Union Pacific Railroad Company Pays $102 Million to Settle Union Pacific Railroad Company (UP) will pay the United States $102 million to settle a civil lawsuit brought by the government to recover damages connected with the 2000 Storrie forest fire in the Plumas and Lassen National Forests in Northern California, U.S. Associate Attorney General Kevin O'Connor, U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey and U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced today. The settlement is the largest recovery in U.S. Forest Service history in a forest fire case. On Aug. 17, 2000, the Storrie forest fire ignited in the Feather River Canyon north of Storrie, Calif., on the railroad right-of-way within the Plumas National Forest. The United States' complaint alleged that the fire started as a result of a midday railroad track repair operation by UP employees who failed to take the necessary precautions to prevent the fire. The government contended that UP track maintenance workers failed to clear the area of flammable material, and failed to use appropriate spark shields in connection with high-speed rail saws and grinders, allowing the escape of small, hot pieces of metal that ultimately started the fire....
Federal investigators inquire about Plum Creek, Forest Service talks Federal investigators have begun looking into closed-door negotiations between the Bush administration and Seattle-based Plum Creek Timber Co., the nation's largest owner of private land. Disturbed that negotiations about U.S. Forest Service road easements near Plum Creek lands in Montana took place privately, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., last month asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate both the private nature of those talks and their outcome. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama criticized the talks soon after he spent the Fourth of July in Montana. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, confirmed Wednesday that the GAO contacted his office. "We met with them (investigators) once, and I expect we will meet again," Rey said in a phone interview. "They asked for information, which we provided and will continue to provide."....
Mountain bikers say they're being left out A disagreement over how to create a wilderness area is brewing in Southwest Colorado. At issue, about 150,000 acres in the Hermosa Creek Region right outside Durango. Several conservation groups want Congress to offer the area a protected status--but that has one particular group of recreators crying foul. Bruce Gordon is owner and operator of EcoFlights. He gives people a bird's eye view of scenic areas throughout the west. He says, "It's really a magical kind of place." Hunters, anglers, and conservationists are lobbying to have the 'West Hermosa Roadless Area' designated as wilderness. That means no motors, and no mountain bikes. Mary Monroe is the Executive Director of Trails 2000, a trail advocacy group operating in the Durango region. She says Hermosa Creek is known as one of the best mountain bike trails in the world." She says granting the entire area wilderness status would be unfair. Monroe says, "You can still hike on it you can still horseback on it you can still do things that our members like to do but there is one group that would be eliminated and that would be the mountain bikers." For months, different interests, including the San Juan Citizen's Alliance, Trout Unlimited, and Trails 2000 have been trying to come up with a plan that pleases everyone. But the mountain bikers have been the most vocal because primarily, they say they stand to lose the most--including a segment of the treasured Colorado trail. ...
Interior proposes lower royalties on oil shale he Bush administration on Tuesday proposed charging energy companies wanting to squeeze oil out of vast shale deposits in the West lower royalties than what they pay for drilling on other federal lands, including offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. In draft rules issued Tuesday, the Interior Department recommended a range of royalty rates for the extraction of oil from shale on 2 million acres of public property in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. All would be less -- at least for a time -- than the 12.5 percent to 18.8 percent the government currently collects from companies producing oil on and offshore. Interior officials said the discounted rate, which would be fixed at 5 percent in one proposal, would offer an incentive for companies to develop oil shale, which can cost up to three times more to produce than traditional oil. Shale oil also contains less energy than oil, coal and wood, the Interior Department said....
Limbaugh, Salazar trade oil-shale jabs The push to develop oil shale in Colorado is about helping oil companies and not about lowering gas prices, Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar said Wednesday in response to on-air criticism from radio host Rush Limbaugh. The day after the Bureau of Land Management unveiled preliminary rules for selling oil-shale leases in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, Limbaugh quoted President Bush as saying that shale could provide fuel to meet energy needs for more than 100 years and said Salazar was standing in the way. "Even with $4 a gallon gasoline, Salazar and his fellow Democrats are still preventing America from using our own resources to lower gas prices and create new jobs," Limbaugh said. Salazar, interviewed later on 850 KOA radio, said Limbaugh is "spreading falsehoods."....
Are we wasting billions fighting wildfires? More provocatively, the research suggests that fighting fires on public lands to protect homes is ineffective and, in the long run, counter-productive. It is also far more expensive. Federal agencies still put out nearly every fire that starts - of the around 80,000 blazes each year, just 327 are generally allowed to burn. Out of the 9.8 million acres that burned across the country last year, only about 430,000 acres burned without suppression, in what managers call "wildland fire use" blazes. Fire suppression costs have risen 6.5 times in a decade to $1.86 billion last year. At the same time, funding to make private homes and communities safer has dropped by more than 30 percent since 2001 - to less than $80 million in 2008 - and more cuts are proposed for 2009. This is the paradox of wildland fire management in America: Most scientists and fire managers agree that fire is a healthy and necessary part of the forest, and that fighting these blazes serves only to build up fuels and boost the size and frequency of catastrophic fires....
