Zaca blaze overshadows forest plan
Forest group speaks out as flames approach county
By Bill Lascher 08/16/2007
With columns of smoke seen boiling over the west Ventura County skyline, firefighters and community groups prepared for a new campaign in the battle to stop the six-week-old Zaca fire.
Ventura County Fire Department Chief Bob Roper was scheduled to meet with Ojai residents at a community meeting Aug. 15 after this edition of the Reporter went to press. He planned to discuss the status of the blaze, which has burnt more than 100,000 acres in the Los Padres National Forest since it began July 4 near Santa Barbara County’s Figueroa Mountain.
“So far, there is no immediate threat to the county, although we expect the fire to cross the county line in the next day or two,” said Capt. Barry Parker, fire department spokesperson, on Aug. 14. “What we’re getting right now is smoke and ash. If they’re present where you live, we recommend that you stay indoors as much as possible and try to limit your activity. This is particularly important if you suffer from respiratory problems.”
As of press time, the effort to combat the Zaca blaze has cost $69.2 million. No one had been killed in the fire, but 25 injuries had been reported.
Meanwhile, an environmental group spoke out against plans from the U.S. Forest Service to deal with some of the debris of another fire that burnt much of the Sespe Wilderness in 2006.
Forest service officials plan to make a final decision soon on plans for a commercial timber sale — the first in recent memory in the Los Padres — that could allow logging companies to salvage wood from trees burnt in the Day Fire, which scorched more than 162,000 acres. Under terms of a draft decision from the forest service, 1,430 commercial sized trees met the criteria defining “hazard” trees. If cut down, those trees could equal a volume of approximately 774,000 board feet of lumber.
A public comment period on the draft decision ended Aug. 8, but Los Padres ForestWatch Executive Director Jeff Kuyper has urged supporters to comment on the plan until the Forest service issues a final decision later in August. Kuyper said that the forest service should do an environmental assessment before the logging occurs, and that it should be scaled back to only focus on trees that could be a direct risk to forest visitors.
“We understand the need for the Forest Service to ensure safe recreation opportunities,” Kuyper said. “No one wants a tree to fall on them. At the same time those safety issues have to be balanced with economic realities and environmental impacts.”
Kuyper said that with the closest lumber mill in Terra Bella, in Tulare County, commercial logging isn’t economically feasible. He also said that a study on the salvage efforts after the 2002 Biscuit fire in Southwest Oregon showed that logging hurts a forest’s recovery potential and could increase fire risk in the future.
“In general, allowing logging in an area that has burned, but slowly and surely recovering, is not compatible with allowing the area to recover,” Kuyper said. “We don’t think it’s appropriate to allow a commercial timber sale in an area that is recovering from the effects of a high-intensity wildfire. It’s too fragile to allow that right now.”
But Tom Kuekes, the district ranger for the forest service’s Mt. Pinos Ranger District, said the salvage project is a “benign” effort. Mechanized and motorized logging equipment is prohibited from any area within the Sespe Wilderness, he said. Of the 20,000 acre outside the Sespe where trees were killed in the Day Fire, he said, work will most likely be done on roadways, because it is only permitted in an area one and a half tree-lengths away from the roadside.
“There isn’t going to be equipment off the road,” Kuekes said. “There will be no new road construction.”
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