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Show EDITORIAL Still Feeling Expendable Residents and business owners living in the vicinity vicin-ity of the Sanford fire are once more feeling expendable. expend-able. It is a familiar feeling to those accustomed to being used as pawns in government decisions impacting their lives and their livelihoods. Only after complaints poured in and smoke from the current Sanford fire in the northern part of Garfield County began to seriously affect the health of residents in nearby communities did the U.S. Forest Service begin to listen, begin to "hear" the local people. " "We hear you" was their sudden serious response after they called two emergency meetings - in Tropic and in Antimony - to cpnsider finally the concerns of local residents. At the outset in mid-April, the Forest Service ignited a prescribed burn in the general Sanford area which had burned slowly. Only a few firefighters were on the scene, most had been sent home when suddenly the burn flared into a full-fledged out-of-control fire, whipped by furious winds in May. By the time the emergency meetings were held on June 15 and 17, the worst of the damage had been done, with some 75,000 acres burned off by the time additional firefighting crews were brought in several sever-al days later. By then, some of the county's most beautiful terrain ter-rain resembled a moonscape, terrain where a great variety of wildlife lived, where trees that would take a lifetime to replace grew, areas where sheep and cattle grazed, cool and lovely areas where local horseback arid' ATV guides took visitors to see the beauty and where the guides - under permits sold to them by the Forest Service -earned their livings, afeas enjoyed by several generations gener-ations of local families. Environmentalist-driven decisions controlling the nation's public lands agencies have virtually destroyed the economic base of Garfield County - its timber harvesting, coal, oil, minerals, and grazing. Now the county has become almost totally dependent depend-ent upon tourism for'survival and that industry has failed to live up to environmentalist-touted expectations. expecta-tions. The Sanford fire was now doing its part to put one more nail in the coffin tourists don't go where the fires are burning or where the smoke eliminates the awesome views they come for. Nor do they come to ride through a moonscape to see how the Forest Service "manages" its' forests or hunt where the wildlife has been driven away, nor stay in the motels when they aren't sure, they'll be able to see through the smoky haze the views they came to see. One more government decision was destroying yet another piece of the lifestyle the residents of Garfield County had forged for themselves over a century of conquering the formidable economic challenges of living in the rural west. That decision was to allow the Sanford fire to burn until fall when, hopefully, cooler temperatures would cause it to go out naturally. Why not just put it out? Forest Service experts explained to the few sick, red-eyed and angry local folk who learned of the emergency meetings in time to attend that there are three criteria which they weigh against the cost of aggressively fighting fifes: (1) safety of fire fighting personnel, (2) the threat to private property, and (3) the value of the timber.resource itself. It appears that these1 criteria include neither the threat to local health nor to the impact on local economy. econ-omy. , We know that ForestcService personnel are bound by the regulations of their agency, but most local folk can remember when our forests were healthy, when things worked differently. They remember when the Forest Service really "managed" the forest, for-est, using methods that preserved and protected it -when experienced Forest Service personnel - rather than Washington D.G environmentalist lobbying -decided what trees to cut, where to thin, how to keep the forest healthy. Some remember an infestation on Boulder Mountain a rrqmber of years ago that was checked early on by ,'cutting timber and treating where beetles threatened, not left to the total destruction as the spruce trees in the forest on Cedar Mountain have been. !' Years ago the government agencies worked closely close-ly with local people; 'their people were often local people - our friends! and neighbors, people who understood the area, not those trained only in scientific scien-tific theory. There was a hands-on understanding of what worked and what didn't work. Ask any local person who has lived here for at least 50 years if he or she would have deliberately started any kind of fire in a drought year such as this - ask those in their 90's who have lived their lives in this county and they will tell you it is the worst drought year in their memories. We cannot help asking as the regular fire season only begins, "Whatever happened to common sense?" And One Thing More... Notifying the public about certain planned actions is required by law of government agencies, and we believe the public is not always being satisfactorily notified. When the local Forest Service office in Panguitch chooses to place its legal notices about proposed Prescribed Burns and Scoping Meetings in a Cedar CitySt. George newspaper instead of in the Garfield County News which has four or five times the readership in Garfield County, we question how seriously that agency wants the public to know what it is planning to do- |