by Skip Kowalski, Stevensville
The first opportunity for the public to comment and become involved in decisions regarding the “Bitterroot Front Project” recently closed. The 144,000 acre analysis area covers a landscape that runs along the Bitterroot Front from Darby to almost Lolo. The intent of the project is to identify potential areas to treat vegetation within the Bitterroot Front to meet the primary goals of reducing wildfire risk and promoting forest restoration. Treatment actions would include tree thinning, timber harvest and prescribed burning.
In an area this large there are significant opportunities to not only effectively analyze fire risk and forest restoration potential, but also address other issues that are best viewed from 20,000 feet. These include: maintaining habitat connections for fish and wildlife; protecting and perpetuating rare habitats such as old growth forests; restoring a more historically representative and visually natural appearing vegetation pattern across the Bitterroot Face; and creating fuel conditions that may help reduce property loss, give firefighters a tactical advantage and improve conditions for firefighter safety when wildfire events do occur. Of equal importance, the proposal recognizes that many fires cross administrative boundaries and that the county and private land owners have an important role to play in ensuring that Forest Service actions taken on public lands to protect our community are meaningful, successful and worth the cost.
Public comments about this project can be found on the Bitterroot Front Project web page and I encourage you to look them over. Responses cover a wide range of opinions from “stay out” to “get on with it” and everything in between. Some comments are helpful. Some are not. Regardless, this is democracy in action and the Forest Service will have no easy job in reconciling the differences.
The Bitterroot Front project has been presented to us as a partnership between the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Ravalli County, State of Montana and other federal agencies. This acknowledges that, considering the level of fire risk to the Bitterroot Valley, it is critical that all agencies responsible for citizen safety and resource management work together. I look forward to seeing how everyone responds and how well each of them contributes to accomplishing the complete job of restoring forests and reducing the risk of wildfire to public resources and private property.
We should all appreciate the opportunity to comment on Forest Service proposals. I personally look forward to staying involved with this project even though I’ll probably disagree with some of the results. More importantly, however, I am grateful that we still have our National Forests and have a chance to influence how they are managed. Remember, there are some who view our National Forests only in terms of dollars and jobs while others would like to see them placed in private ownership. Just imagine what the Bitterroot would look like and what it would be like to live here if they had their way. I cringe at the possibility! You should too.
Helen Sabin says
Well said Skip. I personally saw how Fire can overwhelm fire fighters, planes, etc especially if the wind Is blowing. The Bitterroots are so close to the valley and its residents, that it would take only about five minutes for it to come out of the hills and burn the houses situated right below the mountains in the “wildlife interface area. With all the hay, grasses, etc, it would be in corvallis within ten minutes. We lived in Colorado Springs in 2012 when the Waldo Canyon Fires moved out of the mountains about twenty miles away and attacked the city itself. We stood on a hillside about a mile from the burning and watched as fire trucks had to go up on the sidewalks to get through the traffic evacuating out of the west side of the city. The trucks were trying to stop the fire from advancing to the east. With the winds which are a result of Mother Nature and the fire itself, there is no way to stop fire when it gets going. We MUST clean out the forests, get rid of old, dry timber, and plant new or we will know what “Hell” is like if a fire comes towards the valley. We have been there and seen it first hand and all we could say was …”OH MY GOD!”