A worrisome sight surrounds Colorado mountain towns: forests turning rust-color from mountain beetles. As the insects gnaw on once-green woodlands, they create ripe wildfire conditions. At-risk communities want elected leaders to do something, but experts say there are just two ways to stop a beetle outbreak. One is severely cold weather, something Colorado hasn’t had in years. The other? Fire. The tricky part is how to use the flames in a controlled way so they don’t erupt as raging wild blazes.
The intense drought that hit the state a few years ago left trees vulnerable to insects – today there so many bugs they’re killing even healthy pines. The Colorado State Forest Service says beetles infest a record 425,000 acres statewide, an area too big to safely spray with insecticides. While bug outbreaks are natural, the big problem today is that so many people have built homes in fire-prone forests.
The U.S. Forest Service and other federal, state and local agencies have started a cooperative response in Eagle, Summit, Grand, Routt and Jackson counties, the hardest-hit part of the state. This summer, the Forest Service also will ramp up one notable project, cutting 3,000 acres of diseased trees between Interstate 70 and Minturn. The agency has wanted to do the work since 2001 but until now lacked funding. While controversial, the project is a needed first step to reduce a serious hazard.
Colorado congressmen Mark Udall of Eldorado Springs and John Salazar of Manassa have introduced a bill they say will help the Forest Service respond to the outbreak. H.R. 4875 would eliminate requirements that the Forest Service do environmental studies before cutting timber in beetle-damaged forests in the Rockies. Udall says sidestepping the studies will free up funds to do actual work.
Yet doing away with a few studies won’t fix the problem. The Forest Service already has several beetle and fire mitigation projects ready to go, having finished the environmental studies earlier. The plans sit idle, though, because Congress won’t fund the work. Foregoing future environmental studies, which would cost a few thousand dollars, can’t free up enough money to pay for real insect and fire mitigation, which costs millions.
For example, the Forest Service needs $30 million a year for the next decade to expand its existing five-county beetle repsonse effort to another 10 at-risk Colorado counties. But this year, for all of Colorado, the Forest Service got just $4.2 million. Pine beetles are particularly voracious in the White River National Forest, the country’s most visited forest and home to 10 of Colorado’s 23 ski areas. Yet the White River got a paltry $500,000 this year to reduce potential wildfire fuels.
Cutting diseased trees isn’t enough. Research has found that fires are worse in areas that were cut but not control-burned than where diseased trees were left standing. The Forest Service must follow up beetle-kill timbering with prescribed burns. And that work is very, very expensive.
