Flagstaff officials are trying to prevent wildfires, floods by thinning overgrown forests

As wildfires are burning across the country, Flagstaff officials are looking to prevent catastrophic damage from happening here.

How do they do it? By cutting down trees. A lot of them.

So, federal and local officials in Coconino County are in the process of thinning our overgrown forests. Now, they’ve got trees in 1500 acres near Snowbowl on the San Francisco Peaks in their crosshairs.

Jay Smith is Coconino County’s Forest Restoration director and he joined The Show to talk more about their efforts.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Jay.

JAY SMITH: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Thank you for coming on. So tell us first about these efforts to thin forests near Flagstaff. I was up in Flagstaff earlier in the summer, and you can really notice this. There seem to be a lot of efforts to thin forests where you’re cutting down trees here and there underway.

JAY SMITH: Yeah, we’ve been working at this for several years now, and really had a slow start going through from 2010-12. And we lost all of our industry, basically, our forest industry, and now it’s starting to come back, and so we’re really moving things forward. And we did a lot of modeling of this area, the Upper Rio de Flag Watershed north of Flagstaff, and really saw that there’s a huge wildfire risk, but then the post-wildfire flooding that comes from that as well.

And so the county got involved through our flood control district working with Coconino National Forest and other entities on other parts of that. If you drive up Highway 180 going towards Grand Canyon, you’ll see a huge change in the forest structure because we’ve done a lot of thinning.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So, I mean, you can tell, right? Like you can drive down a road in parts of Flagstaff and you’ll see a forest that’s been thinned on one side of the road and one that hasn’t on the other side of the road, and the difference is so stark. It always seems counterintuitive, but explain this for us, Jay. Like, fighting wildfires for a century has left our forests unhealthy. There are too many trees, right?

JAY SMITH: Exactly. And what we’ve done is we’ve created our own problem by putting all the fires out. This is a fire-adapted ecosystem. Fire is what kept the forest thin for centuries, and then we came in and said, “Let’s put the fires out,” and now we have too dense of a forest.

And so we’re trying to bring it back to a little bit of that natural. So whether we can reintroduce fire, good fire, into this ecosystem and keep it thinned, but we have to go in and mechanically thin first, because to start a fire right now in a lot of these areas would just be disastrous in our own way of trying to fix the forest. So thin it first, then we can go back in and reintroduce fire.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So like a fire starts in a forest that has not been thinned, and it’s just going to take off like — like wildfire, I guess, right? But what happens in a forest that has been thinned? It’s more controllable?

JAY SMITH: Yeah, it stays on the ground like it’s supposed to. It doesn’t get up into the canopy very often, and the trees are adapted for that. Those larger diameter trees are adapted for this fire, and we call it a cool fire because it just stays on the ground, it creeps around.

But anytime we have these hot days where it’s low humidity, high winds, those are disastrous days for fires to start. But having it in a thinned forest — we saw this in the Pocket Fire when it came up through and hit some of the thinned areas, that’s where they were able to control and stop the fire, the forward progress of the fire.

Michel Marizco/KJZZ

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So tell us about where you target for thinning around Flagstaff. Like is it near homes, is it near the city, is it — obviously we’re talking about an area you’re aiming to thin near Snowbowl on the mountain. No one wants to see the San Francisco Peaks up in flames.

JAY SMITH: Yeah, we have — so we’ve done a lot of work in the city of Flagstaff, done a lot of work around the community itself, and we’re still looking and looking at communities and we have a Community Wildfire Protection Plan that’s putting in place to help communities.

But what we’re looking at from a flood control district is we’ve — we’ve dealt with the Schultz Fire, the Pipeline Fire, we’ve had the Museum Fire, massive post-fire flooding where we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to get the watershed back to where it won’t flood communities and homes.

And so we’re trying to be proactive. We got into the Upper Rio de Flag and said, “Let’s start thinning it before we have that.” We know it’s not if — it’s when this fire will happen. And so we want to be ahead of that, and we want to have this area thinned and where we can, you know, not just thinning the trees, but now there’s a lot of dead and down trees that fuel that fire on the ground, and we pull that out as well and really get it back to a more natural state.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I mean, one of the issues here has been how to pay for this, right? Like, a massive amount of forests that need thinning, but also there’s been no real industry for this. There’s no market for the trees in Northern Arizona, right? How are we funding this?

JAY SMITH: Yeah, a lot of it is coming from local and federal tax dollars. This project specifically in the La Rue area that we’re calling, it’s being mostly funded by the flood control district, so local property taxes are funding it to the tune of about $4.2 million, about $500,000 of federal money put into this.

So, I mean, it’s not cheap to do. This is a more difficult area. It’s steeper, it’s got a lot of rocks in it, so it’s more specialized equipment from the local logger that has the contract.

So we’re, you know, we’re willing to invest that when we know that on the opposite side, if it burns and floods — we did the research, and Northern Arizona University’s Economic Policy Institute did this for us — it’s $2.8 billion of economic impact if we just let it burn.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So you feel like you have to do something, but it does feel like something of a ticking time bomb, right? Like, are you really up against the clock here in terms of when and if that wildfire starts?

JAY SMITH: Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights during lightning storms and recreation times where we want to make sure that we get this ahead of any wildfires. And we’ve thinned about 12,000 acres now in this 21,000-acre watershed, so I am sleeping a little bit better at night, but I’m ready to get this last little piece here done.

And then a lot of it, we have 5,000 acres of wilderness in this watershed, and those are where we can’t get equipment into those areas, and so there’s still going to be some risk, but we have really reduced that risk.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, we’ll leave it there for now. Jay Smith, Coconino County’s forest restoration director, joining us. Jay, thank you for coming on The Show. Appreciate it very much.

JAY SMITH: Thank you so much.

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