Forest Service plans fuel reduction

The Plains-Thompson Falls Ranger District held a field trip last Thursday up on Cox Gulch Road to look at doing a fuels reduction in and around the Antimony Mine area.

District Ranger Randy Hojem said there has been a strong emphasis on doing fuel reduction in the area near where people live and that it has been high on their radar.

Hojem said this project was in the very early stages of development and that was one of the reasons the Forest Service wanted to have the field trip, to get input from members of the community.

The trip had 18 people on it, including several homeowners who had land near the areas in question.

“The properties have recently gone from being claims to being private land with houses on them,” Hojem said. This was the reason the Forest Service wants to do a fuel reduction of the area to help prevent the threat of fire in the area, that could potentially damage or destroy these homes.

The project is one that Hojem said the want the Sanders-Mineral Collaborative group to get involved in. The group was formed to help the Forest Service develop projects that have less appeal and litigation tied up with them.

“We did get the project on the list to get funding for it, but we’re still at the very, very beginning stages of it,” Hojem said.

Hojem said that in 1910 there was a burn that burnt around 3 million acres and that a lot of the stands in the Cox Gulch area originated from that fire.

Hojem said that the purpose of the fuel reduction study is because the tress are almost a hundred years old and they burn, on average every 80 to 100 years. Most of them are pondorosa pines and must have a burning event to reproduce. He said it isn’t a matter of if another fire will happen, but when. He said they want to work with the inevitable things and if they can change the fire behavior they can help control the fires.

“What we would do is space the trees further apart and treat the fuels that are close to the ground,” Hojem said. “We want to increase the opportunity to have a successful suppression.”

Since the project is at the beginning stages, the Forest Service would analyze the area and then put together a proposal open to public comment for at least 30 days to define what the issues are. Then the analysis goes back out to the public, which then leads to a decision, which is subject to appeal.

Along with this process, the Forest Service would go through with a marking of timber, as well and see if any timber companies would pick any of it up.

According to Hojem the project has been identified for 2010, which gives the Forest Service two years for project to be complete.

He said that this project would involved removing green material and not just trees with insect damage and disease, which has some of the property owners concerned about their views, however their concerns about losing their views did not outweigh the fact that they don’t want to lose their homes in a fire.

Given the current state of the economy, Hojem said that economics and being able to sell the lumber needed to be taken into consideration.

“While we need to take the economy into consideration, it shouldn’t be the main driving force,” he said.

Hojem said the ultimate goal is to retain as many trees in the area as they can safely.

“When we space them out we tent to leave the biggest and the best trees and try to get rid of the ones that are already diseased or that are relatively small,” he said.

This was the third field trip the Plains-Thompson Falls Ranger District has had over the past month.