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The Nugget Newspaper
Sisters, Oregon
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The contents of the on-line edition of The Nugget represent a selection among the stories that appear in the weekly print edition.

Crews work to rehabilitate fire site
By Jim Cornelius

A dozer did some repair work on a safety zone scraped out of the brush on Cache Mountain.

Fighting fire can scar the landscape every bit as much as the blaze itself.

Bulldozers plow rings of fire breaks through the woods, scraping up topsoil and leaving a cross-hatch of dusty wounds on the forest floor. They push over trees, roll away huge boulders and rip out brush.

Safety zones are scraped out of the brush for 50 square yards -- utterly bare places where firefighters can hunker down and let a firestorm pass over and around them.

It is necessary to damage the forest in this way to save it.

Yet firefighters do not simply walk away and leave the torn up scene when a fire is over.

Even as they work to mop up the blaze itself, firefighters begin rehabilitating the ground.

Dozers and excavators pull brush back over the swaths of the safety zones and equipment parking areas, in an effort to hold down the soil that blows away at the slightest breeze.

The outside containment lines are left alone as long as there is a need to keep the smoldering fire in check. But inside the fire perimeter, crews pull berms back in over the fire lines.

"The hope is that when you pull those berms in, the seed that didn't burn will grow the next year," said Kris Hennings, who worked on the Cache Mountain fire rehabilitation plan for the Sisters Ranger District.

Water bars made of logs and rocks are put into place to prevent erosion. Especially on slopes, fire lines can become runoff streams when the rain falls, creating streams that carry away topsoil and leave still more ruinous scars.

Once berms are pulled back and water bars are set, the key is to keep motorized traffic off the lines so that they don't become de facto roads. Rehab crews pile up logs and brush in spots to block lines of travel.

If they are successful in their work, the fire lines fade into the forest in about five years or so, Hennings said.

Attentive hikers or horseback riders will notice that there are odd straight lines in the forest where no trees grow, but the lines will be covered with grasses and shrubs.

"They do come back pretty good," Hennings said.

The Sisters Ranger District has formed a BAER team (Burned Area Emergency Rehab) to determine what needs to be done to mitigate damage from the blaze itself.

Fortunately, according to Hennings, the Cache Mountain fire is a "low-risk" fire -- one that does not pose much of a threat to critical habitat or streambeds, to wildlife and fish.

However, the BAER team will still take a close look at the effects of the fire on plants, animals, fish and hydrology.

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