Group Seeks Halt to Salvage Logging in Oregon Biscuit Fire
Associated Press
January 7, 2005

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) -- Citing evidence the U.S. Forest Service allowed hundreds of trees to be cut in buffer zones intended to protect salmon habitat, an environmental group has asked a judge to halt salvage logging within the area burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire.

Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics of Eugene has asked a U.S. district judge to issue a preliminary injunction halting further logging of the Flattop and Briggs/Cedar timber sales on the Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon.

The motion was based primarily on evidence gathered from the Horse timber sale, the first of the major timber sales to be logged on the Biscuit fire. It has been completely logged. Logging continues on Flattop. Work has not started yet on Briggs/Cedar.

Silver Creek Timber of Merlin bought Horse and Flattop. Swanson Group of Glendale bought Briggs/Cedar.

"If Horse is the best the Forest Service can do, that doesn't auger well for the rest of the project," said Andy Stahl, executive director of the group. "We want the Forest Service to be aware of this and do something about it."

Siskiyou National Forest's spokeswoman, Judy McHugh, said the Forest Service does not comment on pending litigation.

At issue are regulations requiring the Forest Service to leave behind dead trees along streams and intermittent channels to prevent undue erosion that chokes spawning beds and provide large woody debris that creates resting places for fish in the water.

The action comes after the Forest Service agreed in response to an earlier injunction to use its own employees, rather than loggers, to mark the buffer zones and trees to be left behind and monitor compliance.

As evidence, the motion cites photos, maps and testimony from Richard Nawa, staff ecologist for the Siskiyou Regional Education Project.

He documented the removal of 325 to 345 trees from 12 locations along stream channel riparian reserves on the Horse timber sale that were supposed to have been left behind.

On the Flattop timber sale, Nawa found the Forest Service failed to mark buffers to protect an intermittent stream channel and a spring, and the buffer along one side of the South Fork of Silver Creek was 78 feet too narrow.

On the Briggs/Cedar timber sale, the Forest Service made two stream buffers too narrow and did not mark trees to be left for wildlife habitat, Nawa found.

Silver Creek President John West said there was little logging left to stop on the Flattop sale, where 99 percent of the trees have already been felled. On the Horse timber sale, West disputed whether the areas claimed as intermittent stream channels in the injunction request truly met Forest Service guidelines.

"It's a typical tactic of the environmental groups to try to stop logging, whether they have come up with some bogus claim," said West. "The Forest Service has taken millions of feet out between the two timber sales between the riparians and there's nothing we can do about it."

Gordon Culbertson, Swanson Group vice president for resources, said the company, which has plywood and sawmills in Glendale, met with the Forest Service on Thursday and planned to work with them today to lay out buffer zones on the Briggs/Cedar sale.

"They made it very clear they are going to closely monitor the buffering of those stream areas," Culbertson said. "We need to have the logs to operate. Certainly with fire salvage timber there is a lot of urgency to get it out. We want to get in there before any further degradation or loss of value to the wood."

The Biscuit fire was sparked by a lightning storm on July 13, 2002, in the rugged Klamath Mountains and burned 500,000 acres and threatened 17,000 people in Oregon's Illinois Valley before it was controlled at a cost of $153 million.

The fire -- the biggest in the nation that year -- has become the focus of an intense political and scientific debate between the Bush administration and the timber industry on one side and environmentalists and many academics on the other over whether to log and reforest the millions of acres of national forest that burn every year, or leave them largely to recover on their own.

The Forest Service originally proposed selling 96 million board feet of burned timber solely from lands designated for timber harvest -- a plan that some environmental groups had said they could live with. Under pressure from the timber industry, the harvest goal was boosted to 370 million board feet, expanding into roadless areas and old growth forest reserves that environmentalists want to preserve.

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