Ruling cripples Eureka

"It’s a black day for Eureka."

Jim Hurst was in his pickup, driving into the woods to think, talking on the phone.

By SHERRY DEVLIN of the Missoulian

"It looks real bad up here," said Hurst, co-owner of Owens and Hurst Lumber Co. in Eureka. "Our lawyers say the Kootenai National Forest is shut down."

Hurst arrived home just after 10 Tuesday night and got the news: Federal District Judge Don Molloy had sided with environmentalists who sued the Kootenai forest to stop several salvage-timber sales. The Forest Service was on orders to verify the percentage of old-growth trees in the Kootenai and to assess the health of old-growth-dependent wildlife.

In the meantime, the judge said, there could be no timber sales on the Kootenai.

By late Wednesday afternoon, Hurst had spoken with his lawyers and with the Forest Service. The news just kept getting worse.

Owens and Hurst was actively logging one sale in the Kootenai forest when Molloy released his ruling – but no longer. Forest officials told Hurst to remove any decked logs and move out of the forest.

Loggers were due to start work Wednesday on a second timber sale. It, too, was stopped.

"The forest said we have to stop the first sale and that we can’t enter the other," Hurst said. "That’s about 3 million board feet of timber."

Worse yet, a quick inventory of the Owens and Hurst log yard revealed but a three-day supply of timber with which to feed the sawmill. "We don’t know at this time if we are going to be able to get logs," Hurst said. "The log yard is empty."

Already, Hurst had shortened the work day for his 75 remaining employees, hoping to stretch the timber supply. Another 100 workers at other mills and plants in Eureka depend on Owens and Hurst’s byproducts. Their jobs, too, are in jeopardy.

So Hurst was headed into the woods to think.

"Not being a legal expert, I didn’t think the judge’s ruling was this wide in scope," he said. "But our lawyers say it’s huge. The word we are getting is that the entire Kootenai National Forest is going to be shut down.

"It’s a black day for Eureka. It’s getting close to Independence Day and we get this kind of news and it kind of takes the edge off. We just don’t know what to do."

In his ruling, Molloy said the Kootenai forest broke its own rules by approving five timber sales in old-growth forests without knowing how much old-growth habitat existed in the forest. The Kootenai’s management plan requires a minimum of 10 percent old growth.

Neither could the forest verify the health of wildlife that live in old-growth forests: fishers, flammulated owls, Canada lynx, wolverines, goshawks and others, Molloy said. Every national forest is supposed to monitor the health of old-growth-dependent species.

Hurst said he is worried that Molloy’s ruling could shut down logging on other national forests in Montana and northern Idaho – that it will set a precedent.

Because his company was an intervenor on behalf of the Forest Service in the environmentalists’ lawsuit, Hurst could appeal the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"But we’ve already spent a fair amount of money on attorney’s fees, and I am going to have to look real hard at that," he said. "If I have to spend thousands of dollars on attorney’s fees, maybe I should just give the money to my employees. That might do more good."

Filed by the Missoula-based Ecology Center and the Lands Council in Spokane, the lawsuit challenged projects that forest supervisor Bob Castaneda believes are needed to restore forest health by reducing the amount of fire-prone fuels.

Several of the sales would have salvaged timber burned during the 2000 wildfire season.

"I am very concerned about the delay of critical ecological restoration work and the potential impact of this ruling on the economy of northwest Montana," Castaneda said in a statement sent to reporters Wednesday afternoon. "Southern Lincoln County is trying hard to recover from the closure of the Stimson plywood mill last December. The last thing this area needs is additional loss of jobs.

"The Kootenai National Forest employees are totally dedicated to complying with all federal laws, regulations and policies when working with the public to strike a reasonable balance in accomplishing ecological and forest health restoration and contributing to meeting the economic and social needs of our communities."

From his pickup, Hurst put it like this: "I can’t see any wood coming out of this forest for a long while, and it could be years. It just doesn’t make sense to the average person, no sense at all."

Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at [email protected].

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/07/03/news/local/news02.txt