Forest Fuels Treatment
Forests that are overstocked with trees are unhealthy and
are at risk from catastrophic, stand-replacing wildfire. There are numerous
benefits to forest, wildlife and watershed resources from
landscape level forest fuel management projects. W. M. Beaty & Associates, Inc. (WBA) has planned and implemented
pre-commercial and biomass thinning fuel reduction projects
on tens of thousands of acres. A properly planned
and implemented thinning project reduces fire danger, improves
forest health, and increases individual tree growth. One of the
goals of fuels reduction treatments is to alter the potential wildfire
behavior such that if a fire should occur, the intensity is
greatly reduced minimizing "crown fires" and allowing
firefighters to directly attack the fire. To achieve this
goal, smaller trees (known as "ladder fuels") are removed to
prevent fire from reaching the crowns of bigger trees. To
make these projects economically viable, small trees are processed into wood-fuel chips and burned to generate
electricity while some of the larger trees can be removed as
sawlogs. To date, at least three WBA thinning projects
have helped to prevent the destruction of thousands of acres of
our client's forestlands as well as adjacent forests and
communities. In each of these instances, uncontrollable crown
fires with greater than 100 foot flame lengths have blown into
previously thinned areas where they became ground fires that fire crews were able to
safely contain.
Other types of fuel management projects we plan and implement include:
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Construction of “shaded fuel breaks” along key ridges, roads and/or community interfaces.
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Pre-commercial hand thinning operations when trees are small enough to thin by hand and/or in areas unfeasible for mechanical thinning operations.
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Brush clearing, tree planting and follow-up vegetation management that promotes less fire prone vegetation.
- Controlling brush in plantations to allow seedlings to more quickly grow into larger, more fire resistant trees which then minimizes crown scorch and mortality should a wildfire occur.