USA - Carlton Fire: Ranchers, growers face long recovery
Blackened mountainsides around Stokes Ranch show a light haze of emerging green grass several months after the largest wildfire in Washington state history.Despite the greening, it will be up to five years before those lands recover enough to sustain cattle grazing. Full recovery for the dozens of ranches, orchards and timberlands scorched could take even longer.“Almost every county in Eastern Washington has had a sizable fire in the last 20 years, but they haven’t been the kind where so many cattle were lost or so much ground was burned that there’s no place nearby to graze. This fire is more of a game changer for people to stay in business (or not),” says Craig T. Nelson, manager of the Okanogan County Conservation District.Four months after the Carlton wildfire burned more than a quarter-million acres, caused one death and tens of millions of dollars in the loss of 300 homes, 1,000 cattle, 500 miles of fencing and millions of board feet of timber, ranchers and orchardists face years on the road to recovery.If the immediate loss of fruit trees, cattle, grazing lands and fencing weren’t enough, a larger loss still is probably the long-term setback in production, Nelson said.It takes three to five years for replanted orchards to produce fruit and it takes time to rebuild a registered Angus herd, such as that of Gebbers Cattle, which was decimated by the fire.Scott Miller, director of Okanogan County Emergency Management, said he doesn’t know of anyone who has totaled all of the losses, public and private, but that fire suppression costs alone were close to $100 million.Claims for losses against the state Department of Natural Resources, alleging negligence in deliberately allowing the fire to spread, soon will reach $50 million from 150 property owners, Alex Thomason, a Brewster attorney representing them, said.“The hard part for ranchers and landowners is determining the value of lost timber and the cost to replace miles of fence,” he said.How fire startedThe Carlton Complex Fire was sparked by lightning on July 14 near the towns of Carlton and Twisp in Washington’s Methow Valley. Three days later it rapidly spread 30 miles down the valley, burning homes and property in its path, destroying more than two dozen homes in Pateros, threatening Brewster and multi-million-dollar fruit packing warehouses in both towns. Employees of Gebbers Farms and local firefighters saved Brewster from being leveled.From near Twisp, the fire also burned eastward up over mountains and down the Chiliwist Valley taking more homes and threatening the town of Malott.Rob Koczewski, 67, a retired Washington state patrolman, died of a heart attack July 19 as he and his wife hauled water and dug fire lines to save their Carlton home.General lossesA total of 277 primary residences and 50 cabins were destroyed, plus outbuildings and barns, Miller said.Between 900 and 1,000 cattle died, Nelson said. With prices around $1,200 for a steer calf and $2,200 to $2,700 for a bred cow, the loss is roughly $2 million.At the current record high prices it’s not easy to rebuild a herd “even if a guy had a bottomless checkbook,” said Jack Field, executive vice president of the Washington Cattlemen’s Association.“It’s difficult to go out and find enough quantity, and ranchers prefer their own genetics,” Field said.Fencing loss now totals $9.7 million and will go a bit higher because there’s not a tally yet from one large ranch, Nelson said. So far, that’s 440 miles of rangeland fencing at $20,000 per mile in material and labor, he said, plus 24 miles of orchard fencing at $40,000 per mile.Rangeland fencing for cattle is four strands of barbed wire and steel posts. Orchard fencing is twice as tall at 8 feet to keep deer out. It’s mesh wiring and mainly wooden posts.There’s also damage to cattle watering systems, orchard irrigation lines and pumps and the loss of hay stacks.The fire wiped out electricity to 3,602 customers for more than a week and 156 of those, including ranches, for more than 20 days. Power has been restored to all but a few remote customers who haven’t decided yet if they are rebuilding homes, said Dan Boettger, director of environmental and regulatory affairs at Okanogan County Public Utility District.The PUD is seeking federal assistance for $13.8 million in repairs and replacement of more than 300 miles of power lines, he said.256,108 acres burnedThe fire burned 256,108 acres. Of that, about 95,000 acres are privately owned and 161,108 are public, according to the county.The U.S. Forest Service is the largest public landholder at 80,000 acres, followed by the state Department of Natural Resources at 48,350 and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife at 22,000. Nearly all of the public land is under lease or permit to ranchers for grazing cattle. Most of the private land also is grazed and there’s about 6,000 acres that are heavily timbered, said Ted Murray, a county mapper.Lower-elevation grazing allotments may reopen to grazing in one to three years but it’s likely to be three to five years for upper-elevation allotments, said Stuart Woolley, staff resource officer of the USFS Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Wenatchee.“It depends on how hot it burned and how quickly vegetation comes back, and the biggest driver is how quickly fences can be rebuilt,” Woolley said.The USFS hopes to begin rebuilding 20 to 30 miles of interior fencing next summer and will coordinate with other agencies and permit holders rebuilding boundary fences, he said.Agencies are seeking funding to rebuild fences and watering structures.DNR has 77 miles of fencing and about 17,000 acres of timberland within 48,000 acres that has five permits and 30 leases for grazing, said Bob Redling, DNR spokesman. Grazing will cease for two to three years, he said.DNR is aerially reseeding 9,000 acres with grass and USFS is reseeding 800 acres to hold down noxious weeds.Auctions to salvage 1,200 acres DNR timber will be held within the next couple of months. USFS will salvage 250 acres of timber this winter and hopes to proceed with thinning another 1,800 acres, it planned to before the fire, to reduce fire fuels and open more land for grazing.DNR is also evaluating an area known as Salmon Meadows for replacement permit grazing, which may accommodate up to 200 AUMs (animal unit months — the amount of forage needed to feed a cow-calf pair for one month) and is assessing AUM capacity on other permit ranges, Redling said.DNR and USFS are considering allowing sharing of grazing permits. A problem, Woolley said, is that there’s little suitable nearby lands for grazing that weren’t burned.The USDA Farm Service Agency approved emergency grazing on Conservation Reserve Program land, but it won’t satisfy all grazing needs, Field said. Ranchers may have to install fencing and water systems for temporary grazing at more cost while rebuilding the same things on the allotments they can’t use, he said.