Freres Lumber is offering Santiam Canyon landowners who suffered great loss from last September’s Labor Day wildfires a way out of expensive state reforestation requirements.
“We suffered a great loss in the fires as did many other small woodland owners in the Santiam Canyon,” said Rob Freres, president.
He said the Lyons-based company lost thousands of acres in seedlings to the wildfires. Repair and reforestation can be very expensive, he added, and create hardships for smaller timber companies, recreational sites, and others who lost their trees.
“We would just like to help our neighbors if we can,” he said.
“We wondered whether some landowners would rather make some kind of return by selling their land and eliminating the reforestation expense.
“We thought maybe we could be part of a solution for some people, rather than them fretting over how they would pay for damages and the state qualification to reforest.”
Oregon first required reforestation as part of its Forest Practices Act, adopted in 1972. By law (ORS 527.745) and rule (OAR 629-610-0000 et seq.), landowners must restock forestland after harvesting timber if the number of remaining trees falls below specified levels.
Freres Lumber holds timber for 50 years before using it to make wood products, Freres said.
“We’re always trying to increase our land base to add to the security of our mills and to provide our own raw material,”
he said.
Of the plan to purchase land from Linn, Marion and Clackamas county owners, lands relatively close to their mills, Freres said this is the first notification the company has made.
“We’ve been so overwhelmed with salvage and replanting methods since the end of October,” he said. “We are now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Freres and other timberland holders worry about reburns, which, he said, are not uncommon.
“Look what’s happening this year,” he said. “We may even exceed last year’s [wildfire] record.”
Freres attributes the wildfires to 30 years of discontinuing most of the harvest on public lands. In 1994, the comprehensive Northwest Forest Plan was initiated to end the impasse over management of federal forest land in the Pacific Northwest within the range of the northern spotted owl.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, the plan is an ecosystem management plan that was also implemented in part to conserve and restore old-growth and late-successional forests that would contribute to the conservation and recovery of threatened species, including the marbled murrelet, Chinook salmon and steelhead. The goal also was to maintain a viable forest products industry in the Pacific Northwest.
“The plan was to harvest 20 percent of what used to be harvested,” Freres said. He added that agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, have only harvested a “small fraction of what was promised.”
The result of not clearing timber lands is “tons of ingrowth in the forests that equates to giant fuel load,” Freres said. “There needs to be a paradigm shift to control these fires, including much more harvesting to reduce the fuel load.”
The company’s six mills in Lyons and Mill City all survived the fire undamaged. Freres said the company is still seeking to hire workers to operate at full capacity.
“Just call our office for more information,” he advised.
If interested in arranging a site visit, call Freres Lumber at 503-859-2911.
