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<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   Q&A: Retiring roads Congress on Dec. 20 approved an appropriations bill that includes $39.4 million for repairing or retiring roads on U.S. Forest Service land across the country. It's unclear how much money will flow back to Washington state, but locals hope to get a big piece of the money to deal with a situation they say has turned into a crisis. Q: How many old logging and mining roads are there in Washington state and in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest? A: There are 22,000 miles of roads on U.S. Forest Service roads in the state, including 2,700 miles in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Many of the roads are abandoned logging roads, but others are heavily used. Many are inaccessible because of flood damage that hasn't been repaired. Q: How big is the issue in the state and in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest? A: Statewide, there is a $300 million backlog of logging road damage. More than one-third of that is in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, where there is a $120 million backlog of work. An estimated $51 million is needed to retire roads, $47 million to replace culverts and $23 million to bring the roads that will remain open up to standard. Q: How do you retire a road? A: With limited resources, this usually means removing culverts and scraping away fill near streams. Sometimes road surfaces are plowed up and the hillside is contoured back into its original shape. Q: When it comes to abandoning old roads, why not let nature do the work? A: Roads are built on mounds of loosely-packed fill dirt. When water runs across this fill dirt, it pulls sediment into streams. Once abandoned, roads often become creeks or washes because they create an easy path for water to follow. Q: What happens if the roads are not repaired or retired? A: They will continue to divert runoff, cause erosion and trigger landslides many decades after they are abandoned, even after trees grow back over some road surfaces. The watershed damage could last for centuries if no one reverses the changes to slopes and runoff that were made during road construction. Sources: U.S. Forest Service, state Department of Ecology and Eugene, Ore.,-based Pacific Rivers Council   CONTACT THE HERALD Robert Frank, City Editor frank@heraldnet.com   Published: Monday, December 31, 2007 Area may get millions to repair forest roads The Forest Service has struggled with a backlog of work vital to helping salmon. By Lukas Velush, Herald Writer Dozens of logging and mining roads in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest could be repaired or retired, thanks to millions of dollars in new federal money that might flow into the forest. Congress recently adopted a key appropriations bill that includes $40 million to tend a growing number of abandoned or damaged roads on Forest Service land across the country. The measure was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., and was strongly supported by Gov. Chris Gregoire and other local leaders, so there's hope that Washington will get a good chunk of the money. Local Forest Service workers won't know how much money is coming here until later this winter or early spring, said Peter Forbes, district ranger for the forest's Darrington Ranger District. There's hope that this money will be the first of much more to come, allowing an agency with a staff that has dwindled over the last decade to bring back people to fix the roads. "We've downsized over the last few years to the point where we're pretty well booked with the work we have," Forbes said. "If we feel pretty comfortable that the money is going to keep coming in, we'll probably look at increasing staff as we feel its appropriate." Forest managers have been waging a losing battle to fix some roads and safely dismantle others since the 1990s, when money to maintain the roads dried up with the end of large-scale logging. Statewide, there's an estimated $300 million backlog of road damage on 22,000 miles of logging roads. More than $120 million of that erosion damage is on 2,700 miles of road in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie forest. The Forest Service's road maintenance program for Washington state has been getting about $3 million per year to fix and retire roads in Washington state. That's not even enough to keep up with a problem that grows by an estimated $8 million per year. Even before they learned that new road money may be coming, local Forest Service officials had already started to figure out what roads to fix or eliminate, Forbes said. He said the goal is to focus on one watershed at a time, moving on to others as money comes available. On the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, that first watershed is the Suiattle River basin near Darrington, Forbes said. By early next year the Forest Service expects to produce a proposal for which roads to keep and which roads to eliminate in that river basin. Spending new road money in targeted locations is a good idea because far less is coming than is needed, said Chris Frissell, director of science and conservation for the Pacific Rivers Council, based in Eugene, Ore. He also said it's important to focus on locations such as the Suiattle River basin, where the number of damaged roads is small enough that addressing all of the roads that are eroding away can be done with relatively small amounts of money. That would allow salmon populations that have struggled to cope with sediment flowing off those roads to bounce back rather quickly. Frissell called getting $40 million to address the country's Forest Service road epidemic a good start for a problem that largely has been ignored for more than a decade, but said it will take $100 million per year for 10 years to either fix or eliminate all Forest Service roads that need help. He does think that Washington state and the Puget Sound region will do well, however, in part because it pushed so hard to get Congress to allocate the money. Frissell said his organization works closely with the Forest Service to help it spend the little road money it gets efficiently and effectively. Now that new money is rolling in, it's especially important to help forests like the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, which have seen their staffs dwindle in recent years, hire the right people and develop programs to use the new money effectively, he said. The state of Washington campaigned hard for the Forest Service to get money for roads, mainly because in this state, that's a major last piece in protecting endangered salmon that hasn't been addressed, said Stephen Bernath, senior policy analyst for the state Department of Ecology's water quality program. Roads in lowland forested areas are being repaired or removed on state land or land owned by large logging companies, Bernath said. Lower down, rule tightening and work by regional leaders is leading to the cleanup of storm water runoff and reducing the effects from leaky septic tanks and sewage treatment plants that occasionally overflow. That leaves the Forest Service, which manages upper reaches of all the state's river basins. "You've got the forest service at the top of the watershed who should be producing the cleanest water," Bernath said. Allowing major amounts of sediment to flow into the headwaters of the region's rivers "can wipe out whatever good habitat work is going on downstream. Our concern is we need healthy watersheds from top to bottom." That means repairing roads that the Forest Service wants to keep and removing roads that are no longer needed. Road removal conjures up images of plowing graded gravel roads and planting trees -- but with limited dollars, that isn't the best way to do it, Frissell said. The main goal of retiring roads is to keep the soils that were used to make the road from washing into streams and harming salmon eggs, he said. For that reason, the best way to decommission a road on the cheap is to simply scrape away fill soil near where a road crosses a stream or river. As for the rest of the road? Leave it to mend on its own, he said, adding that many times it makes sense to turn these sections into trails. "In Puget Sound, one of the virtues of that wet weather is trees come back fairly quickly," Frissell said. "A lot of times, the original black soil is there. As soon as they expose it, the vegetation that was under there starts growing again." Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.

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