An Arizona timber company that accidentally burned
8,000 acres on the Coconino National Forest last year will be
allowed to bid on a salvage timber sale in the burned area.
The fire began in May 1996, in a smoldering
slash pile left by Stone Forest Industries. The fire burned 8,000
acres north of Flagstaff and cost taxpayers more than $2 million to
put out. Although Stone Forest Industries has admitted it was
responsible, it didn’t pay a dime; its contract with the Forest
Service absolved the company of
responsibility.
But allowing the company to bid
on a 4 million board-foot salvage timber sale in the burned area
burns Kieran Suckling, a staffer with the nonprofit Southwest
Center for Biological Diversity. He compared the salvage sale to
“mugging a burn victim. It’s a terrible, terrible precedent to
allow multinational timber corporations to set timber schedules
through their own negligence,” he said.
According
to Allen Funkhouser, a Forest Service official who led a team
investigating the fire, Stone Forest was innocent of negligence and
arson. “In this case they followed all the procedures,” Funkhouser
said.
No one intentionally allowed the fire to
spread, agreed Steve Bennett, Stone Forest Industries regional
manager. Bennett said he called in a second investigating team from
the company’s headquarters in Columbia, S.C., which also found no
evidence of arson.
That doesn’t soothe Suckling.
“I don’t care if they went in with helicopters and X-rayed it,” he
said. “The bottom line is these guys burned down the forest.”
The Southwest Center has temporarily stopped the
sale with an appeal to the agency’s regional office, arguing that
allowing logging violates a newly amended forest plan. The plan
requires salvage sales to leave 5 to 7 trees per acre for goshawks
and endangered spotted owls, the Southwest Center says, and the
Forest Service was planning to leave none.
Scott
Ewers, a timber specialist for the agency, said the new plan
doesn’t apply to the salvage sale because the burned area is “a
biological desert” and not goshawk or spotted owl habitat. Even if
it were suitable habitat, Ewers said, the sale is exempt from the
amended rules because the fire occurred before the new rules were
in place.
Suckling said he expects he’ll have to
sue to stop the sale.
Meanwhile, the Forest
Service doesn’t want salvageable lumber to rot. “If we don’t cut
them in the next year, the product value goes to waste,” Ewers
said. “And the American public demands wood products for their
homes and other uses.”
*Jason
Lenderman
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Burning down the woods.
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