Lakeport >> District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown has been in a non-stop flurry of activity since the Valley Fire erupted on Sept. 12. One of the many issues he has to reckon with in the aftermath is the state of the once verdant hills. Thousands of trees were scorched by the blaze. Others have been removed for safety reasons.
With residents complaining of tree removal or curious about reforestation plans, Brown convened a public meeting last night at the Cobb Elementary School to address the current and ongoing situation with the trees.
The meeting was largely intended as a means to disseminate information to the public on the ongoing efforts to cut down and remove any trees that were damaged by the fire, or could prove to be hazards in the near future. Representatives from CalFire, CalTrans, AT&T, PG&E, the Department of Public Works and the University of California Lake/Mendocino County Cooperative Extension (UCCE) were on-hand to discuss their roles in the tree removal process.
According to Brown, the meeting was to largely to help the public understand what trees are being removed, the general criteria for removal of those trees and the plan for removal moving forward. He also hopes it will increase the public’s awareness of why certain trees are being felled in order to help keep those trees that are still safe and viable from getting chopped down, as well.
“There are a lot of trees that still need to come down,” he explained. “We need to get the trees cleaned up. The trees that have been taken down need to be removed. Seeing constant reminders (burnt out trees and vegetation) isn’t going to help anybody recover.” But with “thousands and thousands” of trees affected, it is bound to happen that some that shouldn’t be removed, will.
“We want people to get the facts to try to keep that from happening.”
He also added that the sooner the cleanup process can be completed, the sooner the community can focus on recovery efforts: erosion control, replanting and reforestation.
And that’s where Gregory Giusti comes in.
Giusti is the director of the UCCE. For his part of the meeting, he focused on the reforestation process.
“When we talk about reforestation, we talk about local seed sources — keeping the mix similar to what is natural to the area,” he said. “People need to assess their properties. This coming spring, there may be millions of natural seedlings. At some point you go through and thin them out, 20 or 30 feet apart instead of two or three feet. After you do that, whatever nutrients and water is in the soil concentrates because they are spaced, so they grow faster.”
The benefit of such spacing, he added, was a greatly reduced risk of another catastrophic fire in the future.
He also stated that efforts are being made to get 500,000 seedlings distributed into nurseries for cultivation, with the option in a few years — 2017 or 2018 — for people to transplant them onto their properties.
In the short-term, Giusti encouraged taking steps to preserve the soil and prevent erosion.
“People want to focus on keeping the dirt and soil in place, minimize soil disturbance. There’s a lot of leaves still falling on the ground, which is a natural mulch; leave that in place. Branches, sticks, logs … if you can leave that on the ground, it’s good for minimizing surface erosion. Straw mulch is good for minimizing erosion too. Or use straw bales for people who are afraid of water gullying along roadways to slow water movement across the landscape.”
The aesthetics of the damaged communities hasn’t escaped the Supervisor’s attention either.
“The trees were the single-most attractive reason to live on Cobb,” he said. “The county is discussing taking an unscientific survey, just calling up property owners to ask if they’re going to rebuild in the next one, two, 10 years.”
“This forest is just as much a part of the community as the people who live here,” commented Giusti. “They may never see the trees look like they did when they originally built their houses on Cobb.”
Ultimately, Brown’s goal for the meeting was to help turn rumor into facts, driven by the science of recovery.
“It’s about what has happened, what continues to happen and will happen,” he observed.
