News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters District Ranger Bill Anthony surveys damage near the head of Jack Creek. Stream banks here were not severely burned. photo by Jim Cornelius
The forests to the west of Sisters are being vastly changed by the B&B Complex fires.
Some of the region's most popular recreational attractions for hikers, fishermen, hunters and sightseers have been devastated.
Other areas that did not burn too intensely may actually be helped by the blaze -- the fire acting as a natural regenerator of life. Other pockets were not affected much at all.
"Some areas did not burn; some areas had 'good fire,' some areas had 'bad fire,'" said Sisters District Ranger Bill Anthony as he drove through the fire area surveying the massive rehabilitation project confronting his agency.
Some of that rehabilitation effort will get underway long before the fire is completely contained. Firefighters conduct "suppression rehab" when areas become safe, pulling bulldozer lines back upon themselves, restoring bulldozed-out safe zones to a semblance of their previous condition, cutting out snags.
The cost of this initial patch job is allocated to the firefighting effort.
After that effort is complete, an interdisciplinary team including experts in everything from hydrology to trees will form to make a plan for Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation (BAER).
The BAER team focuses on two areas -- public safety and critical resource damage. They make plans for stabilizing slopes, taking out hazard trees and controlling run-off on denuded slopes.
Flooding is now a real danger in areas of the Sisters country.
"There's been places in the West where the next serious event that comes after a fire is a flood," Anthony said.
The work is extensive and elaborate. Crews enlarge culverts to handle larger flows of runoff. They re-seed hillsides and plant riparian shrubs.
They fall trees across slopes and stake them in place to create water bars.
"They kind of do them like shingles on a roof," Anthony said. "It just diffuses the energy of the water running down the hill."
Wildlife are taken into consideration, too, in areas where critical, sensitive habitat is at stake.
On the Sisters Ranger District, the Booth Fire has taken out some of the last remaining spotted owl habitat.
The BAER team creates a mitigation plan that includes costs for the rehab work. According to Anthony, Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation is usually well-funded; as long as they are reasonable, projects are seldom rejected.
But the emergency rehabilitation only covers a tiny portion of the damage that is done by a massive blaze like the Booth Fire.
Weed abatement -- a real concern in a knapweed-plagued region -- is generally not covered under BAER. Nor is restoration of campgrounds and recreational areas. Nor is replanting of forests.
"If it's strictly planting just to get a new forest started, that's not part of BAER," Anthony said.
That leaves huge amounts of work in "post-fire restoration" to be funded through normal allocation procedures.
It's important work, but not an "emergency." It gets funded accordingly. According to Anthony, the work entails millions of dollars in costs, but his district will probably only see hundreds of thousands in funding to do the job.
Anthony says the Sisters Ranger District already has a considerable amount of rehabilitation and restoration work from the Cache Mountain, Eyerly and Link fires. Rehabilitation and restoration of the Booth and Bear Butte fire areas will occupy the local district for years.
The Sisters Ranger District already has a lot of work on its plate, including the Metolius Project designed to treat 12,000 acres of forest that was nearly consumed by the Booth Fire.
That project will have to be reassessed due to "changed conditions" in the wake of the fire.
There are other treatment projects, archaeological projects, day-to-day business that will all be subsumed to some degree under the B&B Complex rehabilitation work.
"This becomes your work," Anthony said.
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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