As ashes cool, salvage work begins

By Patrick Reilly
Daily Inter Lake
November 9, 2017
Category: Forestry
Region: United States, US West

Fires have given way to snow in Northwest Montana, but local foresters are still focused on the region’s burned acres. Fire-singed trees, called “snags” when dead, aren’t a total loss for the timber industry, said Chuck Roady, general manager at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. “You can use the lumber for the same uses,” he told the Daily Inter Lake. “You could easily lose 20 to 25 percent of the [tree’s] value, because you’ve got to saw deeper into the log, and you can’t sell all the chips and sawdust.” And loggers have only about a year to salvage those snags. …The first step toward cutting that timber is completing a Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) assessment, in which foresters scout out the landscape and identify measures needed to prevent runoff and landslides, and protect infrastructure.

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