After reaching an agreement with the Dunsmuir Elementary School Tuesday of last week, Roseburg Forest Products immediately began logging parts of the school’s property.
By Thursday morning, the first of the trees cut by the company were being skidded down the hillside and onto the school’s athletic field for loading.
As teachers broke from their ‘Fast Track’ reading program training session for lunch, the sound of Roseburg’s feller-buncher sawing down trees served as an unusual backdrop for the heavily forested school.
Dunsmuir Elementary School sits on 25 acres of land that have not been logged since 1925, leading to the same formula of too many small trees, too much forest floor fuel, and no effective way of dealing with it that has led to the fires that have burned 1,400,000 acres in California this summer. In describing the situation earlier this month, school superintendent Mike Michelon said,“If it burns up, the school will go, too.”
Roseburg, which owns a large tract of timber directly adjacent to the school’s property and had scheduled a number of clear cuts in the area this week, offered to thin the school’s trees in exchange for the marketable wood it could extract.
The company has promised to finish the work before the students return to school this week.
Complicating the situation is the fact that the project is only viable to Roseburg if it skids the trees down the steep mountainside to the school’s athletic field for loading because hauling the timber up the hill would use too much energy to be cost effective.
In the agreement reached between the logging company and school, Roseburg will give Dunsmuir Elementary a minimum of $5,000 to repair the damage done to the field by Roseburg’s heavy equipment, which according to the school’s estimates will be enough to defray any repair costs.
Roseburg forester Mike Duguay and school superintendent Mike Michelon led a brief tour of the work Thursday morning, up the hillside from the field, to where Roseburg’s saw-fronted feller-buncher was cutting and stacking tall trees with the ease of harvesting asparagus.
“This is not going to be a typical log in which all the slash is left behind,” Duguay explained. “Everything is going down to the field. You can already see the difference the work is making. This area was packed with small trees before, half of them were dead. Now you have a wide firebreak.”
To illustrate his point, Duguay paced off a 2,000 square foot area, approximately 1/21 of an acre, that had been logged by the company and cleared of debris. While 18 trees had been removed from the sample area, it was still thickly shaded and populated by large trees
Michelon pointed to the trees still standing and said, “This is all about fire reduction and safety for our school. If we wanted to do it for the timber, we wouldn’t be leaving all the tall trees... Clearly, the work is going to destroy our field. We know that... the field is swampy, it has low spots... Our field needed to be fixed anyway. Now we’re going to have some firebreaks on our property and it’s going to be safer for us and adjoining property owners, including homeowners.”
As he has since the inception of the project, Duguay again emphasized that Roseburg wants “100% transparency, no secrets” on the project. To that end, Southern Oregon Scaling – a third party – has been contracted to record the timber coming out of the school’s land.
“They scale and ticket every load, every log is accounted for. Each log is measured and its volume calculated,” Duguay explained. Then he shrugged and laughed. “[This project] is backwards. We’re leaving the nice timber and taking all the crap.”
Michelon pointed out that Duguay had been on site all day, every day of the project. “It’s unusual to have a forester always on site,” Duguay offered, and Michelon injected, “You’re protecting our interests.” Again Duguay laughed, “Yeah, it’s like babysitting... You know I started seeing damage, so I stopped the [feller-buncher] operator and showed him the problem... I got into the machine, I couldn’t see out. We got Windex from the janitor and spent 15 minutes cleaning the windows. That’s what’s unusual, to have that kind of supervision.”
Alongside the feller-buncher, Roseburg also planned to use a loader, a rubber-tired skidder, and a de-limber in the operation, among other equipment.
“This is essentially a mechanical logging site,” Duguay said. “Everything is state of the art... Back in the old days it was much more destructive.” Michelon added, “It’s unbelievable the difference.. there is very little soil disturbance.”
Aside from talking about the school project, Duguay also mentioned that all of Dunsmuir and its surrounding areas have been identified by the state as being at high risk for fire.
“We’ve been working with the Dunsmuir City Council, we held meetings in April,” the forester said.
“In reaching out to the community, people need to understand that this costs money,” Duguay continued at the end of the tour. “We’re trying to balance healthy forests with the costs of removing these dangerous fuels... Writing a Timber Harvest Plan is extremely expensive. A plan for 180 acres can cost between $20,000 and $40,000.”
The plans have to satisfy the requirements of at least five agencies including Fish & Game, CDF, and Mines & Geology, and call for the input of botanists, geologists, and other environmental assessors, as well as spotted owl surveys.
By Monday morning, the school’s athletic field was stacked with logs as the company’s loader set them on trucks for transportation to Weed. A trucker on site said that the merchantable timber was set to exceed initial estimates by 15% to 20%, a portion of the profits of which will go to the school, above the money it will receive from Roseburg to repair the field.