Region Archives: United States

Steve Frisch

The community of Truckee has been discussing the application to Nevada County for a use permit for the Alpenglow small diameter timber mill and wood products facility. Sierra Business Council (SBC) supports the Alpenglow Timber facility, and encourages members of the community to weigh in with their support. The selected site was previously zoned for this activity. The project will create local jobs and create employee housing. It is being proposed by a long- term resident with a 30-year history of sustainable forestry practices. SBC has worked on climate resilience, forest management and wildfire mitigation issues for 30 years with a focus on advancing the ecological restoration of our forests. To achieve restoration we must increase the pace and scale of forest treatment. To reach our restoration goals we need facilities to treat wood waste and find economically beneficial uses in order to control and reduce the cost of treatment.

James Bailey Maxwell

The pilot of an air tanker that died Thursday night while working near the Falls Fire in eastern Oregon was identified Sunday as 74-year-old man contracted by the Bureau of Land Management out of Burns. James Bailey Maxwell had 54 years flying experience and had logged about 24,000 hours of flight time, the BLM said. Maxwell is survived by family members in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, the BLM said. …The single engine Air Tractor 802A that Maxwell was flying disappeared over the Malheur National Forest while assisting on a lightning start in the vicinity of the Falls Fire. The BLM said a single engine airtanker, or SEAT, can deliver up to 800 gallons of fire retardant or water to wildland firefighters on the ground. …The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash.

Related coverage in PBS News: Firefighting pilot killed in tanker plane crash in Oregon

Decades of snuffing out fires at the first sign of smoke combined with climate change have laid the groundwork for a massive wildfire in northern California and scores of smaller ones across the western U.S. and Canada, experts say. These fires are moving faster and are harder to fight than those in the past. The only way to stop future wildfires from becoming so ferocious is to use smaller controlled fires, as indigenous people did for centuries, experts say. …Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, the fires that are burning today are sometimes so severe and hot that they transform forests into a different type of ecosystem. Part of the issue is that climate change means that there are hotter conditions as plant life returns. …But he said there is no option to address the wildfire risk that doesn’t involve fire.

Nick Smith

Writing recently on X, Frontier Institute President and CEO Kendall Cotton observed that Montana’s Horse Gulch Fire is burning in a portion of Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest that was slated for landscape-scale thinning and controlled burns, that is, before anti-forestry litigation dramatically scaled back the planned effort, known as the “Middleman Project.” …the Middleman Project planned active forest management on 53,131 acres to mitigate wildfire risks …Two years after the project was approved, two anti-forestry groups sued to stop the project, claiming it violated federal law… The litigants focused on the adequacy and detail of the 584-page Environmental Assessment. According to the Frontier Institute’s research, in April 2024 the Forest Service agreed to a settlement to reduce the scale of the Middleman Project, forgoing almost all of the planned timber harvest and temporary road construction. They even agreed to pay $39,000 of taxpayer dollars to the anti-forestry groups to cover attorney fees!

COLVILLE, Wash.—Kurtis Vaagen of Vaagen Bros Lumber leads a decade-long project to restore 50,000 acres of the Colville National Forest, aiming to create fire-resilient forests for future generations while emphasizing community and environmental stewardship. …Over the last three decades, state and federal policy changes have restricted timber harvests on both state and federal forestlands, compelling the forest products industry to adopt more efficient and sustainable timber harvesting practices. One lumber company based in Colville, Vaagen Bros Lumber, bid on a contract to restore the Colville National Forest over a decade ago. Emphasizing sustainability and the creation of future forests, Kurtis Vaagen, Vice President of Vaagen Bros Lumber, stated that their goal is to restore the forest to be fire-resilient for future generations.

OREGON — One of the biggest fires burning in the United States is the Durkee Fire in eastern Oregon. As of Wednesday morning, the fire was reported at 244,858 acres and continues to grow as intense weather is expected to hit the area. The Oregon Department of Transportation closed Interstate 84 from Pendleton to Ontario on Wednesday. …The area is under a red flag warning, hurricane force winds and a flash flood warning, according to the Durkee Fire updates. The National Weather Service also expects extreme thunderstorms and lightning in the area. Due to the immense heat the Durkee Fire is creating and the existing winds, it is creating its own storms and changing the overall wind patterns. “We call those pyrocumulus and you end up with a thunderstorm over the fire because there’s so much heat and just enough moisture above the fire to get a storm that forms,” Mike Cantin, a meteorologist said.

LAKE TAHOE, Calif./Nev. – Tahoe Fire & Fuels Team forest thinning projects are underway in the Lake Tahoe Basin. These projects are expected to continue for the next several weeks with some projects continuing through the fall, conditions and weather permitting. For project details view the Forest Thinning Projects Map at Tahoe Living With Fire which highlights current and upcoming projects. After decades of fire suppression, Tahoe Basin’s forests are overstocked and highly vulnerable to insects, disease, and catastrophic wildfire. Forest thinning projects are a vital forest management tool used by land managers to help protect communities by removing excess vegetation (fuels) on public lands that can feed unwanted wildfires. These projects complement defensible space and home hardening efforts on private property in neighborhoods and communities. Forest thinning also contributes to improved forest health, wildlife habitat, and watershed and forest resilience in the face of climate change.