(Narrator)
Welcome to the Shasta-Trinity National Forest Podcast.

The cooler weather has, for the most part, put the worst of the 2008 wildfire season in Northern California behind us, although wildfires are ongoing natural threats in our corner of the world.

But after the flames are out, what comes next?

Hundreds of thousands of acres of wild lands have been blackened. In some areas the devastation was total, entire ecosystems reduced to ash and mineral soil. Erosion from winter rains threatens to cause even more damage, prolonging the time it will take for the land to recover.

Even as fire crews were still mopping up in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, a team of experts was already busy assessing the damage and literally beginning the groundwork in a process known as Burned Area Emergency Response, or BAER.

Brad Rust is a forest soil scientist and coordinates the BAER Team:

(Brad Rust)
“It’s a program that comes into play after large fires where we want to try to stabilize the watershed from major landslides and mudslides and debris flows.

It’s a multistage process where we have a large fire for instance on June 21st of this year we had basically category five thunderstorms that rolled on through and it produced a lot of major fires in our forest. Overall, at least within the counties of Shasta, Tehama and Trinity, we have about 370-thousand acres burned.”

(Narrator)
Just within the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, more than 200-thousand acres were involved.

Rust says this first assessment takes into account not only the damage caused by the fire itself, but also the impacts left by the techniques used to bring the blaze under control:

(Brad Rust)  
“We go into a program, it’s called the Fire Suppression Repair, where we repair all the damage that was done by suppression activities, water barring, mulching, ripping and things like this, and to cover up fire lines from the activities that we did to fight the fire.”

(Narrator)
Repairing physical damage to the landscape is just part of the picture, Forest Service Botanist Susan Erwin says as crews move from place to place fighting the fires, they may have inadvertently dropped off some unwelcome hitchhikers in the form of vegetation that doesn’t belong in a particular area:

(Susan Erwin)
“My role is to identify where, through the process of fire suppression, we might have brought in noxious weeds, and also to identify any treatments to prevent the spread of noxious weeds after the fire.”

(Narrator)
With no competition from the native plants that were destroyed by fire, these invasive species can quickly take over a local ecosystem unless preventative measures are taken early in the recovery effort:

(Susan Erwin)
“Any more, noxious weeds are just so widespread that they get imported in very easily any more and also, a lot are present on the site already, so the measures that I identify to take help to prevent them from spreading.”

(Narrator)
In addition to helping restore the natural features and plant life of the forest, the assessments include identifying Forest Service roads, especially those used by the public, which are at risk from being washed out, posing public safety hazards.

Road Manager Lori Jackson is responsible for Forest Service Roads in Trinity County:

(Lori Jackson)
“On my part, on the roads, a lot of the damage was done by the dozers or cats, and that opens up the road and makes it a lot more susceptible to water issues. The drainages could be smashed, things like that that stop the water from flowing and if that happens it creates a major problem with washouts.

(Narrator)
Because the time interval between the end of the fire season and the onset of winter rain and snow is so short, Jackson and the other members of the BAER team often find themselves working against the clock:

(Lori Jackson)
“When I go out to assess, I really don’t have a lot of time to do the assessment, so it’s a flyby. You just drive so fast, for instance on this fire we had about six hundred miles of road damage. So I assess the damage there, as my crew comes in behind me, or the road crew comes in behind me, they will fix other damage that they see as we go.”

(Narrator)
Rust says the next phase of the process involves taking steps to insure that the watershed is protected from further damage due to erosion.

(Brad Rust)
After fire suppression repair is done, then Burned Area Emergency Response comes in and works to try to stabilize the area that burned inside the fire so we don’t have major water quality issues, landslides, structure damage to houses and property and impacts upon fish, impacts upon roads that we try to address with this program, it’s a very rapid assessment that happens right after the fire is contained, not controlled.

(Narrator)
The team is made up of experts in a number of disciplines to ensure that the full restoration of the forest habitat, a process which will take decades, gets off to a good start:

(Brad Rust)
“So we’ll have engineers going out onto the roads, looking at the damage to the roads, we’ll have soil scientists looking at the damage to the soil, hydrologists looking at what can happen, and what kind of expected flows will be flowing from certain size storms that they can predict and then we’ll have wildlife biologists take a look at owl habitat or other kinds of habitat that was destroyed, and botanists looking at various sensitive plants that were destroyed.”

(Narrator)
Because fire doesn’t respect boundary lines on a map, Erwin explains that the restoration effort often includes participation by other land management agencies:

(Susan Erwin)
"On the fires that we had this year, we had all those different kinds of lands. So we had Bureau of Land Management was on the team, the Natural Resources Conservation Service was on the team, to work with the private landowners whose lands got burned. We had the Trinity River Resource Conservation District to help out and provide a lot of natural resource labor and restoration and revegetation assistance.”

(Narrator)
The assessment and initial fire recovery phase lasts from one to three years, and Jackson says some problems don’t show up until well into the process:

(Lori Jackson)
“We have a lot of stump burnouts below the road, and when they burn out, half the time you won’t notice that they’re gone until the following winter, and then they’ll just collapse, so it creates a great big safety hazard for the public.”

(Narrator)
Rust explains that the BAER assessment team uses these observations from the field to develop action plans to address immediate threats to the forest and the public and provide for long-term recovery of the ecosystem:

(Brad Rust)
“Basically we’re focusing on values at risk. Life and property and some of the resource damages that might happen out there. And then we come up with a plan, a rehabilitation plan, and then we submit that to regional or Washington level (for) approval and then that gets funded, and then we do implementation of this plan.”

(Narrator)
The work is taking place on about five percent of the total burned area that was hardest hit which represents the greatest benefit with minimal costs:

(Narrator)
It will be decades, if ever, before some of these severely burned areas in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest fully recover from this fire season. We were fortunate that despite the large areas wildfire burned in 2008, less than 25 percent of the acres burned experienced extremely hot burns that cause long-term soil and reforestation issues. BAER efforts and a little luck this winter will speed recovery of these forest lands to a healthy state. Thanks to the efforts of the BAER team and similar programs, the U-S Forest Service will continue its legacy of stewardship for generations to come…

(Brad Rust)
It’s very limited, what you can do because, you know, these fires are so large, but if you really are strategic, in locating the places that really have the most, severest damage, and triaging those areas, it really does make a big difference.

(Susan Erwin)
“A lot of people in this forest have worked here for a lot of their career, or a good part of it, and we want to do good things, on the land…”

(Lori Jackson)
“This is our home, and we live here, and we try to take care of the community that we live it, and we see this every day…and it’s part of our lives.

(Narrator)
For more information about the BAER program and the forest restoration process, please visit the Shasta-Trinity National Forest Website at w-w-w-dot-f-s-dot-fed-dot-u-s-forward-slash-r-five-forward-slash-shasta-trinity.

This podcast is produced for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest Office of Public Affairs and Communications by Belongie Entertainment Enterprises.

The U-S-Forest Service is an equal opportunity employer and provider.

Our theme music is “Daydreamer” composed by George Wood and used by permission.

In Redding, California, I’m Bob Belongie.

(MUSIC UP OUT)

[End of recorded material]

Burned Area Emergency Response - November 2008
US Forest Service
Shasta-Trinity National Forest