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

Abstract

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