TRAGEDY ON HUBBARD CREEK:
Fixing Accountability for Oregon's Deadly Landslides
© 1997 BY KATHIE
DURBIN and
CASCADIA TIMES
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION
Flower shrines planted in a river of mud mark the
places where the bodies
of Susan Moon, Sharon Marvin and Ann Maxwell came to rest after a November
18
landslide tore down a steep slope and smashed into the Moon house.
Sneakers,
roller blades, kitchen implements, a wood stove, Susan Moon's nursing
texts
and a Persian rug rest amid the rubble of lives cut short. The two Moon
children narrowly escaped the slide that claimed their parents, Rick and
Susan Moon. Devastated neighbors wonder whether the mountain will someday
break away again.
It's too simple to call these deaths random acts
of God. The slide that
took four lives on Hubbard Creek began in a 1987 clearcut. The slide that
swept Delsa Hammer to her death in the chilly Umpqua River that same night
also began in a clearcut. In both cases, warnings before logging commenced
went unheeded. Negligence is the most charitable label that can be applied
to
the decisions that led to these tragedies.
For too long, the Oregon Legislature and Oregon
Department of Forestry have
sanctioned, and private timberland owners have carried out, logging
practices
known to increase the risk to public and private property and even human
life. It's past time for Oregon residents to demand government action to
protect rural residents from the effects of logging on steep, unstable
slopes.
So far, Oregon has not heard from its elected
leaders on this issue.
Instead, the fledgling campaign for reform has been led by a small band of
grass-roots environmentalists, who have called for an immediate halt to
all
logging on steep slopes and for reform of the Oregon Forest Practices Act.
In
support, 68 groups signed a letter to three governors and President
Clinton
in December asking for a state and federal moratorium on high-risk
logging.
Even rural residents who have been staunch
defenders of the timber industry
now fear for their lives and property. In Myrtle Creek, many residents
blame
clearcut salvage logging in the late 1980s for a slide that pushed five
homes
off their foundations on Dec. 8. Lonnie Leonard lives on Hubbard Creek
Road
not far from where the Moon house stood -- and below a slope Roseburg
Forest
Products plans to begin logging next spring. "I don't want to be labeled
an
environmentalist," Leonard told the Roseburg News-Review in December. "I
feel in a bind over this. But wondering what Roseburg Lumber will do is
like
waiting for destruction. It's like having a sword dangling over your head
and
not knowing when it will fall."
Karen Henderson, a nurse who works in Roseburg,
lives along the same road.
She has gone public with her fear over what might happen to her own house
if
the company goes ahead with its plan. "I'll be damned if I'll watch this
happen without a fight," she said.
The Department of Forestry justifies its failure
to prevent the November
tragedies by insisting that it has no authority to protect houses or to
stop
logging even on the steepest and most unstable slopes -- though in fact it
has worked behind the scenes to relax even the weak regulatory authority
it
does possess.
Incredibly, ODF and State Forester Jim Brown also
continue to insist that
there is no demonstrable relationship between logging practices and
landslides, despite a quarter-century's worth of federal, state and
university-based studies that show a strong correlation. The ODF's own
survey
of research on the cumulative impacts of logging, ordered by the 1991
Legislature but completed only in 1995, concluded that clearcut harvest
and
slash burning on steep slopes "may increase failure rates by two to 40
times
over rates on undisturbed sites." But the department never publicized the
survey, and department spokesman Lou Torres said ODF does not endorse it.
Citizens who want a copy should be prepared to shell out $30.
The department is preparing another study in
response to last February's
slides, but it won't be ready until the fall of 1997 -- after another
logging
season is completed. One of its goals is to show that landslides also are
frequent on unlogged sites, where they aren't as visible in aerial
surveys.
But Keith Mills, an ODF geotechnical engineer, acknowledged in a recent
paper
that even ground surveys conducted in the Coast Range in the 1970s showed
landslides were up to four times more prevalent where clearcutting had
occurred.
It's true that landslides occur in unlogged areas,
but as stream
ecologists have pointed out, landslides that begin in clearcuts typically
pack a bigger payload of soil and sediment than those on slopes where tree
roots still hold the soil in place. "If you have a slope that is only
marginally stable, and you remove the forest cover, it can be the straw
that
triggers a debris slide," says George Bush, a soils specialist for the
Siuslaw National Forest.
