LOS ANGELES, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- President Bush will use his trip to the West Coast this week to announce new regulatory reforms aimed at accelerating the clearing of brush and other undergrowth that have acted as kindling for devastating wildfires.
Bush was scheduled to speak on the overhaul of forestry regulations Thursday in southern Oregon after a helicopter tour of the Biscuit fire, which had burned nearly a half-million acres as of Wednesday.
While specific details of the plan have not been publicly announced, it is anticipated that the plan will follow the wishes of a number of Western lawmakers, including the state of Montana, which has lost a modest 39,000 acres of forest to fire this year, who want to increase the pace of forest "treatment" plans that usually involve allowing commercial loggers to harvest larger trees at the same time they haul out the saplings and brush that have little economic value but nonetheless present the greatest fire danger.
"I applaud President Bush for recognizing that hands-on forest management is the best approach to reducing fire danger," said Montana Gov. Judy Martz. "I am confident that President Bush's announcement will be a welcome first step for federal forest managers in Montana."
Fires have burned more than 6 million acres nationwide this year, and 35 large blazes continued burning in Alaska and 11 Western states. The Biscuit fire, which started more than a month ago, is the largest blaze of the year at more than 489,000 acres.
Higher humidity tempered fire behavior in the Pacific Northwest, but red-flag warnings were in effect Wednesday in Utah and South Dakota due to the potential for strong winds later in the day.
Wind-driven fires are a particularly dreaded nemesis of firefighters, especially in overgrown areas where embers can ignite dry brush and send flames racing into the upper branches of the forest canopy where they are both impossible to fight and can fatally damage a large tree.
The idea behind forest treatments is to return the land to its natural state in which there is less fuel for fires to consume and as a result the flames stay on the ground where they generally do little damage to the thick bark of the lower tree trunks.
Some lawmakers and residents of mountain areas have accused environmental groups of using legal challenges to block treatment proposals on general principals, but the green community was busy this week reaffirming that they agree on the need for fuel reduction, but cautioned against using fire prevention as an excuse to allow logging of old-growth forests.
"Wilderness areas are too valuable to be handed over to the logging industry in the name of fuel reduction," William Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society, said in a statement released Wednesday. "Repealing environmental regulations, logging in roadless areas, or curtailing the public's right to participate in forest management will do nothing to protect families and communities from fires."
The environmental movement people contend that very few treatment plans are ever challenged, and that the U.S. Forest Service would better serve the public if it concentrated its treatment plans in overgrown areas around homes rather than in remote areas that are far from civilization but contain the larger trees that are more valuable to loggers.
"The Bush logging plan would ... log the biggest trees and leave behind the kindling that causes catastrophic fires," warned Bob Schneider, director of the California Wilderness Coalition, a Davis-based organization. "It is a disguise for commercial logging that makes fires worse."
Supporters of the pending changes, however, say they are interested only in preserving the forests and that the job requires both a major reduction in time-consuming red tape and the supportive participation of the private sector.
"There simply is not enough federal money to properly treat all the areas of federal land already burned this year," Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., said in a letter sent Tuesday to Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman urging quick approval of plans to allow loggers to remove trees that were burned in this year's Chediski-Rodeo fire.
"The Forest Service can provide rigorous oversight through language in timber sales and service contracts," said Kyl, a longtime proponent of forest thinning. "However, I understand that fire-killed ponderosa pine deteriorates and loses any commercial value very quickly and ... the window for private sector participation is all too brief."
Kyl said it would not do to just let the burned areas in his state recover naturally since dead trees not only provide fuel for future fires, but also serve as breeding areas for insects that can attack and kill healthy timber stands and create the potential for conflagrations in the years to come.
"We cannot afford to do anything less," Kyl declared. "The federal government does not posses a sufficiently deep reservoir of good will to appear to be a helpless -- indeed hapless -- giant mired in procedural quicksand."
