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Posted on 07/24/2007 1:56:26 PM PDT by jazusamo
GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Bush administration efforts to boost salvage logging after wildfires suffered a loss Tuesday when a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that had stopped harvest of burned trees in an old-growth forest reserve on federal lands in southern Oregon.
The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene that stopped the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from logging 23.4 million board feet of timber from 961 acres burned by the Timbered Rock fire outside Medford in 2002.
The appeals court found that BLM's plan to harvest dead and dying trees violated its own management plans and a mandate to maintain and preserve old-growth forest ecosystems, including trees killed by fire, under the Northwest Forest Plan, which was adopted in 1994 to protect habitat for northern spotted owls, salmon and other species.
The court also found that BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to adequately analyze the cumulative environmental damage from scraping 33 miles of fire line and dropping 40,000 gallons of chemical retardant on the area to put out the fire, and the harvest of 6,000 acres of dead trees on neighboring private timberlands owned by Boise Corp.
In a similar case on the 2002 Biscuit fire outside Grants Pass, a different federal judge upheld a U.S. Forest Service plan that involved salvage logging in old-growth forest reserves and roadless areas.
So according to the 9th, and other liberals, the BLM should do environmental impact studies before dropping retardent on any given fire?
Thanks for the ping.
This is what it must have felt like during the end of the Roman Empire.
Crazy, just crazy.
Unfortunately, we also see many ‘decisions’ like this in Colorado too.
Well, I say the next time they have a fire, the treehuggers can put out their own damned fire. Complaining about a fire line? Or flame retardant? These people have wasted too too much time smoking that funny stuff. You know, per capita, Oregon has way more fruits and nuts than Ca. I am in complete awe of their necessity to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
What “wood” you expect?, they live in glass houses with marble floors.
I’ve lived in both states and I have to agree with you. :-)
Idiot judges.
Don’t let the log any of it!!! Let it ALL burn down.
Idiots.
Why don’t you ask the 265 homeowners, who lost their houses in Tahoe, what they could have done to prevent losing their house? All that flora and fauna that should have been cleaned up, instead being left to burn, and burn good it did. God made us stewards of this earth, and we should be cleaning where cleaning is necessary.
We have to fight the fires and the judges.
Wasn’t today the day Ward Churchill was supposed to be fired, have you heard anyhting?
No news yet :
plagerization and falsification of research.
An investigating committee found that Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies, manufactured facts in some of his essays and plagiarized the work of others, including articles and art.
“We determined his writings were protected under the first amendment. But there were allegations of research misconduct,” said CU interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/13742972/detail.html
Thanks for the link, George, good article.
I’d say he’s lucky they held it behind closed doors, it surely saved the bum some embarrassment.
Lets get on with the firing. :-)
Not only is this the state that forbids self-service gas stations ...
to create jobs for station attendants who “know how to pump gas safely!”
... but this is the state with signs along the interstate in eastern Oregon that say,
Do Not Pass Snowplows On The Right.
Heck, there’s only one interstate in Eastern Oregon, and it doesn’t really have a shoulder to pass on, even if you did want to go around the snow plows. :)
I just have to share a fun little story about Oregon wildfire management... happened the summer of 1991, when I was working field archaeology crew for the Forest Service. We were working about 8 ridges over from a good sized fire, 50K acres, so we kept the scanner on all the time.
One morning, dispatch took a call from a fire crew (three guys, one pumper truck)... small spot fire, send up one more crew, and they could get it out by lunch. Lunchtime, no crew was sent, and the guys radioed requesting two crews (six more guys, two more pumpers), and they could contain and extinguish by that night. It was close to 5pm when they called down to say it was up into “road ban” (wilderness) areas, and they had no chance of catching it now. Twenty minutes later, someone else radioed in to the same dispatch, requesting a crew on another part of the forest, and the dispatcher said, “Sure thing... we have about five crews that have just been sitting here all day, nothing to do.”
Within two days, that little spot fire was consuming another 50K acres, merged with the first fires, and they all roared along in fine Complex Fire status, taking out about 200K acres before fall rains extinguished them.
That salvage sale was tied up in courts by enviros for 8 years. The dead timber rotted where it stood, and burned over every few years for the next decade. Some areas are still bare.
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Judge Aiken is a real head case.
She must be. I posted the threads when she sentenced nine members of the “Family” of eco-terrorists in Eugene a couple months ago and I believe she went too easy on them but there were plea bargains involved with some of them. Still I think they got too easy.
People build their homes where fires have been a periodic occurrence for thousands of years, and they are mad because their home burned! It’s kind of like those of us, me included (except that I’ve just moved back out), that buy/build homes in Florida knowing that it is in hurricane ally and being angry that a hurricane roared through.
Now, my original point is, people need to challenge these bureaucrats that act as if they own the land and can sell-off our (the taxpayer’s) land, and resources therein, at-will.
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