April 23rd 2015
by Adrian Baumann 04/23/2015 Willits News The county continued its efforts to grapple with the issue of hack-and-squirt, otherwise known as frill-treatment, at a lengthy board of supervisors meeting Tuesday, April 21, that ran well into evening. Before the board was a non-binding resolution asking Mendocino Redwood Company for a voluntary 6 month suspension of the practice of killing and leaving dead trees standing, due to potential fire risk, until a third party could evaluated the risks. The resolution failed with Supervisors Dan Hamburg and Dan Gjerde voting yes, and John McCowen, Carre Brown and Tom Woodhouse voting no. Emotions ran high in the packed gallery, with some people sitting on the floor, boos and applause peppered through the day, with frequent shouts and heckling directed at the supervisors. Said Gjerde in an interview, “I think it wasn’t helpful that there were a few vocal people in the room who were basically heckling from the crowd and drawing attention away from the issue and towards themselves.” While the resolution was not approved it should be noted that this is neither a vote for or against the herbicide treatment, or the practice of leaving dead trees standing. As Gjerde noted “This was really the first public airing of this issue at a board of supervisors meeting in at least a decade. So on that score it was helpful.” But Gjerde believes there is support on the board for a working-group, comprised of supervisors, local fire chiefs, scientists, industry and public, that could examine the issue and come back with a real plan to deal with the situation. He cautions the timber industry that this may be be their best option. During the meeting more than one person suggested that if the Board failed to act activists would mobilize to pass a measure along the lines of the anti-fracking Measure S, that would outright ban hack-and-squirt. Hack-and-squirt, also known as frill-treatment, is a forestry practice used to eliminate trees deemed unsuitable. In the case of Mendocino County ecological succession following the clear-cutting of the last century has resulted oaks and Manzanita growing in areas formerly dominated by Douglas Fir and Redwood. To eliminate these trees, foresters typically hack into the bark of the tree and spray in a few milliliters of an herbicide, generally Imazapyr, which is approved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for such use. The tree dies quickly and is left standing, eventually falling and decomposing on the forest floor. While the EPA says Imazapyr is fairly safe after a period of time, they do caution about exposure to the herbicide if it has been recently applied. The amount of herbicide used amounts to about two and a half cups per acre, according to MRC. The practice is used across the U.S. and in Mendocino County it’s used by smaller timber companies and by CalFire in the Jackson State Demonstration Forest. MRC is by far the largest user in the county. MRC also maintains that the treatment is useful in returning forest to a state more similar to the pre-clear-cut forest, one which would have a lower fire-hazard than the densely packed tan oak forests that currently exist. Many locals have asserted that the millions of dead trees left standing on MRC land constitute a substantially elevated fire risk, most prominently Albion Fire Chief Ted Williams. Williams recently led the Albion board to ban leaving dead standing trees in that district. MRC for its part maintains that the practice does not elevate the risk of fire substantially over the long run, while acknowledging the potential for a short term increase in risk of some kinds of fire. Williams is against the practice for a variety of reasons. Not only does he think there is an increased fire risk, he also believes that the dead trees, with weakened limbs and roots, pose an increased risk to firefighters working in the forest. Though everyone agrees that manually cutting the trees and leaving them on the ground would increase risk, Williams calls this a “logical fallacy,” saying that instead of just killing the trees some percentage should be logged out for productive use, like flooring, firewood, or biochar. “They say bring us a cheaper solution and they won’t implement this as the current practice. But I don’t know if we can find a cheaper solution than injecting poison and walking away,” says Williams. Adding, “If they could market that oak product we wouldn’t be in this mess.” CalFire officially has no stand on the fire risk, with Mendocino Unit Chief Chris Rowney stating that fires burn as a result of the complex interaction of different factors, and that no one factor can be isolated. He also noted that managed lands tend to have better road access making fighting fires in them easier. “What we have seen thus far in the county looking at our history we have seen no major fire behavior in those areas so treated,” said Rowney. Finally, the issue is muddled with the persistent fear of herbicides, with a substantial portion of members of the public who spoke at the meeting railing primarily against the use of herbicides instead of the fire hazard. During the hearing at the board a 2010 study conducted by Humboldt CalFire Chief Hugh Scanlon, and colleagues, was repeatedly referenced. The study, “Understanding the Long-Term Fire Risks in Forests Affected by Sudden Oak Death[SOD],” is quite relevant because, though it sought to understand the effects of SOD, it often used frill treated sections of forest as a stand in for SOD struck forest. The study examined forests up and down the North Coast, in different climate regions and with different tree mixtures. Researchers found that in hack and squirt areas treated five to eight years earlier the surface fuel load (a technical firefighter term for how much flammable stuff is lying around) was significantly higher than in areas treated more recently. It also reported that, “...fuel amounts were very similar between stands treated with herbicide recently and recently infested stands, suggesting that further study may establish the former condition as a study surrogate for the latter…” Scientific studies are by their nature cautious, pointing to avenues of future research and requiring confirmation by continued experimentation. In other words, they defy the political and public desire for quick and definitive answers. While none of the parties involved disputed the study, they all found different ways of interpreting it. UC Extension Advisor on forest ecology for Mendocino County Greg Giusti pointed out that conditions today are radically different from what they were before clear cutting. Whereas old growth forest may have had 35 to 45 big trees per acre post-clear-cut forest contains hundreds of slimmer trees per acre, presenting a much great fire hazard. But as for the hazards of hack and squirt he said that the science remains unclear, pointing out that turning the Lightning Complex Fire of ‘08 firefighters managed to knock down a raging fire when it entered a frill-treated area, but also point to the Scanlon study as evidence that in some case hazards might be elevated. But he also commented on the larger social situation as a complicating factor, “We’ve got people living next to commercially zoned tracts of land, it’s no different than people living next to an airport, there’s a basic conflict there.”