Ecopolitology

August, 2007

The last time beatles invaded Colorado was 1964 and they only made it to the foothills of the Rockies. As the story goes, they were here for less than a day. And although they appeared at the storied Red Rocks amphitheater in Morrison for only about 35 minutes, they were able to inflict a considerable amount of their brand of "destruction" in that short time.In terms of the most recent beetle invasion, however, it appears the visitors will be around for much longer -- and inflict a brand of destruction on the Rocky Mountain landscape that will, in retrospect, make John, Paul, George, and Ringo look merely like four harmless, long-haired kids from Liverpool who smoke cigarettes and play some newfangled kind of music that all the kids seem to love. And yes, even these beetles will not be loved by Boulderites.I am speaking of course about the ubiquitous mountain pine beetle which is happily chewing its way through the vast coniferous forests of the North American continent. These beetles have yet to make their way to Red Rocks, but by the time they do, the damage will have been done.Pine beetles, bark beetles and spruce beetles have always been part of the ecosystemic processes in the forests of Colorado. However, within the last 10 years, beetle populations have proliferated. Why? The answers range from the possibility that small increases in the temperature of the earth have created a more hospitable climate for the bugs; to a culture of fire suppression within the US Forest Service, that for over one hundred years took every effort possible to prevent and extinguish forest fires. But fire is a healthy and necessary part of some ecological systems, and perhaps we are beginning to see one of the consequences of its prevention. About 44 percent of the state’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine are now infested by beetles, or about 660,000 acres. The dry, dead trees, which have a rusty red color, pose the biggest fire risk in the year or two before their needles fall off. The debate rages on concerning this epidemic which cannot be stopped. Some groups argue that the dead trees should be left standing, and that they will eventually fall to create the space and nutrients necessary for the flourishing of new ones. But others are fearful that this approach is far too risky. People who live in the resort towns like Steamboat, Vail, and Breckenridge (not to mention the resorts themselves), fear the potential devastation that could be wreaked by catastrophic, region-wide fires. Direct injury to property is hard to prevent because it is hard to anticipate; indirect injury and the concomitant economic losses are also likely but difficult to predict. Many high country residents would much rather see aggressive thinning programs aimed at reducing the fuel-wood in and around the urban-wildland interface. This might help, but thinning would seem to be only a drop in the bucket. With all but 100,000 acres of the dead trees in Colorado on federal land, the bulk of the thinning falls to the U.S. Forest Service, which plans to treat 18,000 acres of dead trees this year.
So if you have never had the opportunity to be awed what appears to be a never-ending expanse of lodgepole pine, or if you just haven't made it out west in a while, I would recommend you do so pretty soon -- before what people think of as the Rocky Mountain landscape, is only a distant memory.
The last time beatles invaded Colorado was 1964 and they only made it to the foothills of the Rockies. As the story goes, they were here for less than a day. And although they appeared at the storied Red Rocks amphitheater in Morrison for only about 35 minutes, they were able to inflict a considerable amount of their brand of "destruction" in that short time.In terms of the most recent beetle invasion, however, it appears the visitors will be around for much longer -- and inflict a brand of destruction on the Rocky Mountain landscape that will, in retrospect, make John, Paul, George, and Ringo look merely like four harmless, long-haired kids from Liverpool who smoke cigarettes and play some newfangled kind of music that all the kids seem to love. And yes, even these beetles will not be loved by Boulderites.I am speaking of course about the ubiquitous mountain pine beetle which is happily chewing its way through the vast coniferous forests of the North American continent. These beetles have yet to make their way to Red Rocks, but by the time they do, the damage will have been done.Pine beetles, bark beetles and spruce beetles have always been part of the ecosystemic processes in the forests of Colorado. However, within the last 10 years, beetle populations have proliferated. Why? The answers range from the possibility that small increases in the temperature of the earth have created a more hospitable climate for the bugs; to a culture of fire suppression within the US Forest Service, that for over one hundred years took every effort possible to prevent and extinguish forest fires. But fire is a healthy and necessary part of some ecological systems, and perhaps we are beginning to see one of the consequences of its prevention. About 44 percent of the state’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine are now infested by beetles, or about 660,000 acres. The dry, dead trees, which have a rusty red color, pose the biggest fire risk in the year or two before their needles fall off. The debate rages on concerning this epidemic which cannot be stopped. Some groups argue that the dead trees should be left standing, and that they will eventually fall to create the space and nutrients necessary for the flourishing of new ones. But others are fearful that this approach is far too risky. People who live in the resort towns like Steamboat, Vail, and Breckenridge (not to mention the resorts themselves), fear the potential devastation that could be wreaked by catastrophic, region-wide fires. Direct injury to property is hard to prevent because it is hard to anticipate; indirect injury and the concomitant economic losses are also likely but difficult to predict. Many high country residents would much rather see aggressive thinning programs aimed at reducing the fuel-wood in and around the urban-wildland interface. This might help, but thinning would seem to be only a drop in the bucket. With all but 100,000 acres of the dead trees in Colorado on federal land, the bulk of the thinning falls to the U.S. Forest Service, which plans to treat 18,000 acres of dead trees this year.
So if you have never had the opportunity to be awed what appears to be a never-ending expanse of lodgepole pine, or if you just haven't made it out west in a while, I would recommend you do so pretty soon -- before what people think of as the Rocky Mountain landscape, is only a distant memory.

