EDITORIAL: Welcome work in Baker City’s watershed

Published 1:00 pm Wednesday, August 3, 2022

We can’t permanently and completely protect Baker City’s watershed from wildfire.

Fire is a natural force too powerful to totally tame, as the catastrophic blazes that have become all too common across the West over the past decade attest.

But we can reduce the risk — perhaps by a meaningful amount — that a fire will devastate the 10,000-acre watershed, creating a water supply crisis and likely forcing the city to spend more than $10 million to build a water filtration plant.

U.S. Forest Service officials plan to start, as soon as the summer of 2023, the most ambitious such project in and around the watershed in decades.

Kendall Cikanek, ranger for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest’s Whitman District, announced in late July that the forest has scheduled a public open house to give residents information about the watershed project. The open house is set for Aug. 17 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Baker County Events Center, 2600 East St.

Forest Service and Baker City officials have talked for many years about the threat wildfire poses to the watershed, most of which is densely forested. The area, on the east slopes of the Elkhorn Mountains west of town, is public property but most of the watershed is closed to the public. The city allows limited access for hunters when the fire danger isn’t extreme, and one open road, leading to Marble Creek Pass, runs through the watershed.

The forests in parts of the watershed are types where wildfires have historically been infrequent, but when they do burn they tend to be severe. Cikanek said there hasn’t been a large fire in the watershed since the 1880s. And when researchers studied old fire-scarred trees in the watershed in the mid 1990s, they concluded that such a blaze, based on past intervals, is overdue.

Fortunately the watershed is not only close to Baker City, where the Wallowa-Whitman has firefighters stationed, but it’s visible from most of the valley, so when a fire does start — typically sparked by lightning — the smoke is seen, and reported, quickly. Fire crews have rapidly doused every blaze in the watershed over the past several decades.

But the risk remains. And the danger continues to increase as climate change results in longer, more severe fire seasons.

Wallowa-Whitman officials intend to curb that risk through a variety of tactics, with two chief goals. The first is to reduce the chances that a fire will spread into the watershed from outside its boundaries. The second is to give firefighters a better chance to confine a fire inside the watershed to no more than a few drainages. The latter goal is vital because the city diverts water from a dozen streams and springs. The fewer of those sources affected by a fire, the more likely the city could still have a sufficient supply while the burned drainages are healing — particularly with the city’s second backup well coming online later this year.

The Wallowa-Whitman proposes to achieve these goals through a combination of cutting trees — including commercial logging, primarily outside the watershed itself — and prescribed burning to reduce the amount of combustible stuff. A key component of the plan inside the watershed is to create fire breaks — swathes where the number of trees and amount of ground litter are both substantially reduced — along the tops of the ridges that divide major streams such as Elk, Salmon, Marble and Mill creeks. Fire crews could use these fire breaks as anchors, a sort of no man’s land where flames could be stopped.

Like all cities, Baker City needs a reliable water supply. Wildfire is one of the biggest threats to that supply, which makes the Wallowa-Whitman’s watershed project both crucial and most welcome.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor