Concern about an early and potentially explosive wildfire season in Colorado has fanned the flames of debate over how far into the national forest crews should build temporary roads to clear trees and reduce the fuel load around towns.

The release last week of another draft of the controversial Colorado Roadless Rule further fueled the controversy. The rule would allow temporary road building a half mile into the national forest surrounding communities and tree thinning without roads another mile into the forest.

Colorado conservation groups have opposed the Forest Service allowing such wide latitude for fuel reduction projects, arguing a much smaller defensible space around communities is adequate in the event of forest fires and that large-scale thinning doesn’t do much to mitigate fire risk.

Some scientists say road building actually degrades forest health, causing erosion and doing little to prevent wildfire in the wake of the state’s ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic. Some studies back up that school of thought.

But regional forester Rick Cables, speaking in defense of the Colorado Roadless Rule (pdf) last week, said the half-mile fuel-treatment exemption for road building was the result of years of discussion.

“We had some meetings over the past few years with scientists, firefighters, incident commanders, specialists of all kinds to struggle with what would be appropriate, that would afford the degree of protection we think is necessary but also protect roadless values,” Cables said. He was asked if the half-mile exemption would be enough given Colorado’s steep and daunting terrain and the ferocity of recent fires.

“We believe that there’s the ability to do the treatment necessary to change the fuel composition, which would change the fire behavior and give us the opportunity to do the fire suppression necessary with the provisions in this rule,” Cables said.

A coalition of Colorado environmental groups late last week opposed the Colorado Roadless Rule, which the Obama administration expects to implement by early next year, because it would trump the 2001 Clinton Roadless Rule, which they claim offers more protections for the state’s 4.2 million acres of roadless federal lands than the draft Colorado rule.

“We recognize that the Obama administration’s proposed rule has improved somewhat from earlier versions, but unfortunately it still falls short of its commitment to protect Colorado’s roadless forests with standards equal to or greater than [Clinton’s] 2001 National Roadless Rule,” the groups stated in a release.

Mike King, director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, points out that Colorado in 2001 was not in the midst of a raging pine beetle epidemic that has claimed more than 4 million acres of lodgepole pines in Colorado and Wyoming. Saying “a lot’s changed in the ensuing decade” since the Clinton rule, King points out that one in five Coloradans now lives in the wildland urban interface (WUI) where communities meet national forest land.

Politicians and public figures from Boulder Mayor Susan Osborne to former vice president and U.S. Sen. Al Gore have blamed global climate change for prolonged drought and warming that’s exacerbated the pine beetle epidemic. Boulder last summer saw the costliest wildfire in state history in terms of property damage when 169 homes were destroyed in the Fourmile Canyon Fire.

A bill that would lock in lower residential property rates for people who lose their homes in wildfires (instead of higher rates applied to vacant property) passed out of the state Senate last week and appears headed for Gov. John Hickenlooper’s desk.

Already this spring several major wildfires, fueled by high winds and an unusually dry winter, have erupted on Colorado’s Front Range, raising anxiety levels with the hottest, driest days of summer still months away.

Hickenlooper last week got the annual pre-season fire briefing from the Colorado State Forest Service and other state and federal firefighting agencies and the prediction was for a long wildfire season, particularly in the southern part of the state.

“Colorado’s wildfire season has already begun and with extreme dry and warm conditions conducive to wildfire,” Hickenlooper said in a release. “We need to be prepared for an extended firefighting season.”

So Ritter will also sign a bill sponsored by another mountain lawmaker that’s meant to provide tax incentives to companies removing and disposing of lodgepole pine trees killed in a massive and ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic.

State Rep. Christine Scanlan, D-Dillon, has become the bug queen, battling hard for state and federal dollars to mitigate the impact of the beetle epidemic, which has hit particularly hard in her Summit County home. Ritter’s choice of locales is no coincidence.

Tonight from 6:00 to 7:30, the U.S. Forest Service and town of Vail officials will hold an open house to tout a proposed biomass power plant that would use extremely high heat to gasify chipped-up beetle kill wood and produce 26 to 28 megawatts of heat and 6 to 8 megawatts of electricity.

The proposal made the final cut of three projects eligible for a U.S. Department of Energy grant and has wide-ranging support from the local ski company, Vail Resorts, to the local electrical cooperative, Holy Cross Energy, to state and federal lawmakers. But there are still a lot of tough questions swirling in the community, such as the noise, traffic and air-quality impacts.

Biomass power plants in the Northwest have been met with community and environmental resistance to using trees and wood products to produce power. In Vail, though, many view the project as a logical way to consume trees that will either fall and burn in a wildfire, biodegrade or have to be removed and disposed of in landfills at great expense.

Also being signed Wednesday is state Sen. Gail Schwartz’s “Roadkill Bill,” which she hopes will cut down on the number of dead deer, elk, bears and other critters killed along mountain roadways in her sprawling and scenic Senate District 5.

