CONCONULLY – Smoke still trickles from smoldering stumps in north-central Washington, the result of a massive wildfire that roared through 274 square miles of state and federal land.
The Tripod fire wasn’t the largest blaze of 2006 – Montana’s Derby fire burned 297 square miles of forest and Nevada is cleaning up nearly 1 million acres, burned by several fires, in one region alone.
But the remote land scorched in Washington state includes hundreds of miles of roads and trails, river channels and wildlife habitat that must be protected from erosion after the blaze. The U.S. Forest Service is asking for $28 million over the next two years to complete what may be the most expensive rehabilitation project the agency has ever undertaken.
“The flames have died down, and the firefighters have gone home, but the work is just beginning,” said Doug Jenkins, Forest Service spokesman for the recovery effort.
The Tripod fire, two fires that joined after being sparked separately by lightning, burned 175,184 acres just south of the Canadian border, briefly threatening the remote hamlets of Conconully and Loomis, tucked away in the thick Okanogan and Wenatchee national forests.
The forests, hard hit by a bark beetle outbreak, provided ready fuel. In areas where the fire burned hottest, all the ground cover or duff – small or downed trees and branches, bushes and shrubs, forest debris – burned away. Standing trees are scorched sticks, their root systems beyond repair. Soil has been seared to a fine, gray ash.
Twenty-three percent of the fire zone burned severely.
“By and large every tree is dead in the areas that are severely burned,” said Mel Bennett, a forest hydrologist assigned to the recovery team, which includes engineers, botanists, biologists and cultural resources specialists, among others.
The recovery effort doesn’t try to replace what’s been damaged by the fire, but to reduce further harm to now-fragile land that is exposed to the elements.
The team works long hours, for weeks on end, to evaluate hazards and develop a recovery plan to submit. The expense for the Tripod fire: $28 million.
The Forest Service already has received $14 million to begin the work this fall before heavy snow falls, and officials say they hope the rest of the money to complete the project will be approved next year.
Work includes clearing downed trees and cutting hazardous trees that have been weakened and could fall on 259 miles of road and 70 miles of trail inside the fire lines. This is not salvage logging, which is generally conducted later.
Also, culverts must be rebuilt, and in some cases enlarged, to handle runoff from snow and rain in the coming months. Erosion poses the biggest risk, Bennett said, resulting in landslides and sediment loading in streams important to threatened and endangered fish.
Erosion also could increase by up to 400 percent stream flows in some drainages during peak periods of rainfall and snowmelt, flooding downstream communities.
An estimated 270 truck loads of straw have been delivered to the Tripod fire alone, to be dropped by helicopter in 1-ton bales over the heaviest burn areas. The straw provides cover from rain and snow for scorched soil.
Less severely burned areas are to be fertilized to help damaged plants recover. Roughly 7,000 acres are to be seeded with sturdy grasses, and workers will clear noxious weeds such as diffuse knapweed and dalmatian toadflax that could choke out emerging plants.
Terry Lillybridge, a plant ecologist on the team, estimates a 50-50 chance for success.
“The success of seeding depends on what happens next spring,” he said. “You end up with a rainstorm that might not normally be a problem on a vegetated slope, become a problem. Maybe in a case where 80 percent of the rainfall might soak in, maybe 80 percent comes downstream instead.”
For Jenkins, Bennett and Lillybridge, the operation is the largest they can remember after many years with the Forest Service.
“It’s the biggest I’ve been associated with in my recent memory – at least in the last 30 years,” Bennett said.
At Oregon’s Biscuit fire in 2002, where salvage operations became the subject of harsh criticism by environmental groups, rehabilitation efforts in the first year cost just $3.6 million, according to Patty Burel, public information officer for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. The fire covered 500,000 acres.
“Certainly, there was a lot of land treatment – seeding, mulching – and the removal of hazard trees,” she said. “But much of the Biscuit fire burned in a wilderness area, which requires a different kind of management.”
The Hayman fire in Colorado’s Pike-San Isabel National Forest, about 30 miles southwest of Denver, consumed 133 homes en route to scorching 137,760 acres in 2002, said spokeswoman Cass Cairns. Recovery costs: $18.1 million.
Even in northeast Nevada, where fires this summer burned 10 percent of the 11 million-acre Elko Ranger District of the Bureau of Land Management, rehabilitation costs only total $14 million so far.
While the costs are certain to go higher, the area doesn’t have many trails or roads that need work, said Mike Brown, district public affairs officer.
“That’s part of the reason some of the fires got so big, because of the access to them. There wasn’t any,” he said. “It’s a different ecosystem, different environment, but the same concerns with erosion and flooding.”
Robin DeMario, spokeswoman with the Okanogan and Wenatchee national forests, agreed. Comparing acreages to acreages in comparing fire rehabilitation would be like “comparing apples to gila monsters,” she said.
“They may be dealing with areas that are wide open, where for us, we have communities that still need protection: Loomis, Conconully and Winthrop,” she said.
In the meantime, the Tripod fire will continue to smolder. The fire won’t be considered contained until the area sees three days of rain equaling a half-inch or 5 inches of snow.
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