Disaster Prevention – Local consensus: Thin overgrown forests

Loggers, environmentalists agree on best way to move forward

By Guy McCarthy, Union Democrat, July 25, 2015

Some forest lands in Tuolumne County haven’t burned in a century, leaving them so dense they’re ripe for another disaster like the 2013 Rim Fire.

To prevent the next catastrophic megafire, local loggers and environmentalists have reached an agreement on the best way forward:  thin overgrown forests with selective logging and prescribed burns.

Now they want support from elected leaders, lawmakers and residents.

“We need to scale up on all treatments,” Eric Knapp, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, said Friday before visiting the Stanislaus- Tuolumne Experimental forest outside Pinecrest.  “We are doing 100-acre projects, mechanical thinning and prescribed burns, and we need to ramp it up to 1,000 acres, 10,000-acre projects.”

During a presentation Friday hosted by Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions, Knapp and Forest Service ecologist Malcolm North outlined what’s working in test sections of the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest.  The collaborative formed in 2010 to bring local voices together to find common ground on the ever-controversial public safety concern of forest management.

Fire history

     Knapp summarized fire history in the Sierra Nevada with information about the experimental forest, first studied by Forester Duncan Dunning in 1929.

“We used chainsaws to cut into stumps to read fire scars, “Knapp said.  The scars helped illustrate a record going back 500 years.  Fires happened every six years or so for centuries, until 1850.

“Then the Gold rush and native American populations who used fire were disrupted,” Knapp said.  “The last major fire here was 1889.”

Photos from the early 1930s by Forester A. Everett Wieslander show what parts of the Stanislaus national Forest looked like 85 years ago, and quoted Forester George Sudworth who said in 1900, “So continuous and widespread are these fires, that except where some natural barrier or chance has prevented, they keep a very large percentage of the seedling growth down.  Dense stands of yellow pine 25 to 50 years old suffer a thinning every time surface fires run through them, and not infrequently the younger stands succumb entirely.”

Forest density has changed dramatically in the absence of fire over the past century, jumping in some cases from 15 trees per acre to 142 trees per acre, a 947 percent increase, Knapp said.

Tree density maps from a century ago and areas of the Stanislaus National Forest in 2008, five years before the Rim Fire burned, showed how overcrowded and prone to catastrophic fires local forest lands are today.

“The Rim Fire showed us we need more prescribed fire on the ground,” Knapp said.

‘Fire is inevitable’

     North talked about the consequences of a century of aggressive fire suppression.

“Suppression only postpones,” North said.  “Fuel loads increase and escaped ignitions occur during extreme weather.”

Dangerous fuel overloading over many decades has set the stage for unnaturally gigantic blazes:  since the start of effective fire suppression in the 1920s, 16 of the 20 largest wildfires in the contiguous U.S. have occurred in the past 14 years, North said.

Historic fire rates in the Sierra Nevada used to burn 487,000 acres a year, North said.  Nowadays, logging, prescribed fires and wildfires consume 87,000 acres a year.

“People talk about the forest getting vaporized,” North said.  “In fact high-severity fire creates large homogeneous, similar-density patches and it perpetuates a high-severity fire forest regime.”

Reducing fuel in the Stanislaus National cannot happen too fast, in North’s view.

“If I could I would get a trained corps of beavers on crack to chew their way through the forest,” North said.  “Think about beavers on crack.”

‘There is consensus’

     Logger mike Albrecht of Sierra Resource management in Sonora, and advocate for the environment John Buckley of Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte, represent some of the diverse voices in Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions.

Albrecht said, “If we dropped a match in there we’d probably lose it all.”

Targeting the goal of thinning the entire Stanislaus National Forest with selective logging and intentional fires is going to take an infusion of cash, resources and commitment.

The Rim Fire burned more the 400 square miles, including portions of the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park, between August and October 2013.  But more than 80 percent of the Stanislaus Forest did not burn and remains vulnerable to bark beetle infestation, tree mortality, drought, competition for scarce water and megafires, according to the Forest Service.

Albrecht said, “We hope the public will be encouraged that locally the timber wars are over.”

It is important for Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions members and people who support them to stay positive, Buckley said.

“Politicians who spend time lambasting each other are not building that Kum Ba Yah spirit that we already have here,” Buckley said.

Tuolumne County District 2 Supervisor randy Hanvelt said, “I don’t think this is a partisan issue.  I think there is urgency here.  We had the Rim Fire.  We had the King Fire.  Pretty soon the forest could be gone.  I want to emphasize, there is urgency here.”

For more about the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Forest, visit www.fs.fed.us/psw/ef/stanislaus_tuolumne