TIMBER
Delays turn Biscuit payoff hopes to ash
CAVE JUNCTION — It sounded like an unbelievable amount of
money: more than $171 million worth of salvage lumber, enough
to build as many as 17,000 homes, waiting to be logged in
forests blackened by 2002’s famed Biscuit Fire.
In the end, it proved to be an unbelievable estimation. Over
the next four years, as delays grew and wood deteriorated, and
the USDA Forest Service reduced the amount of acres that would
be logged, the number sank lower and lower. By early 2006,
after most of the salvage work had been done, the agency
reported that only about $32 million worth of timber had been
taken out of the burn area that surrounds the Kalmiopsis
Wilderness in the far southwest corner of the state.
And even that estimate of the value may be high. Jennifer
Phillippi, of Rough and Ready Timber Co. in Cave Junction, says
that the company’s mill has had to turn away Biscuit Fire
salvage. “We weren’t able to cut it, it was too far
gone,” she said, referring to how the wood has
deteriorated over the past four years. “Now all that has
value is the bigger-diameter Doug fir, but even with those,
some are pretty iffy.”
One hundred miles up the road in Roseburg, Ray Jones, vice
president of resources at Roseburg Forest Products, says that
despite running into similar quality-related issues, in 2005
his company was still able to purchase about 7.5 million board
feet — a sliver of work compared to the 400 million board
feet of lumber the company mills a year.
By the end of 2006, helicopters were removing the last of the
Biscuit Fire salvage timber. But the promise of economic
stimulus for timber towns such as Cave Junction and Roseburg
has not appeared, according to Patty Burel, a spokesperson for
the Forest Service, who says that was one of the agency’s
primary goals for the salvage operation.
Which might not have come as a surprise to some in the timber
industry, according to Tom Partin, president of the
Portland-based timber industry group American Forest Resource
Council. He says the unrealistically high estimates and long
delays were frustrating, but had few other effects. “Most
everyone planned on not getting any of it [salvage
timber],” he says. That’s because, he says, very
few companies would have been able to afford setting aside
space in their log yards for the arrival of timber that could
be — and ultimately was — delayed by years of
politics and lawsuits.
It wasn’t long after the smoke cleared in 2002 that the
Forest Service began its analysis on what areas in the nearly
500,000 scorched acres would be logged and replanted. But
internal debate and the scope of the study slowed the
process.
And once the agency announced in 2004 what areas would be
logged, reaction was swift: Within five days, Partin’s
organization, the Siskiyou Project, the Wilderness Society and
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics filed three
lawsuits against the agency, alleging faults with its
environmental studies and reforestation strategies, how it
chose which trees to log, and whether it had complied with the
Northwest Forest Plan, which dictates how forests are managed.
Over the next two years, the agency would successfully
negotiate stays on some suits while weathering a number of
other legal challenges.
Robert Shull, timber and planning staff officer with the
Forest Service, says despite the disparity between the early
estimates and the final results, his agency is happy because
some money did go into the economy and the agency’s
pockets. “We shot for the sun and we sure did hit the
moon real clearly,” he says.
But the moon did not include the big economic recovery that
some hoped for. Phillippi says the work, if it had appeared,
would have provided stability for her family-run company,
rather than it operating year-to-year as it does now.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the company. In 2006,
Rough and Ready bought harvesting rights to 421 acres, with
13.4 million board feet of timber, in the Glendale Resource
Area for $1.98 million. But over the last 15 years, the mill
side of Rough and Ready’s operations has shrunk from a
two-mill operation with 225 employees, to one mill and 80
employees — a downturn shared by the entire industry as
regulations limiting logging on federal lands force companies
to focus on private property.
Is there any one thing at fault for the unrealized economic
rebound? Like the debate over the logging itself, there is
little consensus.
Partin says the Forest Service over-planned in an effort to
serve everyone’s needs, but ultimately aggravated both
sides. Rolf Skar, campaign director for Siskiyou Project (which
was unsuccessful in its suit against the Forest Service), says
lack of strong local leadership in the agency stymied any
efforts at the kind of collaboration that could have smoothed
the process. And Phillippi says the conversation over the
salvage process might have been less extreme if the public
hadn’t been so concerned over that initial estimate of
how much money the salvage timber was worth.
“I would just hate to be in the Forest Service’s
shoes,” she says. “They can’t win no matter
what they do.”
— Abraham
Hyatt
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