“I have a real concern that come May or into June, we will have ranchers still feeding hay because they won’t have grass to go out on,” Field said.“It will be a huge challenge for producers for the next two to three years, depending on the severity of their burn and how long they have to rest the ground,” he said.About a dozen ranchers with grazing allotments and maybe a half-dozen tree fruit growers were hardest hit by the fire. Vic Stokes, a Twisp rancher, and Gebbers Cattle probably sustained the most in loss of cattle and, with several others, lost the most grazing land, Nelson said.Gebbers FarmsThe largest agricultural company impacted is Gebbers Farms. Its roots in Brewster date back to 1885. It’s a big producer of tree fruit, owning more than 5,000 acres of orchards, and produces timber and beef. It owns timber and grazing land and has grazing permits or leases on public lands.Cass Gebbers, president and CEO of Gebbers Farms, did not respond to a Capital Press inquiry for this article. But in August, he said millions of board feet of timber burned, 232 of his cattle died and 55 were missing and that “a few hundred acres of tree fruit orchard” were damaged.Private forest owners, including Gebbers, began salvaging scorched timber this fall, Nelson said.“Entire forests are gone, burned like a moonscape to nothing but sticks,” Gebbers said in August.He said miles of cattle watering systems needed repair and that thousands of acres needed grass reseeding to prevent noxious weeds from taking over. Soils were so scorched in places that grass roots and seed sources were destroyed, he said.“This will be a many-year process of rebuilding hundreds of miles of fence, resting and rotating burned pastures (grazing allotments) to allow full and proper recovery while dealing with the lingering stress that some of these cattle have experienced,” he said.It was mainly Gebbers registered Angus cattle fleeing from the fire down Chiliwist Valley that were trapped in fencing on North Star Road and burned to death, said Doug Hale, environmental health specialist at Okanogan County Public Health.About 230 were buried there in a mass grave on Gebbers’ property and 100 were buried two miles down the road where they died in a box canyon, Hale said.“Normally, by state law you bury one animal per pit but in this case because of the public health risk with temperatures of 100 degrees or more, there was an emergency order and we did mass burials,” he said.Another 100 cattle were buried near Twisp and 50 in a remote canyon near Pateros, he said.Stokes RanchVic Stokes, 60, a fourth-generation rancher near Twisp, said he lost 235 cattle, about half his herd, and close to 90 percent of his grazing land and U.S. Forest Service land that he used. He lost one of four residences, miles of fencing and 150 tons of alfalfa hay.“His entire business is almost destroyed,” Nelson said. “I’m sure he and others are facing what to gamble on. Whether to rebuild herd strength now or put it off and where to find money to rebuild fencing.”Stokes ranches with his son, Kent, and said they have to plan their future at their own pace. Every ranch has different natural resources and circumstances to work with, he noted.“I can put a dollar amount on my loss of cattle now, but we lost future production. It’s impossible to put a figure on that. We built genetics we like which are hard to replace,” Stokes said.People have given him hay and fencing supplies.“In the short-term, we’re OK. I don’t know what we will do next year. We may have to put some wheels under some of these cattle,” he said, meaning truck them to other pastures at added expense. He’s considering government programs for help.As past president of the Washington Cattlemen’s Association, he said he’s concerned about a competition for grazing land among the affected ranchers.“I hope everyone can work through this,” he said, “and not ruffle each other’s feathers.”Orchard lossesNext to Gebbers Farms, Stennes Orchards Inc. in Methow suffered the biggest orchard losses.Firefighters saved their homes but the fire damaged about 20 acres of orchard, irrigation pumps and 5.8 miles of deer fence, Keith Stennes said.“We’ll probably pull 10 acres and replant and see if we can rehabilitate the other 10,” he said.He estimates a loss of production of four to five years and said at $8 per tree it costs $15,000 to $20,000 an acre to replant. Rehabilitation amounts to pruning trees and seeing if they regrow.They lost a couple hundred bins worth of Red Delicious that fell prematurely from trees because the trees were stressed from heat and lack of water. They lost some irrigation during the power outage, despite renting generators to keep irrigation going, and lost more due to mudslides from rain after the fire.By Oct. 16, the Stenneses were 95 percent done rebuilding two miles of deer fencing. A big part of the effort was a dozen to two dozen volunteers from Wenatchee churches helping every Saturday for several weeks.“We’ll survive. The limiting factor is it will slow us down from any growth or expansion and upgrading our tree varieties,” Stennes said. “That normal replanting all gets pushed back a few years.”Mark Armstrong, a Pateros grower, said some of his burned trees are showing green shoots on their trunks.“We lost a-mile-and-a-half of deer fence and five acres of apples and pears. We’ll replant one acre and wait to see if the others grow back,” he said.He said he lost two irrigation pumps that cost $60,000 to $70,000 to replace.Aid comes up shortStennes and Stokes said they are looking at government aid, although Stennes said he falls short of requirements for the Farm Service Agency’s Tree Assistance Plan.“You have to have loss higher than 18 percent of your orchard and then it’s 18 percent deductible. So that probably negates it for us,” he said.Crop insurance covered a small part of their crop loss, he said.Cattle producers may have some insurance and those with cattle losses should have filed livestock indemnification claims with the USDA’s Farm Service Agency by now which pays about 75 percent of value, Field said.FSA and the Natural Resource Conservation Service have programs that can help with fencing and livestock water, Nelson said.Source - http://www.capitalpress.com/
