As any forester knows, there is little if any time to spare when it comes to harvesting trees damaged by wild fire.

John Sessions, a leading expert on salvage logging and a forestry professor at Oregon State University, argued that point in January 2004 after studying the 2002 Biscuit blaze that charred nearly 500,000 acres of Siskiyou National Forest.

Eighteen months after that fire, federal and state officials on both sides of the debate were still arguing what methods to use in getting the salvage wood out of the burned areas without harming the environment worse than what the fire had already caused.

By using helicopters, enough of the salvage wood’s value would have remained to more than repay logging firms for the high cost of aerial logging as well as the expense of replanting the burned-out hillsides, Sessions argued.

But leaving the burned timber alone while studies were conducted and experts debated the pros and cons of quick action caused 40 percent of the timber to deteriorate so badly during that period that it ended up with absolutely no salvage value.

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups often argue that since fires are natural, leaving the forests alone is the best practice. They usually cite as their source for such thinking a 1995 study conducted by Robert L. Beschta, also of Oregon State University although now retired, and seven of Beschta’s colleagues from the University of Montana, Idaho State University, University of Washington and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In that study, Beschta and his fellow researchers concluded, in part, that since the Western ecosystems have evolved with, and in response to, fire, “salvage logging should be prohibited in sensitive areas” and severely “limited in all other areas suitable for salvage logging.”

However, that kind of thinking is flawed, responds Jim Ostrowski, timberland manager at Timber Products Co., since the report overlooks other important factors and safeguards that are already in place to protect the environment.

“The report elaborates on all of the possible risks that may happen during timber harvest and then generalizes that they will all occur on a fire salvage operation,” Ostrowski was quoted as saying by the Mt. Shasta Herald in December 2005.

“The risks they bring up are all possible, which is why foresters use experience and science to minimize the potential risks. Foresters design harvest plans that prevent erosion, leave wildlife structures and retain healthy, green trees in burned areas to reduce risks and mitigate the impacts of the fire.”

That is why the Valley Post is urging local government officials and those involved in the wood products industry to back U.S. Representative Walley Herger’s clarion call for expediting rehabilitation of fire-affected lands in a letter that he and 18 other members of California’s Congressional delegation sent Wednesday, July 30, to Ed Schaefer, the nation’s Secretary of Agriculture, and to James L. Connaughton, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality.

The letter supports taking steps to salvage and restore the fire-affected territory in order to limit threats to public safety and the environment on more than 1 million acres of forest land already charred this year by lightning-sparked wild fire.