Residents worry firebreaks could lead to flooding
Work in Cedar Crest part of restoration project
CEDAR CREST — Residents of Snowline Road in Cedar Crest are questioning the wisdom of what they took to be large firebreaks cut into the mountainside above their homes, but the Forest Service says they shouldn’t be worried because it is part of a larger restoration effort.
One of the residents, Lorette Lambert, has lived in her home on Snowline Road for 27 years, where she raised her children and takes hikes with her dogs in the forest behind her home. Returning from a hike May 14, she discovered that huge clearings had been made up and the down the forested slope above her home.
In talking to neighbors, she learned that the Forest Service had brought in a large mulching machine — resembling a mine-digging machine, one neighbor said — that had cut the wide, vertical swaths along the mountainside.
Lambert recalled a single firebreak made along the upper ridge line more than 10 years ago, which made sense to her. Lambert said the new firebreaks seemed overly destructive and has her concerned about exposing her home and others to flooding.
The machines tore down nearly everything standing, sparing a few trees within each swath, including one dead tree northwest of her home. That stretch of firebreak leads down her fence line, down a slope near her home’s propane tank.
Some of the previously existing hiking and horse trails have been rebuilt, but Lambert said it must also have wreaked havoc with wildlife living in the trees.
As for homes along Snowline Road below the swaths, Lambert is concerned that the clearing will expose them and the road to flooding and possible mudslides, especially with the National Weather Service’s predicting a normal monsoon rain season this summer, starting in July.
Because Snowline is not a county road, residents living along it have spent considerable money and effort to control flooding in the past, she said.
“I guess there’s some kind of — I don’t know — sense to it, but I don’t know what that may be,” she said. “For a firebreak, it seems way more than what is necessary, and I’ve been told they’re not done yet.”
Restoration project
Matthew Rau, a Forest Service fire management officer, said work done along the hillside was part of the Sulphur Springs Restoration Project, which covers 1,677 nonwilderness acres in the Sandia Ranger District. Creating firebreaks was only one function of the effort, he said. The project was an outgrowth of the East Mountain Area Community Wildfire Protection Plan, developed in 2006, which was the result of the 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act.
“This project is being planned and designed as a landscape restoration proj-
ect,” states the Forest Service’s summary about it. “The objectives of the treatments are to restore forest health for resiliency to drought, insect and disease, and uncharacteristic wildfire. Treatments that promote an uneven-aged forest structure and mimic natural disturbance patterns will also increase wildlife and vegetation diversity and improve scenic quality.”
The more traditional firebreak at the top of the ridge, called the Armijo Fuel Break, was cut in 1996, Rau said. About 10 years later, he said the Forest Service began taking a more holistic approach to firebreaks to also improve forest health in the process. The uneven-aged stretches of forest being created improves the watershed and wildlife habitats while also providing firebreaks, according to the Forest Service.
The open strips were created by a process called mastication that mechanically chews up trees, Rau said. The Forest Service returned soon after to reduce the torn-up trees into a mulch, which he said will help hold in moisture and likely reduce the kind of flooding residents below have experienced in the past.
“There is now a layer of organic material like you see in gardening,” he said. “There will be way less gullying and erosion.”
Better forest
Pointing to the untreated area of the mountainside to the south, Rau said that dense forest crowds out other vegetation and that the lack of undergrowth was likely the main cause of f looding problems that residents below experienced in the past.
“There is just too much competition for available resources,” he said of the dense forest growth during a time of protracted drought. “The best thing to do is cut out some of the competition for available resources.”
Rau said he understood how people living near the mountainside may have been taken aback by the amount of area cleared, but the forest will be better in the long run.
“When we do a project like this, we’re looking at hundreds of years,” he said. “We’re creating conditions where the ecosystem can become sustainable again and be healthy for many, many generations.”