Biscuit Timber Salvage Loses Money
By Paul Fattig, Medford Mail Tribune
January 11, 2006

The U.S. Forest Service lost some $14 million on timber salvage from the 2002 Biscuit fire in the Rogue River- Siskiyou National Forest, according to a study being released today.

Costs exceeded revenues by $14 million for the roughly 53.5 million board feet of timber salvaged, concludes the 31- page report by a group of scientists, former agency employees and environmental groups.

Calls to forest officials by the Mail Tribune to comment on the report were not returned late Tuesday afternoon.

The financial loss resulted from salvage timber selling for about 70 percent less than the agency projected in its planning documents, said Dominick DellaSala, one of the authors and a forest ecologist with the World Wildlife Fund’s Ashland office.

Instead of receiving $250 per thousand board feet as touted in an April 2004 request for expedited logging because of deteriorating trees, the agency received an average $75 per thousand, resulting in a money- losing proposition when all the costs are factored in, DellaSala said.

The low bids were received largely because of the need for expensive helicopter logging operations, he said.

"This report demonstrates that the ecological and economic science behind post-fire logging is shaky at best," he said. "The public needs to know that post-fire logging is a lose-lose proposition — the taxpayer loses by footing the bill and the environment loses by damaged soils and degraded fish and wildlife habitat."

"It’s unfortunate but true that logging cast as ‘restoration’ is one of the most damaging management activities humans can initiate after a fire," added fellow report author James R. Karr, an aquatic ecologist who teaches at the University of Washington.

Regions burned by the roughly half- million-acre Biscuit fire aren’t "catastrophes," Karr said, adding that forests have been designed by nature to regenerate after a fire.

Among the six others participating in the study were fishery scientist and former forest supervisor Jack Williams and former agency forester Rich Fairbanks.

Today’s report comes on the heels of a study released last week which concluded that logging burned trees at the Biscuit fire site killed large numbers of seedlings that sprouted on their own and increased the short-term danger of wildfire. That study was led by an Oregon State University graduate student in forest science.

The study released today was the result of a three-day workshop hosted by the World Wildlife Fund in Ashland last October that drew more than a dozen scientists with expertise in fire science and forest and stream ecology.

All told, 90 of the 220 units in the salvage area were examined.

In addition to the economic impact, the study concluded:

Salvaging damaged regenerative processes by degrading soils, triggering erosion on erosion-prone sites, increasing delivery of sediment to streams already stressed after wildfire, delaying natural plant and wildlife successional processes, and introducing or spreading invasive species.

Post-fire logging inhibits the return of old-growth forest conditions by removing the large dead and downed trees crucial in their development.

Salvage logging increases fuels by removing the least flammable portion of trees (trunks) and leaving flammable logging slash on the ground, which acts as kindling for future fires. Burning of those slash piles damages underlying soils because of the high temperatures within those fires.

The volume of timber available for harvest was overstated by an agency plan that proposed logging at levels (518 million board feet) far above timber volumes economically accessible.

Following a 2003 study by OSU experts that suggested up to 2 billion board feet could be salvaged from the Biscuit fire area, the Forest Service added two high-volume logging alternatives. That delay — not environmental appeals — resulted in a missed logging season.

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