic fires.

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http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2006/01/13/news/regional/eaa1eebd402d8e63872570f40077601c.txt

[Caoimhe]

1. I remember when the Chimp came for the photo ops

That's all forests are to him, photo op backgrounds. He's seized on the tragedy of wildland fires to line the pockets of his logging industry, anti-conservation buddies.

Raping the publics land for profit, is Bush's specialty.

[Buck Turgidson]

2. Study: Logging burned areas kills new trees, increases risk of forest fire

BY JEFF BARNARD
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published Jan. 05, 2006

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — A study of the aftermath of the 2002 Biscuit fire, which has become the focus of debate over national forest management, concludes that logging burned trees killed large numbers of seedlings that sprouted on their own and increased the short-term danger of wildfire.

The study, to be published Friday in the journal Sciencexpress and later in Science, comes as conservationists and the timber industry battle over a bill in Congress to speed up the process of evaluating whether to harvest burned trees and plant new seedlings on the millions of acres of national forests that burn every year.

"These results surprised us," said Dan Donato, a graduate student in forest science at Oregon State University who was lead author of the study. "Even after a huge high-severity fire in a place that is really tough to grow trees we are finding abundant natural tree regeneration."

Based on test plots in areas that were logged and not logged, the study also found that cutting down dead trees left much more wood on the ground to fuel future fires, even after the logs were hauled away, than leaving the trees standing, unless crews burn the debris.

"Why that is important is because on some fires those additional treatments aren't carried out due to lack funds," Donato said.

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