PLAINS – When forester Kyle Johnson set out to begin restoration work in the wake of the massive Chippy Creek fire, the charred tree stumps were still smoking. Johnson was looking for trees that might have survived the blaze and marking them with blue paint – a sign to spare them from the salvage logging that would soon begin.
Two years later, Johnson and other members of Montana’s Department of Natural Resources are in the final stages of salvage, restoration and recovery for state lands here, and small saplings and grasses have grown amid the burnt remains.
As another fire season heats up, and fires across the region grow in frequency and size, the work is an example of one approach in the often-contentious debate over how to deal with a wildfire’s aftermath.
“One of the things we’re pretty proud of as an agency is how quickly we’re able to respond to these things,” said Shawn Thomas, DNRC forest manager bureau chief in Missoula. “It’s not just as easy as going out and starting to salvage logs.”
In August 2007, the Chippy Creek fire roared through Northwest Montana, burning nearly 100,000 acres of land near Hubbert Reservoir, not far from Hot Springs and Plains, and on the northwest corner of the Flathead Indian Reservation. More than 600 firefighters worked the blaze, which, by the time it was put out, cost more than $18 million to fight. Of the burnt acres, about 2,500 were school trust lands managed by the DNRC.
On a recent tour of the area, DNRC officials described their approach to addressing the aftereffects of fires on school trust land as “fairly aggressive.”
The state’s school trust lands were established in 1889, when Congress granted federal land to several western states for the purpose of generating revenue for public education. Today, the DNRC manages 5.2 million acres in school trust lands – 730,000 of those forested – and in recent years has generated approximately $80 million in total annual revenue for state schools.
While people often view school trust lands the same way as other public lands, Thomas noted there is one very important difference – the trust mandate. “We have a mandate of managing that land to the maximum benefit of the beneficiary,” he said. “Obviously there’s a loss of value to the beneficiary when something burns; the sooner we act the better able we are to limit that.”
Following a wildfire, the agency assesses the area and designs projects to meet four objectives: mitigating the fire’s adverse impacts; restoring the forest to its income-generating potential; capturing the value of dead and dying trees; and generating revenue for the trust beneficiaries.
In the days after Chippy Creek, foresters like Johnson begin delineating trees that were too damaged to survive. Within six months, the majority of these would be salvaged for various wood products – more than 64,000 tons sold for a total of just more than $1 million. With burnt wood, time is of the essence: Within a year, beetles will attack, staining the wood blue and causing it to lose as much as 30 to 50 percent of its value, Thomas said.
While the salvaged wood generates money, funds also begin to flow into the area for restoration. In the case of Chippy Creek, nearly $100,000 went toward road construction and improvements, while additional funding went toward planting 65,000 seedlings – all in an effort to bring the area back to its original environmental and money-generating state.
For DNRC forester and administrator Bob Harrington, the work at Chippy Creek is representative of broader challenges to come. Since 1988, Harrington said about 30 percent of the pine base in Montana has burned or been killed by pine beetles.
“As climate change continues, we’re going to be dealing with these types of situations a lot more as a society and as a state,” he said.
Additionally, the question of what to do after a forest burns is tied directly to the economy and even progress toward alternative energy, he said. For every million board feet harvested, Harrington said there are about 10 to 13 jobs; in the case of Chippy Creek where there were 12 million board feet, there are about 120 jobs for two years.
Woody biomass as an alternative energy could also prove a valuable revenue source and economic driver, Harrington said. “But it’s got to pay its way out of the woods,” he said, adding that tax credits now are lagging behind those for solar and wind energy.
“There are lots of choices in front of us,” Harrington said. “Some of the most important work to be done comes after these fires.”