(soft instrumental music)
- Shared Stewardship is about bringing people together
in a very initially, it was about bringing the State
and the Forest Service together
and it will take all of us to deal with wildfire risk.
- Historically, we've always looked
at these little post-it stamps,
10, 20, 50, 100 acres.
This one's looking large-scale.
- But just having a big line of defense is not enough.
You have to impact the whole system.
(gentle music)
- Shared Stewardship is a way of bringing folks
who care about the wildfire problem together
to make a very big difference.
- Even though this particular site
is on National Forest System land,
if you go a mile up the road,
we're on a totally different jurisdiction.
- Our project here that we're talking about today
is the Beaver River Watershed Improvement
Shared Stewardship Project.
We started overlapping with Bureau of Land Management.
We started overlapping with the city
or with the counties and with the State lands.
And so we started have to go,
"Hey neighbors, how can we work together
to not have these lines on a map?"
And all of a sudden our treatment stopped.
- There is no one entity that can do this by itself.
Instead we can work together to confront
the major challenges of catastrophic wildfire.
- We have more tools now within Shared Stewardship
than we've ever had
because we have all the partners at the table.
- We're bringing the resources that we need
and the partnerships we need to be able
to really make a difference on this landscape.
(instrumental music)
- So this project benefits you
because what we're doing is identifying those areas
that are most at risk.
- [Woman] Where can we truly make a difference long term
on the ground to get work done that will help protect
our citizens.
- We have homes, we have campgrounds,
we have municipal watershed.
We also have a high fire risk in this area.
So this is an area where that risk and that value intersect.
- And in getting ahead of those problems,
provides huge benefits because we won't have to invest
in large scale firefighting.
- And so, this is something that's been very deliberate,
very strategic on when and where we're doing our treatments.
- So Shared Stewardship is about working
with the right partners at the right time
in the right places.
- A lot of emphasis is gonna be put
on the protection of these values.
So we want to do these mechanical treatments
upfront to set our suppression resources up for success.
- Mitigation is the one thing that we can deal with.
We use that mitigation and in such a way
that critical areas are treated.
We interrupt that continuity
so we can affect how wildfire reacts when it hits that area.
- The core treatments that we are working
on are mastication or it's a mechanical technique.
- Mastication is a rotating head.
They grind up or shred the vegetation.
- We have thinning.
- Ladder fuels are the fuels
that allow the fire to climb into the canopy.
If we can eliminate the ladder fuels by use of a chainsaw
which is just pruning the tree up,
it makes it more difficult
for the fire to leave the forest floor
and climb into the canopy.
- Getting rid of dangerous trees, cleaning the underbrush.
- We can use prescribed fire in a controlled manner
or even a wildfire at the right place at the right time.
- Carrying drip torches in our hands,
Terra Torches on UTVs,
and then we also use aerial equipment.
- We have a few contractors
that are now mechanically inclined.
So machines do all the falling
and bucking and slash gathering.
- Contractors are going to get the trees.
They're going to drop the trees and then pile them.
We are working forward to look at the whole landscape
but we had to be very strategic on kind of the where
and the when, and then allow fire to do its natural thing.
- Not only are we trying to protect private property
and we've got the ski resort,
that's a huge economic boom, but also the watershed.
- A great amount of water in Utah
comes from National Forest System lands, the mountains.
And if we have a wildfire come through
and affect the water delivery system,
that can be even a bigger deal
than effecting some structures.
(guitar music)
- We're contracting with timber companies
to remove small logs and larger trees.
And they're turning those into wood products.
- Cut it, we're gonna drop it
and then we're also gonna deck it.
And the long-term the plan is to sell those decks.
So we are getting the product off the forest.
We also look at all the other benefiting factors.
So we're trying to build partnerships.
We're trying to build resiliency in the landscape
because not all fire is bad, fire in the right time,
right place and right intensity is really good.
And also we're trying to help local communities.
- We're always collaborating.
We're talking to them on where they're working.
So if they're saying they're working close to a community,
we focus in on that community.
- One of the great things about being the sheriff
in Beaver County is the great relationships with our local.
- We had a fire up on the mountain
near the resort this year.
- I was working over at the lodge.
I looked out and the fire was already extremely larger
than we could handle.
Very short, I mean, I was very impressed with the time
that everyone got up here that the sheriff sent
and water tankers and things started getting up here.
- These guys were so on the ball and so on top of things.
- I mean, it seriously
all comes together as one big group.
And without those, we wouldn't be here right now.
Working as a community is a real honor
because if we don't work as a team, really dangerous scary
things could happen.
- Our goals in working together is to really create a safer
and healthier forest.
- You have to do these things
at large scales to have an impact for them to matter.
- Shared Stewardship is about bringing people into that
fold of, we have an issue let's work on it.
And that's what makes it pretty exciting is it's working.
- From everything that I have seen,
Sheriff stewardship is the big success story of the West.
And this Shared Stewardship might be the key
to having healthy forests again.
(instrumental music)