FYI - EP

Denver Post September 4, 2006

The healthy spruce and lodgepole pine trees atop the Steamboat ski area represent the last stand for Andy Cadenhead.

As the forests turn reddish-brown all around him - the result of an unprecedented outbreak of bark-burrowing beetles - the "high-value" land at the ski area remains green because of the extraordinary efforts by U.S. Forest Service agents like Cadenhead and ski-resort crews.

"Our effort was to keep the spruce beetles there," he said, pointing to a thickly forested area east of the resort, "and not here."

"We've done a number of things to do that," he said. "This has taken a considerable investment of time and money, on the order of several hundred thousand dollars, but this is probably the closest thing we've had to a success story."

In addition to the traditional means of cutting down dying trees and spraying healthy ones with insecticides, officials in Steamboat are trying experimental tactics to repel the beetles, and their efforts have kept the mountaintop green, so far.

Such small successes punctuate what otherwise has been widespread failure to stem the outbreak of the bark beetles, which already have decimated evergreen forests in a large swath of the West, from British Columbia, Canada, to Chihuahua, Mexico, and ultimately will leave millions of acres of dead trees in their path.

"People have their own images of what this change might be, but I think that, almost without fail, people are surprised at how much bigger this thing is than what they expect," Cadenhead said. "We're talking about a dramatically changed landscape."

Like a rash spreading across the mountains, beetles are reaching spots previously immune to the outbreak, crossing the Continental Divide to the Front Range, reaching high-elevation forests and even infiltrating remote areas such as the Black Forest northeast of Colorado Springs.

"We're still seeing the expansion of the mountain pine beetle," said Joe Duda, forest-management supervisor for the Colorado State Forest Service.

"The areas that last year had only partial mortality, we're seeing a lot of those fairly completely hit," Duda said.

And in many cases, the beetles are attacking prominent "high-value" areas such as campgrounds and recreation sites, high-dollar mountain real estate and wilderness areas.
In Colorado, where a century of fire suppression has created abnormally thick and uniform forests and a decade of drought has weakened the trees' natural defenses, the culprits - chiefly mountain pine beetles - have destroyed an estimated 7.4 million trees on 1.5 million acres of the 14.5 million acres of national forest in the past 10 years.

Infestation "epidemic"

Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Keystone, Sol Vista, Steamboat, Vail and Winter Park ski areas all are being hit by the bugs at "epidemic" levels, according to a recent report by the Northern Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative, a consortium of government agencies.

Now, communities surrounded by dying forests are using drastic measures they never would have contemplated even a few years ago, as they realize the extent of the damage:

In Summit County, where the dead trees have appeared in the past two years, residents shocked by the moonscape left by initial logging efforts have banded together in a grassroots task force to consider the implications that the die-off has on everything from tourism and property values to environmental concerns.

In Eagle County, where wealthy property owners once opposed all logging in their backyards, the practice is now considered a preferred alternative to dead, wildfire-prone forests. The town of Vail has committed $1.5 million to removing trees with the aid of helicopters, and the community even has grudgingly accepted logging crews consisting of chainsaw- wielding prison inmates.

