EPA blasts plan to log burned Oregon forest

By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter

	RICK BOWMER / AP President Bush walks with firefighters during an August 2002 tour of a fire-damaged area in Oregon.
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The Forest Service's draft plans to log 29,000 acres blackened by the 2002 Biscuit fire would cause erosion and sediment-loading in key watersheds that are supposed to be protected for salmon, the review said.

EPA's negative assessment is an unusually blunt assault on the administration's strategy for dealing with a burn zone that President Bush himself visited on two occasions.

The Biscuit fire in the Siskiyou National Forest was the nation's largest conflagration in 2002, and Bush used it as a symbol and backdrop for an initiative that called for more forest thinning to prevent such catastrophic wildfires.

The measure, passed last year by Congress, also gave the administration a better shot at defending post-fire salvage sales from environmental challenges in court.

The charred Oregon forest has been the focus of intense debate among the administration, the timber industry and environmentalists over whether — or how much — logging after a fire can contribute to the future health of a forest.

Unveiled last fall, the Bush administration's proposal to remove more than 500 million board feet of timber from the burn zone — more than the entire annual Forest Service harvest in all of Western Washington and Oregon — cited a report by an Oregon State University professor that said heavy logging would more quickly return the landscape to a natural state.

But EPA's harsh review could cause the Forest Service, which was already expecting to have to downsize its timber-harvest goals, to scale back even more.

"I know the estimates have been more refined, and there's going to be a (downward) shift in timber-harvest volume," said Mark Rey, the undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture who oversees the Forest Service. "What I don't know now is ... where that ends up."

EPA's review noted that the Forest Service's draft proposal called for a 1,200 percent increase in logging activity in the area. It said at least a half-dozen of the 22 stream systems that already are too warm by federal standards could see temperatures rise as erosion during logging fills pools or causes river channels to braid.

The EPA pointed out that federal lands burned in the fire were an important source of dead and downed trees necessary to provide rearing, nesting and foraging spots for fish and other wildlife. And it said logging near the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area, in the Siskiyou National Forest, would cause "irretrievable" damage to otherwise pristine forest lands, forever ensuring those lands couldn't be added to the wilderness preserve.

"EPA does not believe that these levels of harvest are consistent with water quality, fishery, wilderness and the ecological goals of the Northwest Forest Plan," EPA officials wrote in their review. The forest plan is a compromise agreement, created under the Clinton administration, that promised forest protection and logging rights.

EPA noted "environmental concerns" with each of the seven post-fire logging scenarios proposed by the Forest Service. The only three the agency concluded struck a "reasonable balance" would reduce timber harvesting by up to 85 percent of the Forest Service's preferred scenario. EPA urged the Forest Service to consider three other options, which would reduce timber harvest to between 5,200 acres and 15,000 acres. That would cut overall wood volume to between 82 million and 133 million board feet.

"When we looked at the alternatives, it looked to us like the other alternatives offered a way to still get a substantial amount of salvage with much lower sediment impacts," said David Powers, who worked on the review for EPA. "It needs to be done in a way that adequately protects water quality and the other resources."

EPA's review comes after field work by Forest Service staffers showed some trees were decaying so much they were no longer valuable. There were significantly more small streams that would need to be protected than first thought, and ground surveys are showing many of the larger trees are still green and alive.

The review also follows critical evaluations from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which said the plans could be hard on endangered species and otherwise pristine landscapes, and the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, which said far fewer marketable trees were killed by the fire than the agency first thought.

"I think (the EPA review is) a devastating critique and backs up the claims we've been making for months that this sort of salvage is bad for aquatic ecosystems," said Rolph Skar, of the Siskiyou Project, an Oregon conservation group.

But Chris West, with the industry group American Forest Resource Council, said that logging practices already reduce erosion, and that most of the cutting was to be done by helicopter or using cables, which would reduce ground disturbances.

"The bottom line is a half-million acres burned, and we're already talking about (cutting) in a small percentage of that," he said. "We're going to have to take some short-term risk and short-term harm to prevent long-term risk. If you want the forest to return to a forest, we can do it quicker if we use the science of modern forestry to get it done."

The Forest Service is expected to release a final draft of its logging proposal in April.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com

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