Replanting forests in Colorado wildfire areas has benefit for water supply

WESTCREEK — Pushing to accelerate nature’s healing, the U.S. Forest Service is deploying contract labor crews who this week began planting 146,000 more pine and fir trees — an effort to stabilize wildfire-ravaged mountainsides that slump into metro Denver water supplies.

But every new catastrophic wildfire adds to the blackened-dead acreage west of Colorado’s Front Range cities. And water providers face increasing costs — which are passed to residents in monthly water bills — as more eroding sediment descends across burned watershed and clogs reservoirs.

“These trees will stabilize this slope. Once their roots get going, they will hold soil in place,” Forest Service specialist Bob Post said Thursday, hiking alongside a tree-planting team of 17 men.

The workers edged back and forth across the mountainside from top to bottom as headwaters trickled below. Each swung a pick-like tool called a hoedad and hauled a sack of ponderosa seedlings — raised at a federal nursery in Nebraska using seeds collected in surviving Colorado forests. At the bases of still-standing charred trees, the men scalped away surface debris and dug 8-inch holes — and delicately inserted seedlings.

Significant root growth won’t happen for three years — if the seedlings survive. Forest Service officials said it costs $400 to $500 per acre for tree-planting, using the Florida-based contractor Sweat LLC, which has brought workers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico to Colorado.

Aftermath of fires

There’s not nearly enough money or seeds available to replant all of the 138,000 acres burned here in the 2002 Hayman wildfire — let alone the 13,000 acres burned in the 1996 Buffalo Creek fire and the 6 square miles burned this month in the Lower North Fork fire.

However, relying on natural regenerative processes alone would take centuries.

“Any little bit we can do helps,” Post said. “But we are fighting a battle we can’t win.”

Once wildfires burn forests, there’s basically nothing left other than still-standing dead trees and rocks to keep soil from slumping into headwaters of the South Platte River. At least half of metro Denver’s drinking water comes from this river.

“If we allow a larger area like this to restore on its own, it could take more than 1,000 years,” said John Peterson, deputy supervisor of the Pike and San Isabel National Forest.

“Mother Nature could tolerate that. But we’d like to get it back and functioning as a ponderosa pine forest for the benefits it brings” to wildlife and the watershed, Peterson said. “We’re tree-planting to try to accelerate that process.”

Denver Water officials say since they’ve spent $26 million in the aftermath of the Buffalo Creek and Hayman fires, on dredging more than 1 million cubic yards of sediment that clogged Strontia Springs reservoir, and other projects to trap sediment before it slumps into waterways.

The Hayman fire destroyed 132 homes over six weeks and cost an estimated $238 million in damage and rehabilitation.

Metro water providers now partner with the Forest Service, paying for restoration work. And Colorado’s challenge has drawn attention nationwide, with the Arbor Day Foundation rallying corporations this year to contribute $80,400 to the tree-planting.

“There is a direct connection between healthy forests and sustainable supplies for clean water,” Denver Water spokeswoman Stacy Chesney said. “Planting trees will help re-establish the ponderosa pine forests that would otherwise take more than a hundred years to grow naturally.”

“Nature runs the game”

Sediment eroding into streams and the river after rainstorms “increases our cost of treating water” and has forced operational suspensions, Aurora Water spokesman Greg Baker said. “We want to get ahead of this.”

Forest experts say it’s too early to assess the extent to which tree-planting may spur regeneration of forests. Current targets call for replanting across 1,085 Hayman fire acres this year, with the goal of eventually replanting one-third of the burned acres, and also starting on the Buffalo Creek fire area.

Residents who still live in the former forests along the upper South Platte applauded the tree-planting but say federal foresters should have begun this work with greater intensity and focus 10 years ago in the immediate aftermath of the fire.

Drought this spring has helped, because rainstorms trigger erosion, Westcreek resident Steve Schnoes said, out with his wife, Tanya, cutting back trees near their home as a precaution in case of a new fire.

“Nature runs the game here,” but planting is a necessary response, Schnoes said. “We’re going to look like the moon if we don’t.”

Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 twitter.com/finleybruce or bfinley@denverpost.com

$400-$500 per acre

The cost of tree-planting in wildfire-charred areas, using Sweat LLC, a Florida-based contractor, according to Forest Service officials