Smoked Ribs, Apple Pie and Fuel Reduction

By Matthew Koehler, Unfiltered 5-23-07

What do you get when you mix together a Missoula environmental group, a local logging crew, the volunteer fire department and all-you-can-eat smoked ribs and homemade apple pie? Good times, hard work and the second annual DeBorgia Community Wildfire Protection Work Week of course!

That's exactly what happened May 12th to 15th as the WildWest Institute, West End Volunteer Fire Department and a fuel reduction crew from Wildland Conservation Services used “Firewise” principles to create defensible space on private land around the DeBorgia community through education, action and fellowship.

The DeBorgia community sits about 85 miles west of Missoula along I-90 and is surrounded by lush, diverse forests of pine, fir, larch, cedar and yew. A fair number of the residents in the area are elderly, meaning that the arduous task of reducing fuels around their homes isn’t something that they can easily accomplished on their own. That’s where the community wildfire protection work week comes in.

This year, a total of seven properties were treated during the work week courtesy of a grant that the WildWest Institute secured through the National Forest Foundation and the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation. The work varied from place to place and based on the preferences of each landowner, but generally included thinning small trees and brush, pruning braches and clearing fallen trees and branches from near homes. Larger trees were bucked up for firewood, with nearly a dozen cords of firewood created during the week, which will certainly be appreciated come winter. Two of the landowners even had enough sawlogs cut from immediately around their homes to deliver a load of logs to a local mill.

Thanks to the Frenchtown Fire Department and their remarkably hard-working and efficient three-person chipper crew, all of the mounds of “slash” created during the work week were quickly reduced to a few piles of chips.

Bruce Charles, chief of the West End Volunteer Fire Department, was thrilled with the success of the 2nd annual work week. "The basic homeowner preparation that took place during the work week will give our volunteer firefighters a much better opportunity to help save homes when wildfire does strike.”

The WildWest Institute’s Jake Kreilick – who was busy trimming limbs from larger trees using the “saw-on-a-stick” – explained, “Given the historical role of fire in shaping both the forest communities and the human communities out on the west end of Mineral County, this work week is vital to ensuring that home owners are putting 'firewise' principles into practice.”

While plenty of work got done during the week, there was also time for fun and socializing. A community potluck was held at the West End Volunteer Fire Department on Saturday evening with plenty of food and fellowship to go around – including those excellent smoked ribs and apple pie!

To learn more about Firewise principles, please visit http://www.firewise.org. For more information about the WildWest Institute, visit http://www.wildwestinstitute.org.

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