OPINION: When environmental activism turns deadly in wildfires

It’s the burnt moss on the isolated vertical rock face that shows how hot the fire got. It was able to skip over portions of open sand to ignite scattered patches of fuel and then jump the Potlatch River to ignite the timber on the steep south side. Once that happened, there was no stopping the flames as they ran up the hillside. In the aftermath of the Texas Fire, the primary colors in the Potlatch River canyon are no longer shades of green. They are now dominated by charcoal black, ash gray and dirt brown.

Forest fires are quirky. In the early stages, they may skip around. There will be spots where the foliage is perfectly green with no heat or fire damage right next to black charred ground. In some cases, you’ll have a group of trees flare out with one in the middle staying perfectly green. In the case of the Texas Fire, once it got rolling, it scorched the earth right down to bare soil and rock, and began to throw burning embers well out in front of it. And this is where the fallacy of adequate fuel treatments espoused by the environmentalists comes apart.

Some of our regional environmental activists insist that cities and towns that are in a forest environment can be protected by a 200-yard zone around the perimeter of the settlement that has been cleared of ground and ladder fuels. Both regional and national environmental activists have claimed that thinning the forests or putting large fuel treatments further out in the forest will either exacerbate the situation or have no effect at all. As I walk through the scorched forest or look at it across the Potlatch River canyon from the Texas Ridge Road, the following observations become readily apparent:

-- Terrain plays a large factor in what will burn and how intense the forest in those areas will burn. A draw of any size acted like a chimney and funneled the heat of the fire to the point where everything within the draw was incinerated. The intensity threw burning embers well beyond 200 yards. At the head of the draws, all the standing timber is now patches of dead, black, completely denuded stems that will be a concentrated source of fuel in the future when they begin to break down.

-- Large portions of the forest on the south side of the river had never been logged. It contained large 30-inch-plus Douglas fir that was old growth in everything but recognition. That timber fared no better and was no more fire resistant than areas that had been previously logged. In fact, the most intact patch of timber within the burned area is one that the landowner had thinned four years ago. As for the large trees, a Douglas fir with a completely scorched crown is on its way to becoming a standing or fallen snag.

-- Large portions of the slopes on both sides of the river are now completely bare of any type of vegetation. There is no brush, no grass, no limbs or no logs to hold the soil in place and to check the runoff of future rain and snow melt. Unless the roots of that vegetation are still intact and the fall rains are gentle enough to allow it to resprout before winter, those hillsides are going to erode and dump a lot of sediment into the Potlatch River. The Potlatch River is a wild steelhead stream. I bring this point up because the environmental activists are always challenging road building in the national forests and the amount of sediment they produce. A new, properly constructed forest road that provides access for timber harvest and fuels reduction is not going to come anywhere close to allowing the amount of sediment into a watercourse that the erosion from a fire will.

In the case of the Texas fire, most of the damage occurred on private land. It was the homes and businesses of my friends and neighbors that burned or were severely damaged. When the environmental activists go into a courtroom to challenge fuel treatments, timber thinning and forest restoration projects on the national forests, they endanger the lives and property in communities far removed from their own. While the environmental activists are safely ensconced in Moscow, Missoula or San Francisco, it’s the residents of Grangeville, Elk City, Dixie, Elk River, Harpster and Stites who will suffer the consequences of their agenda to restrict active management of our national forests — forests that are owned by all the citizens of the U.S.

Now the environmental activists are going to ignore this next observation. But if you are one of those who they are soliciting for donations, please pay heed. Environmental activist organizations — whether they be regional such as the ones found here in Idaho or national such as the Sierra Club — play legal games in a courtroom concerning a forest biology that they know nothing about. When your contribution is used to stop a forest restoration project that would improve forest health and reduce fuel loads around rural communities, it can have long-lasting, severe and deadly consequences to rural residents, property and forest health.

If you are concerned about forest health, the U.S. Forest Service, the Idaho Department of Lands and the Idaho Forest Owners Association will gladly provide you with information about the benefits of active forest management, free of charge. I encourage you to take advantage of those resources before you invest any more money into these environmental organizations’ next solicitation.

A couple of final notes:

-- The response time of the Idaho Department of Lands out of Deary to the Texas Fire was exemplary. Their quick reaction kept a bad situation from becoming much worse and was directly responsible for stopping further property damage. It’s easy to criticize government agencies. But in the case of the IDL, they are worth every dollar we pay them.

-- The IDL and U.S. Forest Service firefighters were aided by the volunteer fire agencies in Kendrick-Juliaetta, Deary and Moscow. Those volunteers took time from their businesses. Some gave up a year’s vacation time and worked around the clock in the early days manning water tankers and providing logistical support for the fire crews. All of these agencies are always short on funds that are necessary for equipment and training. If you would like to make a contribution that will be put to good use and won’t be siphoned off into administration fees, please consider making a donation to your local volunteer fire department. In this case, it is a blatant appeal to contribute to the Kendrick-Juliaetta and Deary fire departments. Thank you.

Hassoldt is a field forester who lives in Kendrick.