The City of Eugene has received a $157,400 grant from the United States Bureau of Land Management for fuels reduction and wildfire preparedness outreach.
Since 2015, the city has received nearly $1 million in grant assistance to support fuels reduction projects on over 1,000 acres of land. These projects focus on large and densely wooded areas along the Ridgeline Park system, Skinner Butte and Morse Family Farm.
Fuel reduction is the process of removing foliage and overgrown vegetation from the forest floor to reduce “ladder fuels,” which carry fires from the forest floor to the tops of trees. Ladder fuels are often associated with uncharacteristically large and severe fires.
According to the United States Forest Service, forest management includes practices like fuels reduction, prescription burning and mechanical cutting, which improves resilience to wildfire and generally aids the health of a forest.
Emily Steel, an ecologist for the City of Eugene Parks and Open Space and the grant manager for fuel reduction efforts, said that the grant is for the community wildland fire assistance, a program that operates on a national level.
“We will use most of the funds for vegetation removal from various natural area parks in Eugene,” Steel said. “The majority of [funds] will be for on the ground work in parks to help us reduce fuels.”
Steel said that some of the areas where efforts will be focused include Skinner’s Butte, Spencer Butte park, Suzanne Arlie park and Hawkins Heights.
Steel said that typically contractors are hired to clear the vegetation using a variety of methods. This year they will frequently be using mastication , which is a forestry practice that clears vegetation by churning up trees, brush and other debris on the forest floor.
Other methods include hand crews –– groups of people on the ground with chainsaws or weed eaters, or just using a regular lawn mower on the forest floor.
Steel said that similar projects have been very successful in the past.
“It’s somewhat common for us to have parkland in this condition,” she said. “The funding we’ve received here have made a big dent in us being able to go back to places [overgrown with vegetation and trees.]”
The end goal, Steel said, is to disrupt the continuity of fuels that would otherwise cause a much more severe fire if just left alone.
This summer, the Eugene area had two large wildfires. The Lookout and Bedrock fires, together, burned over 40,000 acres of land. The Lookout fire began because of a lightning strike, and the cause of the Bedrock fire is still under investigation.
“People refer to this area as a fire resilient landscape,” Steel said. “In this region, fire is normal. But our goal is to not have uncontrolled and serious wildfires on city parkland.”
Steel said there has been a narrower focus on this kind of work starting from 2015, and projects are “chipped away at” every year because of funding like this.
