Work begins to restore thousands of blackened acres

Monday, Aug. 30, 1999 | 8:53 a.m.

Plans drawn up by the Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation team call for rehabilitation of about 47 percent of the more than 800,000 acres charred by brush fires in Elko, Eureka and Lander counties.

"I think it's impossible to reseed the entire burned area and hope all of you can agree with that," team head Tom Gavin told about 60 ranchers and federal agency personnel Thursday night at the Elko Convention Center.

"We're trying to prioritize the areas by front-loading in the first year the reseeding efforts that are not going to take a lot of intensive site prep."

Gavin said seeding is the best possibility federal agencies have of restoring the range, wildlife habitat and watershed areas.

Gavin also stressed the rehabilitation effort will be on public lands only, although some slop-over will occur on private lands since aerial seeding does not guarantee exact placement.

While discussions continued over the reseeding, fire crews were in the mopup stage Sunday of the largest current wildland fire in Nevada. The 45,000-acre blaze 45 miles north of Reno was 80 percent contained with full containment expected by nightfall.

That left the Sellem fire 80 miles southwest of Ely among the ongoing fires. It was only 10 percent contained.

Gavin said the three-year plan in northeast Nevada was open to amendment as the rehabilitation efforts progress.

"This is not a perfect plan and this is just a draft recommendation," he said.

Gavin's team, which has 11 members augmented by seven members of a second team because of the size of the area burned, mapped the blackened areas and the grazing allotments affected by the fires.

One cost-effective measure he said Congress should easily approve is the removal of wild horses from the range.

The plan calls for removal of 875 horses from the four horse management areas affected, with half going to Palomino Valley for possible adoption and the other half to be relocated elsewhere in the state.

"I doesn't make any sense at all for us to reseed hundreds and hundreds of acres and leave the wild horses on the range," Gavin said. "It makes no sense to jeopardize that $19 million investment by leaving those animals on the range."

Gavin also said a two-year moratorium on grazing on burned allotments will not be put in place and allotments will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.