The restoration debate: fire, floods and road failures

The news about flooding in the Pacific Northwest was, unfortunately, all too familiar for the people living there, though the intensity of the storm was particularly bad this time around.  And as officials went out to assess the damage, the news started pouring in about how many roads and bridges were washed away by the storms.

But the news about flooding in the Pacific Northwest was also all too familiar for the similarity it has to the annual news about wildfires in the west.  Each year residents brace themselves for fire season, and all of the chaos that comes with it.

Why is it, then, that when most politicians debate forest management and restoration at the national level, they focus almost exclusively on logging to reduce fuels buildups?  While thinning, in certain situations, may reduce fire damage, it is only one component of a comprehensive approach to restoration.  Poorly maintained (or even unmaintained) forest roads cause profound impacts to water quality.  These problems are both chronic and episodic.  In other words, dirt roads deliver small to medium amounts of sediment to streams all the time, but when a storm comes through with heavy rains and flooding, the roads can blow out, delivering thousands of cubic yards of sediment to streams in an instant.  Fortunately a growing number of people in the Pacific Northwest understand these problems, including local land managers and politicians.  But such road failures occur all over the country, not just in the Pacific Northwest.

Many argue that there is a direct correlation between the amount of fuels (trees) on the ground, and the intensity of a wildfire, though there is a lot of conflicting data about which types of fuels are normal and which aren’t.  There is also a direct correlation between the number, status and condition of roads on the ground and the level of damage caused when a severe flood event occurs.  With a maintenance backlog of more than $5 billion nationally, the Forest Service has too many poorly maintained roads, sitting, like ticking time bombs, just waiting for the next big storm.

It would be really nice to see the national restoration debate treat the surfeit of poorly maintained, ecologically damaging forest roads the same way it treats the questionable surfeit of trees on national forests.  If we can put so much energy into trying to reduce the severity of fire by thinning trees from the national forests, can’t we put at least a percentage of that same energy, and federal funding, into reducing the severity of floods by removing unneeded, ecologically destructive roads from the landscape?

Investing in that kind of work will not only reduce the impacts from severe flood events, but it will provide high-wage, high-skill jobs to the very same people who build roads – excavator and bulldozer operators.  In addition, it will save a lot of money, because it’s a lot less expensive to reclaim a road before it fails, than to clean up the mess it causes after it fails.

While we certainly can’t fix all the roads tomorrow, the sooner we start the process, the better our watersheds will handle future floods.  And in this era of climate change and uncertainty, we should be investing heavily in comprehensive approaches to restoration to improve the resilience and condition of our watersheds.