In hard-hit Grand County, where beetle-decimated areas around Grand Lake and Ute Pass look like war zones, a demonstration of industrial wood- grinding machinery last month attracted two dozen timber-industry representatives and government officials hoping to find some way of salvaging a usable product.

"The problem is, this is so massive," said Duane Dailey, a Grand County commissioner who has seen the landscape outside his window devastated by the grain-sized beetles. "I mean, what do we do with all of this?"

Dailey's hope is to see an industry develop around energy use - predominantly burning the wood to create electricity. That would require huge financial investments in an industry that has an uncertain future.

The best guess is that the current beetle outbreak in Colorado may generate five years of trees, maybe 10, and even that supply could be limited by concerns such as the general aversion to commercial logging and environmental regulations that restrict logging in many areas.
Clear-cutting, the most economical form of logging, still meets stiff public opposition, even though entire hillsides of trees are now dead or dying.

"Nobody wants to support clear-cutting, but that's pretty much what we need to do in a lot of places," Dailey said.

Selective logging, on the other hand, is prohibitively expensive and can be accomplished only in relatively small areas.

"It's costing us about $13,000 an acre to treat this area," said Phil Bowden, a Forest Service specialist pointing out a thinning project on a 19-acre parcel adjacent to the Red Sandstone neighborhood in Vail.

"It's all hand work, and it's going to be helicopter-yarded," he said, referring to the removal of logs by helicopter.

"That is going to get very expensive," he said.
Big shift in funding

The fact that the town is footing 80 percent of the bill for logging on federal land represents a sea change, said Tom Talbot of the Vail Fire Department.

"Five years ago, it was a challenge to generate money for this type of project," he said.
The dead trees and the threat of a catastrophic wildfire have convinced residents and town officials of the need for logging.

Still, there was plenty of heartache when plans were announced to cut 1,800 lodgepole pines on the highly visible hillside above Donovan Park in West Vail.

"I don't think anybody anticipated that this would be as bad as it is," said Vail Mayor Rod Slifer.

"It's a tough thing, and we have to cope the best we can."

As the pine beetles chewed their way from Grand County over Ute Pass and into Summit County over the past five years, Sandy Briggs realized that the biggest issue might not be dealing with the natural process but with the social impacts.
"I don't think many people real ly understand how different it's going to look," he said, standing in an area of the Frisco peninsula where a dense forest in the past two years has been reduced in places to barren fields of stumps and slash. "This is our future."

Last year, Briggs organized the Summit Mountain Pine Beetle task force, a citizens group that has become a model for bringing together residents, business owners, and local and federal officials in a twice-monthly discussion forum.

Over breakfast at the Best Western every other Thursday morning, Briggs assembles experts to talk about subjects such as how homeowners can protect their own trees and what the future forest will look like.

"We're not going to do anything to stop it, so we might as well figure out the best way to deal with it," Briggs said.

Summit County could lose 90 percent of its conifers to beetles, part of the natural forest process that periodically thins out the older trees, forester Cary Green recently told the group.
The trick will be to create a new forest of diverse species and ages so that entire forests don't become susceptible in another 80 years. The beetles typically attack older trees that don't have the vigor to expel them with their sap.

"We have about 3 million acres of lodgepole pines that are highly susceptible" in the Routt National Forest alone, Green said.

Add to that a blowdown of millions of spruce trees in the adjacent Flat Tops Wilderness Area - prime breeding ground for the spruce beetle - and nearly all of the evergreens in Colorado's north-central mountains are in jeopardy.

"There's no way we can protect all of that," Cadenhead said.

Entomologists say that only an extended early or late-season arctic spell, with sustained temperatures below a lethal minus 30 degrees, would bring a rapid halt to the epidemic.
Setting priorities

Since stopping the beetle appears impossible, aside from small areas where intensive care is justified, land managers are resorting to defending high-value areas, including popular recreational sites and the "urban interface," the zones in which homes and private property abut public forests.

From one of the access roads at the Steamboat ski area, Cadenhead hiked 10 minutes through the forest to one such spot, where entomologists set up traps scented with pheromones on "sacrifice" trees intended to lure the bugs away from other trees.

