The Implementation of Vegetation Management Projects on U.S. Forest Service Lands: The Big Eddy-Ostrander Vegetation Project on the Mt. Hood National Forest

摘要

Utility forestry has become a primary maintenance issue for the Bonneville Power Administration(BPA) since the August 10th, 1996, western United States outage. This issue has been sustained bythe massive power outage caused by tree outages last summer (2003) in the northeastern UnitedStates. One of the responses to the 1996 event by the Bonneville Power Administration was todevelop a programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the transmission system. Thegoal of the EIS was to develop a strategy and provide a clear path for managers to implementenvironmental analysis when developing powerline vegetation management programs on BPArights-of-way that cross in the Pacific Northwest. The Big Eddy-Ostrander project initiated onU.S. Forest Service lands, proposed the use of herbicides using the EIS as the analysis guide. Asa cooperative project with the Oregon Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service tocontrol noxious weeds, many items needed to be worked out. These items included: the determi-nation of who was the lead agency for the project, what formats should be used for environmentaldocuments, who could appeal the process, and what did each agency want to see during the en-vironmental analysis process. The end result of the process was that in the summer of 2003, BPAmade the first herbicide treatment for vegetation management on the right-of way located in theZig Zag Ranger District in over 20 years.