Chetco Bar fire salvage shrinks under new plan

By Mark Freeman
The Mail Tribune
April 16, 2018
Category: Forestry
Region: United States, US West

BROOKINGS — The Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest now is looking at salvage-logging fewer than 4,100 acres of last year’s 191,197-acre Chetco Bar fire, possibly producing as much as 70 million board-feet of timber from dead and dying trees. Forest officials Monday revealed their new draft environmental study that focuses on possible logging to about 2.5 percent of Forest Service lands burned in the fire, down from about 8 percent studied in January. Timber interests decried the move as losing a chance to salvage-log lands already tapped for future logging before insects kill more trees and cause more carbon from charred trees to be released into the air. Conservation groups see the Forest Service’s focus… as an “old-growth grab.”

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