Brunell: Big fires increasing prices for lumber

In terms of public health, calculations by researchers at Canada’s National Forest Carbon Accounting System indicated that last year’s mammoth fire, which evacuated Fort McMurray, released the equivalent of 5 percent of Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, or 41 million tons.

Massive forest fires have been around for centuries in western parts of the U.S. and Canada. For thousands of years semi-arid forests which stretch the length of the western U.S. and Canada’s interior have operated on a cycle of growth, fire and regrowth.

Huge fires are part of Washington’s Cascade Range history as well. For example, in a single week in September 1902, the Yacolt Burn engulfed more than a half-million acres and killed 56 people in the Columbia River Gorge and around Mount St. Helens.

The choking smoke was so thick that ships on the Columbia River were forced to navigate by compass and the street lights in Seattle, 160 miles to the north, glowed at noon.

The Yacolt fires actually forced Weyerhaeuser into lumber milling, particularly in the Longview area, where it built a massive forest products processing complex. The company needed to find a way to recover as much value from its charred trees as possible. That complex also processed salvageable trees from its Mount St. Helens tree farm following the 1980 volcanic eruption.

Logging burned acres of public lands makes sense. A 2015 U.S. Forest Service study of federal forests in the Wenatchee area found that large wildfires can leave behind thousands of acres of fire-killed trees that eventually become fuels for future fires.

In the past logging fire-damaged forests was viewed only for recovery of their economic worth. Now they have a fire-prevention value.

Salvage logging was part of President George W. Bush’s proposed “Healthy Forests” initiative 15 years ago, but critics viewed the program as just a way to increase logging in public forests and killed it.

Bush’s plan called for removing dead and diseased trees before they could fuel large wildfires. Those fires cost hundreds of millions to suppress. (At the time, huge fires in the Wenatchee-Lake Chelan area were fresh on people’s minds).

The logging, milling and replanting of logged land with young trees would create thousands of jobs and add to our nation’s timber supply. It is a way to maintain a healthy growing forest that stores carbon and emits oxygen.

The bottom line is clearing dead trees and debris from the forest floor reduces some of the risk of massive wildfires that pump millions of tons of CO2 into our air.

Global warming seems to be accelerating the number of wildfires across the planet. Those fires are public health threats. Robbing them of their fuel makes sense. So does making lumber more plentiful and affordable.