News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Those of us who live in the Sisters country watched the catastrophic forest fires in Colorado and Arizona with a cold thought in mind: That could be us.
"What's going on in Colorado and Arizona could happen here," said Sisters District Ranger Bill Anthony.
Sisters and its outlying community are vulnerable.
We are surrounded by a forest filled with summer campers and their fires. Stiff winds blow west to east and could push a growing fire right into Black Butte Ranch, Camp Sherman, Tollgate, Crossroads and on into town.
Yet Sisters is in a better position to ward off catastrophe than many places in the mountains of the West.
"We've done more preventative work in Central Oregon than in some other places," Anthony said.
Foresters in the Sisters country have been engaged in a fairly aggressive program of thinning and underburning the forest in an effort to create a belt of "defensible space" running north-south from the Metolius River to the southern end of the district.
They have also created islands of defensible points around rural subdivisions, rivers and Highway 20.
The work has been done through timber sales, through thinning projects and through prescribed burning and mowing of undergrowth.
The work has created areas of the forest where small timber and choking underbrush that could fuel the movement of a big fire is reduced. The fuel reduction also results in a healthier, more open forest.
That kind of work doesn't happen everywhere, Anthony noted.
"The public in the Northwest is still to a degree more supportive of active forest management than people are on the Front Range in Colorado," he said.
And Central Oregon still has the industrial capacity to do the work. According to Anthony, who came to Sisters from the Boulder Ranger District in Colorado, that capacity "has dried up" in Colorado. Even as Colorado residents become aware that work needs to be done in the forest, there is no timber industry there to do the job.
Anthony cautions that Oregon is not far behind in dismantling industrial capacity.
"We are ... at risk of losing a good portion of our industry," he said. "Mills have closed, contractors have moved out or found other ways to make a living."
Plenty of work remains to be done -- and the ability to do it is diminished due to lack of funding. Part of that is attributable to a reallocation of resources to fight the war on terrorism.
"Our ability to fund security is going to cut into our ability to deal with other issues," Anthony said.
The effect of budget constraints is already apparent on the ground.
"We would love to be able to treat more acres per year," he said. "The number of acres we treat is shrinking."
In 2001, the Sisters Ranger District thinned, mowed, burned or otherwise treated some 6,000 acres. In 2003, that is reduced to 4,000 to 5,000 acres.
According to Anthony, the district should be treating between 6,000 and 8,000 acres per year. And treated areas have to be maintained so that they don't return to dense, overgrown conditions.
He said the district needs to plan a new project each year to keep up with the need for fuel reduction. Currently, the district is heading toward a planning cycle that will kick out a project every other year.
"We've done quite a bit of work," Anthony said. "We're still nervous. We're in better shape than a lot of places, but we're still nervous."
The District Ranger said that, on a scale of one to 10, his degree of security with forest conditions in the Sisters country is at about a five. That's not so good, but it's a lot better than his assessment of Colorado.
"If I was on the Front Range in Colorado, it would be somewhere between zero and one," he said.
Help save your home from fire
Homeowners in the Sisters country can do a lot to boost the odds that their home will survive a major forest fire.
"It's important for people to do defensible space work on their own private lands," said Sisters District Ranger Bill Anthony.
That means clearing away pine needles and brush that accumulate near the home; cutting back trees and thinning out dense stands that can go up like a torch.
Political activism is also an important defense.
If communities are strongly supportive of fire prevention measures in the forests, the work has a much better chance of getting funded.
"Congress will allocate dollars where they know there is political support," Anthony said.
Agencies are also more likely to commit funds in places where there is a good chance that things will get done.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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