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Environmentalists will fight logging in Bonners Ferry watershed 1/1/2007 BONNERS FERRY (AP) Environmental groups in northern Idaho say they will fight a U.S. Forest Service plan to log 2,200 acres in Bonners Ferry’s municipal watershed. About 3,500 acres of the watershed in Myrtle Creek Valley burned in 2003, and now community leaders and the Forest Service want to thin the forest to prevent another fire. The plan won’t be officially released for another month. But environmental groups say slash piles left by a logging project helped fuel the fire three years ago, and that the new logging project is much more than just thinning. “Clearly it has nothing to do with forest health,” Mike Petersen, director of The Lands Council, told The Spokesman-Review newspaper. “It’s a huge logging project. The Idaho Panhandle (National Forests) continues to call everything ‘forest health projects.”’ Bonners Ferry Mayor Darrell Kerby backs the project, and said the 2003 fire knocked out the town’s water system when mud and ash filled Myrtle Creek. “For all his belief he is the savior of the Earth, I can’t rely on him to provide resource information on my watershed,” Kerby said of Petersen. “I have to live with the results. I have a community that needs to drink that water year in and year out.” “It continues to be shocking to me that they plan to do regeneration cuts in a municipal water supply,” Petersen said. “Ultimately, a lot of towns don’t log their municipal water supply.” Kerby and Boundary County Commissioner Dan Dinning said lawsuits preventing logging have hurt the area’s economy, and Dinning blamed them for the loss of 60 positions that are being permanently cut from a sawmill in Moyie Springs. “It just rubs me the wrong way,” Dinning said. “Our local citizenry is having to bear the burden of outside people shutting down our woods.” On Dec. 18, U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge in Boise dismissed a lawsuit to stop work on the 7,200-acre Mission Brush project north of Bonners Ferry. The Lands Council and Wildwest Institute based in Missoula, Mont., argued that the logging would have harmed the forest that supports grizzly bears and other animals. The Forest Service said the logging was needed for fire suppression, and Lodge agreed. “Following one of the worst fire seasons in history, the need for fire suppression is an important public interest and is one of the goals of this project,” Lodge wrote. |
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