"We're catching thousands of beetles in every trap every week," he said, showing off the plastic funnels nested inside one another through which the beetles fall.

"The jury is still out on whether it's working. The preliminary results are that we're seeing other trees attacked too.

"They're kind of overwhelming us," he said.

"There's just a lot of beetles."

Water Quality ?

The Town of Estes Park violated federal drinking water standards this past year, for not testing for TOC’s (total organic carbon) in May from the Mary’s Lake water treatment plant. Results of regular monitoring are an indicator of whether or not our drinking water meets health standards. During 2007 we (the Town of Estes Park) did not complete all required TOC testing, and therefore cannot be sure of the quality of our drinking water during that time.

Please share this information with other people who drink this water, especially those who may not have received this notice directly (for example; people in nursing homes, apartments, and schools). You can do this by posting this notice in a public place, or distributing by hand or mail. (We quote directly from the mailer).

We choose to blog it, thank you.

The Town of Estes Park is required by law to post this notice, which they did in the form of a mailer titled Annual Water Quality Report Testing performed in 2007, Town of Estes Park Water Department. One year after the violation!

It did so in a very positive manner.

In the April 8th 2008, town board meeting, Town of Estes Park Administrator Halburnt commented about the source of the water contamination in Alamosa recently was their storage tank and/or cross connections. Alamosa does not use chlorine to disinfect their water (not a fact) however…the Town of Estes Park does use chlorine (which has its own chemistry issues). The Estes Park Water Department has stated, an outbreak similar to Alamosa would be unlikely in Estes Park (also not a fact).

Does that mean, because we chlorinate…our chances of being contaminated like Alamosa are reduced?

Not hardly…cross connections are mechanical problems, often the result of do-it-yourself midnight plumbers and a lack of a competent inspection programs in small unprofessionally operated communities prone to ignoring the law.

When high flows occur in one section of a water distribution system it can create a vacuum/siphon in an other section. If some weekend plumber…plumbed the fish pond to the water system - instead of filling the fish pond… water would be siphoned out of the fish pond into your drinking water. Regardless of chlorine or no chlorine people get sick. It is suspected that this is what happened in Alamosa. The point is the only real protection you have is a comprehensive water quality testing/inspection programs.

In Estes Park, evidently, water quality testing is conducted on a hit or miss basis, or if there is a possibility of violation samples are just not submitted. TOC testing is required for your protection by federal law, it is not optional, except in Estes Park.

Staff evidently has issue with the operation our treatment facilities which is a standard treatment train, simular systems are operated successfully by hundreds of competent staffs all over Colorado including the City of Denver who treat the same water quality,,, with no issue.

One must ask the question is our water quality problem a staff issue or a facilities issue? If we intent to spend 5.5 million on new treatment technology did we require onsite pilot testing or are we just crossing our fingers and relying on the judgment of staff who forget to even sample?

Staff would like us to believe that what was required was the purchase of a computer program to schedule a mandatory once per month sample. All that is really required is a calendar and a pencil, mark a big X on the first Tuesday of each month - on that day put the water in a jar and send it to the laboratory. If you are not capable of that all the soft wear in the world will not help you.

The physical elimination of certain organic compounds from our water is the task. That is exactly why town staff have chosen to spend 5.5 million or our dollars on a membrane filtration treatment train, the removal of TOC (total organic carbon). If the present technology employed at the treatment plant is not capable of the removals of those compounds during heavy loading, the Estesparkian can understand that and staff reaction to employ improved technology to deal with the problem, that is reasonable and understandable.

What the Estesparkian has issue with is the oops we forgot to sample for the very chemistry issue that requires a 5.5 million dollar fix. Oops, you should be running the street sweeper not the treatment plant! Membrane filtration systems are not easier to operate they are very complex and given exaggerated loading rates can be very expensive.

So the real question here has it become town policy to ignore state and federal law out of political convenience even if our health is in danger? I mean, its not like the town hasn’t set a standard for that type of thing. Health or Marketing oh well its only law it does not apply, its Estes Park, no one reads those glossy fliers anyway. Most of the people that drank that water are long gone back to Iowa anyway!

By the way what we are discussing here are organic compounds that when combined with chlorine improperly can create carcinogens but what the heck.

Drink up your town administrator assured you the water is fine quality testing or no quality testing!