Fighting Fire with Ire

How one group is keeping communities safe from wildfire

Hayfork, Calif., is a one-highway town. A small collection of storefronts and a post office hug Highway 3, a two-lane strip that curls through the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. A decade ago, this was a major route for logging trucks. These days, a few trucks still rumble through, but the road is mostly quiet, mirroring the decline this Northern California outpost has gone through since its economy began sagging in the early 1990s.

Hayfork's main drag.

Photo: Jeff Nachtigal.

For decades, logging and the steady drone of the sawmill had provided jobs and comfort. When the end came, Hayfork -- like hundreds of forest communities scattered throughout the West -- didn't need a few extra jobs, it needed a whole new approach to building businesses and employing the skills of its foresters and loggers. That's where the Watershed Research and Training Center came in.

Founded in 1993 and located in Hayfork, the center helps nearby forest communities make the transition from timber to sustainable alternatives. About six people work and volunteer at the center, promoting collaborative stewardship projects with the U.S. Forest Service, fostering small enterprises like furniture-making, and developing wildfire prevention and preparedness plans, among other projects.

Recently, the center helped a community an hour west of Hayfork get a wildfire planning project off the ground. The Post Mountain subdivision, a group of about 1,000 houses, sits amid a highly flammable pine forest bordered by Forest Service property. The rural, low-income community needed to make sure that everyone could escape in case of fire. People still remember the 1987 wildfires, says WRTC director Lynn Jungwirth, "when the whole world burned up here."

With the center's support, representatives of the Post Mountain community and the Forest Service met regularly to hammer out a realistic approach to fuel-reduction work and maintaining an ecologically sound forest. During the planning process, the Forest Service produced maps and data detailing the value of trees that might be thinned and riparian areas that needed special care. In the end, the team created a plan for safe escape routes and for a forest where fire can naturally move through without destroying everything in its path.

It's the kind of collaborative approach that should be re-created across the West, but Jungwirth doesn't think the model can be easily packaged for other communities. For one thing, the current budget crunch has dried up federal support for local projects. For another, the "landscape, social fabric, and the Forest Service are so idiosyncratic that models don't work very well," she says.

Jungwirth thinks small nonprofits are vital to making the process work locally, and others agree. "Community forest groups have a really strong role to play in helping low-income communities organize and engage in government programs, and get work contracts," said Cecilia Danks, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont who studied Hayfork's community-based approaches to managing wildfire.

As local groups organize to do just that, many recognize WRTC as a leader in innovation and action; Jungwirth regularly gets calls asking for advice. As to the issues these towns face, she says that while fire is an annual threat, it's nothing compared to prolonged economic depression. "These are forest people, and they want to live and work in the forest," Jungwirth says. "Right now, with such gridlock over national-forest management, those towns are pretty much squeezed to death."

Click here to read more about the connection between wildfire and poverty.

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