FEATURE Story By Rocky Goodnow
UNPRECEDENTED NUMBER of devastating wildfires that have raged through the western U.S., including the devastating fires in western Oregon in September, will greatly affect longterm timber supply. (Photo by Evan Wright, Fremont-Winema National Forest)
Western wildfires will have lasting impact on West Coast log supply he U.S. West is experiencing some of the most devastating wildfires in its history this year. An extremely hot, dry summer has led to prime conditions for a severe wildfire season, with fast moving flames damaging over 6 million acres. The timber damage from these wildfires will impact log supply in the West for quite some time. In the near-term, salvage operations will attempt to recover as much of the burned timber as possible; and in the longer run, the loss of billions of board feet of timber will further stress log supply in a region already constrained by lack of timber availability. The greatest damage has occurred in California, where five of the six largest wildfires in state history have occurred in 2020. Wildfires have raged in California since early summer, with current estimates placing the total area burned at more than 4 million acres. This is more than 10 times the
T
10
n
The Merchant Magazine n
five-year average of area burned by October. Exceptionally dry conditions helped fuel summer fires in California, especially on public lands with heavy fuel loads accumulated from years of strict fire suppression efforts and inactive land management. While California has suffered the most devastation, the greatest impact to the forest products industry will be in western Oregon, where fires erupted in the Coastal region west of the Cascade Mountain range during early September. Wildfires are less common in the Coastal region which typically receives more precipitation than the drier climate in eastern Oregon. However, the combination of the hot, dry summer along with easterly winds blowing in over the Cascade Mountains created optimum conditions for intense wildfires that spread rapidly down the western slopes of the Cascade Range. In just a few days, wildfires spread to
December 2020
over 850,000 acres in Coastal Oregon. There are two primary factors why the wildfires in western Oregon will have the largest adverse effect on U.S. wood products supply. First, the region is one of the largest producing regions for softwood lumber and plywood. Mills in the Oregon coast currently account for 15% of the U.S.’s softwood lumber capacity and roughly 25% of softwood plywood capacity. The wildfires in western Oregon will also have an outsized impact on the industry given how much privatelyowned timberland managed specifically for industrial timber production was affected by the Oregon wildfires. Our preliminary estimates indicate that over 300,000 acres of privatelyowned timberland was within the fire perimeters of the five largest fires in Oregon, with over 80% of the private lands owned or managed by major forestry industry companies—either Building-Products.com
