Recovering from the Pole Creek Fire

Smoke-filled days are a bitter memory in Sisters Country, but the effects of the Pole Creek Fire will linger for many years, though the last wisps of smoke have been deadened by rain and snow.

In fact, rain and snow now become a threat to the very landscape over which the fire raged for more than a month, from the morning of September 9.

Earlier this month, an early rainstorm washed over Sisters Country. Whychus Creek ran a thick, muddy brown through town and locals knew what that meant: Sediment was washing into the creek.

"Whychus is very 'flashy,'" says Terry Craigg, who heads up the Forest Service's BAER team (Burned Area Emergency Response) in the wake of the fire. "It responds quickly to a storm ... we got disturbance with the past storm."

That disturbance comes as rain hits slopes where vegetation has burned away. Craigg said there was some moderate-to-high-intensity burning in the upper reaches of Whychus Creek.

With less vegetation and duff from needle cast, riparian slopes are vulnerable, and the sediment that washes into the streams brings the threat of damage even miles downstream.

"There's been a lot of restoration work downstream that we're interested in protecting," Craigg said.

Sisters District Ranger Kristie Miller said, "The concern is that if we have a larger event during the winter, we could have more come down."

To mitigate that possibility through the winter, the Forest Service plans to spread wood chips along critical slopes via helicopter. The chips were made from trees cut down along roads to make firebreaks and remove hazards to firefighters.

The chips will catch moisture and helps stabilize the soil. About 200 acres will be treated in this manner.

"It'll give us a year or two to get the understory in," Craigg said.

Cost and the amount of biomass material available determines how much treatment the area gets.

"It's very expensive to have the helicopter pick up that material and spread it across the slope," Craigg said. And, he noted, "That's about as much material as we've got to work with."

Firefighting itself has an impact on the environment. To minimize those impacts, firefighters try as much as possible to use existing roads for fire lines. Rehab from the cutting of dozer lines was underway even before the fire was contained, and fire crews rehabbed their own fire lines before being discharged from their duties.

Like Whychus Creek, Pole Creek showed quick reaction to the storm, showing increased runoff in the Three Sisters Wilderness due to the fire. Snow Creek "reacted the least," Craigg said.

The Forest Service is going to have to replace road culverts due to anticipated increases in runoff.

"Our culverts, which functioned fine before the fire, are now too small," Craigg said.

All of this work is not cheap. Estimates of the rehabilitation costs have not been tallied, but they will come in on top of the $17 million cost to suppress the blaze.

"It can get expensive," Miller acknowledged. "It can get really expensive."

Funds for rehab don't come out of the local budget. They come from a larger federal "pot," which has had to increase consistently over the past decade and more as more and more large and destructive fires sweep the West. Money taken from those funds for rehab has to be justified with thorough documentation.

"The pot has had to get bigger and bigger," Miller said. "They have a pretty sharp pencil when they're looking at it."

And time is short. The fire came late in the season and wet weather has set in relatively early, meaning that crews will have to work quickly to get their mitigation work completed.

Some salvage logging is a possibility in some of the fire area, according to Miller. Any logging would focus solely on dead trees; late successional reserves and riparian areas will not be logged.

Silviculturist Brian Tandy is surveying the fire area for the possibility of replanting.

"I think that will happen," Miller said.

It is hard to shake the perception that a 27,000-acre fire means 27,000 acres of blackened trees and ashen soil - but that is not the case. The Pole Creek Fire burned with widely varying levels of intensity.

Satellite imaging indicates that only 406 acres burned at high intensity - taking out whole stands of large trees. There were 9,897 acres of "moderate" burn; 9,370 acres of low-intensity burning and 6,000 acres that got only a light underburn or no burning at all.

In areas that had been

treated for forest health and wildfire safety, especially in the area facing the Crossroads subdivision, the fire was benign.

"We got a nice underburn, and the stand looks really nice," Craigg said.

The prognosis for the health of the forest depends

significantly on this winter's weather. Heavy rain - especially a rain-on-snow event - could do a lot of damage, throwing mud into the streams, tearing out banks and culverts. Conversely, a quiet winter bodes well for a spring that will begin the healing of the wounded forest.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

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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