California's Timber Industry

[Larry Harrell]

December 8, 2003    Los Angeles Times

THE STATE

Dead Trees Fail to Bring Life to Forest
Disappointing bids from loggers hamper efforts to replant and clear
deadwood for fire safety.
 

By Bettina Boxall
Times Staff Writer


TAHOE NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. — Little has gone according to
plan in the Red Star Restoration Project on the Sierra Nevada's wooded
slopes near Lake Tahoe.

Private timber companies were to pay the federal government millions
of dollars in fees to log several thousand acres of dead trees
blackened in a 2001 wildfire. As is often the case after a forest
fire, many of the dead trees retain commercial value.

The U.S. Forest Service would use some of the revenue to pay for
replanting and to clear out small, worthless deadwood that could stoke
future blazes.

It's an approach that the Bush administration is promoting across the
West and one that underlies the forest legislation the president
signed into law last week. Give commercial loggers more leeway to cut
trees, the administration maintains, and they will help thin overgrown
woodlands, reduce the wildfire hazard in the region's vast federal
forests and save taxpayer money to boot.

But it's not working that way in the Tahoe National Forest's Red Star
project, about 15 miles west of Lake Tahoe, and in a number of other
so-called salvage timber operations in California. Commercial loggers
are bidding low or not at all. The revenue envisioned by the Forest
Service is not pouring into the government's coffers. The smallest
trees, which pose the greatest wildfire threat, are not being cleared
out, and the larger, more valuable and least flammable ones are hauled
away. Limbs and treetops left from timber cutting remain strewn across
the landscape like giant piles of kindling.

It is a scene, repeated up and down the Sierra, that raises questions
about the degree to which the federal government can rely on
commercial logging to help with its fire prevention work.

For one thing, the commercial strategy assumes a vibrant logging
economy that does not exist in California. It also implies that when
commercial logging makes a healthy profit, money will be immediately
available for clearing out the smaller trees and flammable debris. In
fact, much of that revenue, especially from salvage sales, is by law
earmarked for other uses. Last year, salvage harvests made up nearly
half the timber volume cut in California's 18 national forests.

California's timber industry has shrunk dramatically, forest
economists say, hurt by cheap Canadian competition, a steep drop in
timber output in national forests in the 1990s and the cost of doing
business in the state.

"The basic problem is that the industry in California, especially
production in the Sierra Nevada, has just gone away in the last
decade," observed Rich Thompson, a resource economics and management
professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "The number of mill closures is
phenomenal. They're gone. The few [companies left] know they
practically have the wood basket to themselves and … don't have
to be competitive."

In 1992, there were 56 timber mills in California. Today there are 29.
Many of the remaining operations are owned by a single company, Sierra
Pacific Industries, which has for years been the biggest purchaser of
federal timber in the state.

Fewer mills mean fewer bids. Records compiled by Timber Data Co. of
Eugene, Ore., show that timber sale after sale in California national
forests attracted little or no interest from loggers this year. That
was true of offerings of live green trees and those killed by fires,
insects or storms.

"It is something that is becoming more common. It is really an effect
of the global market," Jim Pena, supervisor of Northern California's
Plumas National Forest, said of the anemic bidding situation. Parts of
a salvage project in the Plumas were offered three times this year
without getting a single bid.

In the Klamath National Forest in northwestern California, seven
separate timber sale offerings last summer failed to attract any bids,
according to Timber Data. In the Modoc National Forest in the state's
northeastern tip, silence greeted an October appeal for bids on
portions of a 9,000-acre salvage project.

The weak appetite for federal timber is not confined to California. In
a recent newsletter, Timber Data owner Doug McDonald tracked the
average number of bids on federal sales in the far West. In many
states, they had fallen from six per sale in 1980 to two in 2002.

As in any market, timber prices fluctuate, and they have enjoyed
something of a rebound this fall. While admitting he was concerned
"that we've got very few mills left," Jack Blackwell, the regional
forester who oversees California's national forests, said he was
optimistic. "I guess I'm of the opinion the market probably is picking
up."

But when the bids came in on the first round of Red Star timber sales
last summer, they were a fraction of what the Forest Service had
predicted: two cents a board foot instead of 11 1/2 cents. And instead
of cutting trees as small as 11 inches in diameter, which the Forest
Service proposed, the timber companies wanted only bigger trees at
least 16 inches in diameter.

Red Star prices were low because much of the wood was rotten by the
time the Forest Service had finished its environmental analysis and
offered it for sale nearly two years after it was burned, said Dan
Tomascheski, vice president of resources for Sierra Pacific.

