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No Comments [ Add Comment ]A Brush With Safety / U.S. Forest Service cuts overgrown oaks to create fire containment lines
By JESSE FRUHWIRTHFARMINGTON -- Hoping to cut useful containment lines for inevitable fires, U.S. Forest Service employees spent Tuesday afternoon chain sawing hundreds of overgrown oaks above Farmington Creek Trail.
The sawing took the place of a prescribed burn. Off and on over the last two years, crews have cut major breaks and piled the wood. The crew intended to burn the 600 piles -- some reaching 8 feet tall -- spread over roughly 10 acres Tuesday, but conditions were too dry.
There's no snow just above the bench and hoped-for rain didn't fall on the project. The crew called off the burn and went back to cutting after one test burn confirmed their concerns.
About two miles southeast of the trail and 1,700 feet up toward Bountiful Peak, the crew -- armed with four chain saws, replacement fuel and axes -- began sawing, sawing, sawing, then stacking, stacking, stacking logs.
"It's a lot like factory work," said Eric LaMalfa, z Davis County fuel-treatment project specialist who works for the Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
While the fuel-treatment project currently includes just high-risk pieces of the county's wildland-urban interface, a long-term vision of the service is to cut a break line along the entire Wasatch Front.
"It doesn't guarantee we're going to save property or houses, but it gives us a better chance," LaMalfa said.
The break stretches 50 feet wide in some areas, but could be cut thinner in areas deemedless crucial.
Kathy Jo Pollack, spokeswoman for the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, said the oak brush in the area has grown to unnatural heights.
"This is oak brush, this isn't trees," said the 27-year veteran of the service."The maple and oak aren't supposed to look like trees, but it's old."
Old, as in, not burned recently.
Fire mitigation has been so successful that wooded areas that used to burn and regrow regularly now grow more robust than they did before civilized development, Pollack said.
That means fires have more fuel, so much that the flames become unnaturally hot, "sterilizing" the soil, hampering plant regrowth.
But the fuel treatment project can't help that entirely. It's aimed at slowing fires pushed by downslope winds before flames reach homes.
LaMalfa said workers leave some trees in the break so it's less noticeable from below. Leaving a few big trees also shades the ground so new growth fills in the break more slowly.
Leaving a break in the tree canopy allows fire retardant dropped from a helicopter to drip to the ground where it's effective, he said.
Officials say the prescribed burn that was supposed to take place Tuesday will now be done another time this winter or in the spring, when weather conditions are just right.
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