Ritter couldn’t have chosen a better spot. Wildlife officials call I-70 the “Berlin Wall” for animals looking to move from northern Colorado to the southern part of the state or vice versa. Several reintroduced Canada lynx have been struck and killed along I-70 near Vail Pass.

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Beetle kill pines against power lines (U.S. Rep. John Salazar)

The largest power outage in North American history left more than 50 million people in the Midwest and Northeastern United States, as well as parts of Canada, without electricity for up to two days beginning on Aug. 14, 2003. It’s estimated the blackout cost up to $6 billion and at least 11 lives.

And it all started with untrimmed trees coming into contact with a power line in rural Ohio.

Conditions are more than ripe for a repeat in Colorado, where officials say hundreds of miles of major transmission and distribution lines crisscross devastated national forest land on their way to supplying the power needs of Front Range communities.

“Most of the major transmission lines for the Front Range cross the Continental Divide,” said Cal Wettstein, commander of the U.S. Forest Service’s Bark Beetle Incident Management Team. “There are three or four big, main lines and the majority of them go through some kind of beetle kill, so that’s the big concern.”

A fire the size of the 2002 Hayman blaze — the largest in Colorado history at about 138,000 acres — could take out a number of key transmission or distribution lines. Or a beetle-killed tree could easily topple onto a line, causing it to either arc and set fire to the surrounding forest or set off a domino effect that would overload line after line, which is what happened with the Northeast Blackout.

“There are a number of concerns, but the first one is the trees contacting the lines and actually knocking out the grid. Then there’s the fire aspect,” Wettstein said. “And fire going both ways — starting from a power line and then the effects on the power lines of a wildfire that starts somewhere else.”

Heading off disaster

The Forest Service just finished taking public comment on its Emergency Power Line Clearing Project, which would allow up to 15 different utilities and power companies to clear trees from swaths of national forest land surrounding 625 miles of power lines (.pdf) on the White River, Roosevelt and Medicine Bow-Routt national forests.

Wettstein said the Forest Service is allowed to expedite the decision-making process under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, and that utilities are compelled to pay for and undertake clearing of hazard trees under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That legislation was in direct response to the Northeast Blackout.

The Forest Service hopes to wrap up the National Environmental Policy Act process on the project by January so utilities can start clearing next summer.

But there are some critics of the proposal. Wettstein said the two biggest concerns coming out of the public scoping process were the width of the treatment areas (up to 400 feet for major lines) and the impacts on roadless areas (75 of the 625 miles are in designated roadless areas).

If it’s not economically viable to remove downed timber, power companies can simply masticate (cut up into small amounts) trees and spread them across the forest floor so they’re no longer a threat to the lines and present less of a fire hazard.

Such an approach wastes a valuable forest product, some experts say, and fails to recognize the potentially harmful carbon-dioxide emissions from rotting trees, as well as the CO2 potential form forest fires.

A green approach

Phil Kastelic, CEO of Colorado Forest and Energy, a company that distributes portable bio-energy machines that produce virtually carbon neutral power and heat by gasifying chipped wood, says Littleton-based Community Power Corporation’s BioMax systems should be part of the plan.

“Our BioMax technology could be installed in local communities close to power line clearing efforts or installed along the transmission and distribution lines plugging in parallel directly into the grid,” Kastelic wrote in a comment letter to the Forest Service. “This transforms a dangerous and expensive problem into a leading renewable story, highlighting Colorado technology.”

Kastelic suggests certain incentives be included in the plan to discourage utilities from leaving too much slash and too many fallen trees along the miles and miles of power lines. Renewable energy credits could be offered for the power that’s produced, and utilities could set up community drop zones so wood could be collected, chipped and consumed in bio-power generators.

Large-scale, multi-megawatt biomass power plants are common in Europe where forest products are cultivated to provide a consistent fuel load, and similar facilities are operating in the United States or have been proposed in Colorado. But portable 50- and 100-kilowatt systems about the size of tractor trailers have yet to catch on commercially in Colorado despite the beetle-kill epidemic.

Recognizing a renewable energy

Democratic State Rep. Christine Scanlan of Dillon, whose legislative district includes beetle devastated Summit and Eagle counties, said she’s talked to biomass companies, pellet producers for wood stoves and other forest product companies about getting a seat at the table. She said U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s proposed National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act of 2009 would recognize beetle-killed forest products as a renewable energy source that fits within the parameters of the Clean Air Act.

“I’ve talked to those folks [biomass proponents] a little bit, and I do think they need to be part of the equation, and if Udall gets through what he’s proposing, then that opens the door. That could potentially incentivize new business opportunities, so that’s why we need all of those voices to help us come up with a plan. Frankly, we need the forest products folks there, because this problem’s too big for even the feds to handle in a really holistic way.”

Scanlan said she’s spoken about the problem with former Colorado Department of Natural Resources director Harris Sherman, who last month was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, which oversees the Forest Service. She plans to meet with him again in Washington in the coming weeks to push for a more comprehensive approach.

