When I was reporting for Mendocino's weekly community newspaper, The Beacon, part of my beat were rural fire departments south of Fort Bragg, California. One of those tiny departments was the Albion-Little River Volunteer Fire Department, an agency that covers an incredible geographic area that includes a lot of commercial timber land, most of it owned by the Mendocino Redwood Company.
In 2014, ALRVFD Chief Ted Williams became increasingly concerned about dead trees on MRC property left behind by the timber management practice known as "hack-and-squirt." Hack-and-squirt involves making a cut in an undesirable tree, such as tan oak, and then applying an herbicide to the cut. There are different herbicides used in the timber management industry, but one commonly used is imazapyr. The trees are then left to die and fall on their own.
2014 was also a year with record temperatures and low rainfall. In Mendocino, residents within the Mendocino City Community Services District were mandated to install water meters on their wells to help the district manage the limited groundwater. In the northern portion of Mendocino County later that year, over 12,500 acres burned near Laytonville when a wildfire was ignited by lightning.
In the early months of 2015, Williams had no reason to believe things would be different and there were hundreds of acres of dead timber bordering his fire district. He took his concerns to the Albion-Little River Fire Protection District board of directors, looking for a solution and then broadened his approach to include community members and fire professionals.
When I interviewed Mike Jani in March 2015 for a Beacon article, the issue of dead standing trees was quickly becoming a topic of concern for several coastal communities. Jani, the president and chief forester at MRC, attempted to minimize the dangers from standing dead timber.
“Our experience with the way fire reacts is it stays on the ground and doesn’t get into the canopy,” he said. “Albion-Little River Fire Protection District may have been ill-informed of the fire risk.”
Over a year later, MRC has spent $197,000 fighting against the county-wide measure, Measure V, that would make dead standing timber a public nuisance. In late March of this year, at a public forum moderated by the League of Women Voters, the timber company, with other opponents of the June measure, argued against Measure V on the basis of cost as well as creating a beneficial environmental situation; opponents continued to argue against the danger of dead timber as potential fuel in wildfires.
And while MRC has donated plenty of time and money to Mendocino County communities over the years, in this issue the company is wrong. The risks involved with hundreds of acres of dead timber seem self-evident. It is essentially miles of firewood waiting to be lit. Those potentially burning trees put first responders at risk due to falling snags, to say nothing of the question of whether those dead trees create unusually toxic smoke when they burn because of residual herbicide.
Measure V is needed to ensure that the negligence of property owners such as MRC does not endanger communities or firefighters. While I can understand the argument of trying to limit expenses, there is a point when common sense needs to rule over commercial expediency.
No landowner, whether it is an individual or a corporation, has the right to put their neighbor at risk because of one or more dead trees. MRC needs to accept it's responsibility to the greater community good, not just its bottom line.
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