Firefighting burns money, manpower McCoy-Brown, a district ranger with the Boise National Forest, credits a nine-year, $1.6 million Forest Service program to thin trees and clear flammable brush with keeping the 300,000-acre Cascade Complex fire at bay last year. "It costs a lot less to do these projects than it does to fight a wildfire," she said. But taxpayers didn't see the savings. The Forest Service did fight that fire, at a cost of more than $53 million. While dollars and people were devoted to this and other forest fires around the West, preventive programs - like the one at Warm Lake - were put on hold. And fires rob federal agencies of more than just the resources needed to keep homes and cabins safe in the future. In big fire years - which, thanks in part to a century of suppression, are now more common than ever - money and manpower are diverted from recreational needs, environmental preservation and even timber sales. Scientists and land managers say the forests need fires to be healthy. They say requiring fire-proof roofs and clearing trees and shrubs within 100 feet of rural structures is a far cheaper and less dangerous way to protect private property than attacking forest fires deep in the wilderness....
BLM testing anti-dust solution A short-term solution may be at hand to diminish damage to ancient rock art in Nine Mile Canyon, where big rigs serving gas drilling on the West Tavaputs Plateau are kicking up dust laden with corrosive salt. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is working with Denver-based Bill Barrett Corp. and county officials to test a relatively benign dust suppressant that may replace the magnesium chloride the company now uses to wet the steep unpaved roads that lead to its gas field. The product, Pennzsuppress D, contains materials similar to pine resin and soap that can penetrate dirt and repel moisture but it doesn't require water and can be ground up into the roadbed instead of sprayed on the surface. "It looks like it has potential. It looks good. I am cautiously optimistic," said Pam Miller, chairwoman of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, a conservation group dedicated to preserving the ancient Puebloan cultural sites spread throughout the area....
Woman Attacked by Bear Expected to Survive A 57-year-old woman is recovering from serious injuries after she was mauled by a bear while walking her dogs in Kern County. The bear attacked Allena Hansen and her two dogs Tuesday morning near the tiny rural community of Caliente, about five miles away from an area that burned in a recent wildfire. Despite suffering severe lacerations to her face and head, Hansen escaped and somehow drove herself three miles to the nearby Piute fire station, authorities said. "For her to be attacked in that manner and drive to a fire station, she must have been running on pure adrenaline," county fire spokesman Sean Collins said. "It's quite incredible actually that she did manage to get herself down here because I'm figuring there must have been a lot of blood also involved as well", he added. Hansen's friend August Dunning says he's really not surprised that she survived the ordeal....
Nitrates that killed wild horses were a natural occurrence A study released by the Bureau of Land Management shows that high levels of nitrates present in water in a depression near Cactus Flat were not from industrial sources. The high nitrates were from a combination of evaporative concentration and animal waste and natural soil nitrogen from air deposition. Last June, 71 wild horses on the Nevada Wild Horse Range, which is within the U.S. Air Force's Nellis Test and Training Range, died from nitrate poisoning at the site of the depression. The study conducted by Desert Research Institute determined that the two sources of high nitrates that caused the deaths of the horses were: * An increase in the concentration of naturally occurring nitrate due to high rates of evaporation of the water, and * The chemical conversion of nitrogen to nitrate that occurs through a process called nitrification in natural materials, including animal waste and natural soil nitrogen produced by aerial deposition....
Drilling taking over Rockies Colorado's former big game manager, John Ellenberger, remembers when the Piceance Basin was called the state's mule-deer factory because of its tens of thousands of deer. The 7,110-square-mile basin, about 170 miles west of Denver and dissected by the Colorado River, boasts some of the largest deer and elk herds in the country. Now Ellenberger wonders if Colorado can keep those bragging rights. During a recent tour of the basin, 18-wheelers barreled down a county road as companies drilled holes and laid pipes for natural gas in what has become one of the nation's energy hot spots. "You definitely get this feeling of being in the middle of an industrial zone," Ellenberger said. Throughout the Rockies - the Pinedale Anticline of northwestern Wyoming, the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming and southern Montana - the energy boom is changing a once-pristine landscape. It's generating lawsuits, regulatory fights and heated public relations battles between those championing America's untapped energy potential and those worried about populations of deer, elk, pronghorns and sage grouse....