When the Forest Service has "to go through all those hoops and
construct an environmental document that is so extremely bulletproof,
the whole thing takes time," said Tomascheski, whose firm logged some
of the Red Star land. "It's barely economical when it's time to sell
the timber. And then the environmentalists say, 'See it wasn't worth
anything.' "

Yet, even where timber sales have not been tied up in such lengthy
environmental reviews, prices have been low. A salvage sale on Native
American tribal land in Arizona — of which Sierra Pacific bought
a substantial portion and which began soon after that state's
extensive 2002 wildfires — fetched the same price as Red Star,
according to a forest manager for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

With the skimpy revenue from Red Star, the Forest Service now says it
lacks the money to do much of the cleanup and restoration work it
planned. The logged hillsides remain littered with thick tangles of
deadwood. Armies of small charred trees stand poised to fall in the
next few years and join heaps of highly flammable logging debris on
the ground. The fire hazard is higher now than immediately before the
loggers went to work.

But even if the Red Star wood had sold for what the Forest Service
projected and forest managers had done everything they had originally
proposed, they said, they would still lack the money to clean up
nearly half the site. As a result, their own documents acknowledge
that the wildfire threat would remain dangerously high for decades to
come on land that borders a reservoir and a healthy old-growth forest
that is a haven for the California spotted owl.

"It is realized," the Forest Service wrote, "that after all the
proposed activities have been completed, the resulting fuel loadings
over a majority of the burn area would create conditions that may
allow another large, severe wildland fire in this area during the next
20-30 years."

During a Sacramento court hearing last summer, U.S. District Judge
Morrison England Jr. described the logged Red Star land as having the
makings "of one heck of a barbecue." A Bush appointee, Morrison then
issued a temporary order, still in place, that blocked the Forest
Service from selling timber in another part of the project while he
reviewed an environmental lawsuit challenging the project's cutting of
big trees.

Forest managers insist that Red Star and similar projects are
nonetheless worth doing. Better to remove what they can from
burned-over forests than nothing, they argue.

"The key is that all of the material would have been on the ground and
a lot of brush would have grown up and you would have a tremendous
fire hazard," said Tahoe National Forest Supervisor Steve Eubanks, who
approved the Red Star project. "In 40 years, we'll at least be better
off than if we had not done anything. We certainly will not be worse
off."

The Forest Service also says that small material provides needed
ground cover to prevent erosion on burned-over soil.

But environmental critics contend that the agency is cutting the wrong
trees. "They've got the whole thing turned on its head," said Chad
Hanson of the John Muir Project, an environmental group that helped
mount the legal challenge to Red Star and closely monitors national
forest salvage sales in California.

In interviews, fire scientists said that the larger dead trees
harvested in Red Star and other California salvage operations had
presented much less of a fire hazard than the smaller wood the Forest
Service was allowing loggers to leave behind in those same projects.

"The kind of stuff they're taking off [in Red Star] is the least
flammable and the least problem," said James K. Brown, who retired
from the Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana in 1995
after nearly four decades of fire research. "The very large pieces
— although there's a lot of material there in terms of tons per
acre — it doesn't contribute that much to fire, to intensity and
soil heating."

By contrast, leaving large quantities of small deadwood less than 10
inches thick "causes quite a bit of trouble," added Brown, who
co-wrote a just-published Forest Service paper that discusses the
levels of deadwood that can be safely left at salvage sites.

Red Star is not the only place in which salvage sales are removing
larger commercially valuable trees, but leaving piles of small
fire-ready deadwood on the mountainsides.

At the Burnt Ridge Restoration Project in the Sequoia National Forest,
the Forest Service proposes to commercially log fire-killed trees of
at least 11 inches in diameter. Many of the rest would simply be
felled and left on the ground, a situation that a Sequoia fire
management officer said would create conditions for a "damaging fire"
over the next 15 years.

A proposal earlier this year for the North Fork fire salvage sale in
the Sierra National Forest called for helicopter logging of medium and
large dead trees, but for leaving logging debris and smaller trees.
"It would be extraordinarily expensive [to remove them] and the few
dollars we have for that type of cleanup are better spent in areas
where we have a higher fuel hazard problem," explained District Ranger
Dave Martin.

Regional Forester Blackwell says he recognizes the need to better
coordinate fuels cleanup with logging projects. And McDonald, of the
Oregon data firm, says forest thinning sales on state land in
Washington and Oregon are attracting multiple bids and decent prices.
The federal government, he suggested, has to prove it will be a
reliable supplier.
 
Comment from poster: This will put a serious dent in restoration plans
for California's National Forests. I think that it's time to break up
Sierra Pacific's monopoly and to restore competetive bidding to
Federal timber sales. Maybe further increases on imported wood could
bring more balance to the timber industry? Something has got to give
and it looks like our forests will continue to be tinderboxes.

Larry,     not the logger's pal