The Forestry Department's posture of denial not
only undermines its
credibility, it also now threatens Gov. Kitzhaber's coho salmon
initiative,
the only thing that stands in the way of an endangered species listing for
coastal coho. The National Marine Fisheries Service has the final say on
whether the voluntary plan Kitzhaber ultimately brings forward contains
enough safeguards to stave off a coho listing. NMFS has worked closely
with
several state agencies on developing the plan. Only State Forester Jim
Brown
has dug in his heels. Asked to review a finding that "Oregon's waters
currently experience significant impacts from forestry" and that
additional
protective measures might be necessary, Brown retorted in an October 7
letter
to NMFS Regional Director Will Stelle that the finding constituted "guilt
by
association" and that NMFS had offered no information to support such a
claim.
Stelle was so infuriated by Brown's response that
he fired off a letter to
Brown warning that the forestry department's head-in-the-sand mentality
regarding the harmful effects of logging threatened the coho initiative.
"I
find the substance and tone of the letter very disappointing and would
have
hoped for something better, particularly in light of the constructive
collaboration that we are trying so hard to build with Governor Kitzhaber
and
others in the State of Oregon," Stelle wrote.
"They have positioned themselves in such an
untenable situation that they
are now circling the wagons," remarked Chuck Willer of the Oregon Coast
Range
Association, who monitors logging practices on public and private land.
In a followup memo to Kitzhaber, Stelle said NMFS
remains concerned about
how Oregon forest practices increase the risks of mass wasting and
landslides
in unstable areas and damage to salmon streams.
But reform of Oregon's Forest Practices Act won't
come without a fight. It
never has. Even when the Oregon Legislature has ordered changes, ODF and
the
policy-setting Board of Forestry have dragged their feet and compromised
solid science in the face of timber industry opposition to meaningful
regulation.
In the early 1980s, Andy Stahl and Terry Thatcher
of the National Wildlife
Federation petitioned the Department of Forestry under the little-used
Administrative Procedures Act to hold hearings and adopt strict rules
regulating logging on steep slopes. The board held hearings, but ended up
adopting only a weak provision giving the department the option to require
logging companies to submit a plan for minimizing risks when logging
unstable
sites. At Hubbard Creek, in 1986, the department decided to waive the
requirement for a written plan.
The 1991 Legislature directed the Board of
Forestry to adopt more
protective rules for logging along streams and to require written plans
before logging areas at "high risk" of landslides.
The board appointed a scientific panel to make
recommendations on how best
to protect streams from logging, then promptly shelved those
recommendations
when they got a hostile reception from timber lobbyists -- despite
overwhelming public support for permanent no-log buffers along Oregon
rivers.
The final rule contains loopholes that allow companies to continue cutting
large trees within stream buffer areas. Some of the landslides triggered
by
the November rains tore right through those buffers. Slides also took out
much wider buffers along streams that run through federal land.
The board also reluctantly adopted a rule
requiring mandatory written plans
for logging on high-risk sites. But in 1995, ODF joined with industry
lobbyists and the Republican leadership in pushing through a bill that
lifted
the requirement for mandatory written plans. The little-noticed bill also
required legislative approval of all new forest practices rules and
compensation of private property owners if any new rule reduced the value
of
their timber by 10 percent or more. This gift to timberland owners was
shepherded through a special legislative session by then-Senate President,
now U.S. Senator Gordon Smith.
But wait, there's more. Unlike Washington and
California, Oregon in most
cases does not require timber companies to obtain permits before they log.
They only have to provide a 15-day advance notice before logging begins.
Adjacent landowners must pay to receive these notices. Yet ODF and the
Oregon
Forest Industries Council plan to go hand-in-hand to the 1997 Legislature
to
weaken even that minimal requirement by waiving the notification rule in
some
instances.
ODF spokesman Brian Ballou says the goal is to
reduce the load on overworked
forest practices staffers by relaxing the rules for large industrial
landowners who have a good record of compliance with forest practices
rules.
"Landowner cooperation and education will produce more in the long run
than
showing up with a badge and a rulebook and a book of tickets to get them
to
do something to manage their land for the long term," Ballou said.
One reason enforcement workers are so overloaded
is the breakneck pace of
logging in the Coast Range, where industrial timberland owners are
practicing
short-rotation forestry to liquidate their inventory. In 1995, 100 workers
processed 24,679 notifications for logging operations in Oregon. Many of
the
trees coming off private land are in the 40-to-45-year-old range -- far
too
young to bring top dollar in the global timber market. The environmental
impacts should be obvious to anyone who has driven through the Coast Range
recently and tallied the number of log trucks streaming out of the
logged-off, slumping hills.
The pattern is clear. Oregon needs new forest
practices rules with teeth,
even if it takes a citizen initiative to get them on the books. Leaders
willing to carry the banner for reform need to step forward -- now,
while the mud and debris on the slope above Hubbard Creek provides a fresh
reminder of what happens when a government fails to protect its citizens
from a foreseeable harm.
© 1997
Kathie Durbin
This article first appeared in Cascadia Times.
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