“The power lines are a huge issue, of course, with the grid, but there is another way to look at this,” Scanlan said. “You can just clear that right of way 150 feet or you can apply fire science to it so that in some places it can be narrower and in some places it can be wider.

“I’m glad they’re doing something, but doing a lawnmower strip maybe isn’t the smartest thing we could do,” she added. “The right-of-way clearing idea was based on flat-land transmission lines, so they don’t really take into account dealing with the elevations and grades that we have in the mountains, so I think it calls for a different strategy.”

But Wettstein said the proposal goes for maximum clearance (200 feet on either side of major transmission lines) in case that’s what’s needed in serious hazard areas. He doesn’t really expect to see that much area cleared by the power companies.

“They will vary that width to what their local needs are, because the bottom line is it’s going to be very expensive to do and they’re not going to clear any more than they absolutely have to to get those lines protected,” Wettstein said.

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Areas of Routt National Forest are included in Colorado's roadless areas. (Creative Commons photo by andso via Flickr)

While conservation groups called Wednesday’s federal appeals court decision reinstating the Clinton-era roadless rule a major victory, the state of Colorado contends its own revised rule is still a far more practical way of managing the state’s 4.2 million roadless acres.

Mike King, deputy director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, said Wednesday that the 2001 Clinton rule, which provided sweeping protections against road building on nearly 60 million acres of largely undeveloped public lands nationwide, did not take into consideration wildfire mitigation or other critical economic drivers.

“In Colorado in 2001, we didn’t have a bark-beetle epidemic, and now we find ourselves eight years later with at least 2 million, and maybe more like 2.5 million, acres of dead trees,” King said. “Many of these acres are adjacent to communities, and the risk of catastrophic wildfire has increased exponentially as a result.”

The Bush administration quickly tossed out the Clinton rule in 2001 and four year later allowed states to petition for their own roadless rules. Only Idaho and Colorado went that route, with Idaho adopting its own set of rules late last year.

Colorado’s draft rules, released in 2008, were formed by a task force with extensive public input over a period of two years, but it has been slowed by critics charging that it allows far too many road-building exceptions for energy extraction, water and power infrastructure, logging and ski-area expansion. It was also stalled in the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations.

On Monday, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration issued a revised version of its 2008 draft, drawing jeers from environmentalists. But Wednesday, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling upholding a 2006 U.S. District Court decision that reinstated Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule and threw out the Bush administration’s State Petitions Rule.

“Today is a victory for one of the most important land protection measures of the decade,” Jane Danowitz, director of the Pew Environment Group’s U.S. public lands program, said in a statement. “It is now up to President Obama to fulfill his pledge to permanently protect our unspoiled forests by resurrecting the [2001 Clinton] Roadless Rule.”

Colorado had been operating under the notion that the 2001 rule was permanently enjoined in the state and that the U.S. Forest Service could not use it to manage public lands in Colorado.

Rob Vandermark of the Pew Environment Group disagreed with that reading of earlier court decisions, instead arguing that injunctions by lower courts were only in effect pending appeals.

“Today’s decision by the higher court … affirmed [District] Judge Laporte’s ruling that the Bush administration unlawfully repealed the 2001 roadless rule and reinstated the 2001 rule nationwide,” Vandermark said. “Today’s ruling means that the U.S. Forest Service is now bound by the provisions of the 2001 rule on lands it manages in all states — except Idaho and within Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.”

According to a spokeswoman, Pew wants Obama to affirm that the 2001 rule applies in Colorado and suspend the state rulemaking process in favor of a permanent national rule. King said that would be a mistake for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with states having more knowledge of special circumstances such as wildfire mitigation.

In the 2008 draft Colorado rule, for instance, King said conservationists were concerned that language on logging road exceptions was too broad and could allow local officials to declare an entire county high risk under the Healthy Forest Restoration Act and set up a Community Wildfire Protection Plan in order to land a timber mill in the county.

So in its revised version, the state shored up that language to allow fairly unfettered thinning within a half mile of towns and then public review as part of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan process — as allowed under state Senate Bill 1, which went into effect Wednesday — for public lands between a half mile and 1.5 miles of town.

“I’ve had candid conversations with many environmentalists who say, ‘We know that when the Obama administration takes up this issue at the national level there will have to be some accommodation for fuel treatment because of [the fire] issue in Colorado and other western states,’” King said. “So we think the question of does there need to be some flexibility for fuel treatment is a no-brainer and it’s a foregone conclusion.”

King said two other exceptions for temporary road building include 29,000 acres on the North Fork of the Gunnison River for coal mining and ski-area expansion on roadless areas within existing resort permits — about 8,000 acres spread over 11 existing ski areas.

“Those are two examples of narrowly tailored exceptions that we can do on a state analysis that the national rule would never give you the ability to do,” King said, adding both industries are critical to the economy of the entire state.

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