As the world demand for timber continues to increase and the demand for profit also escalates, while prime logging locations have long ago been logged, steeper and less stable land is being harvested using the outmoded method of clear cut logging.
The odds that this slide prone area in Washington State would collapse without any logging activity could be argued, but most reasonable and scientific minds would conclude that clearcut logging activity hastened and intensified the catastrophic landslide. Living trees do a number of things to maintain the geographic features of the earth. Old forests develop massive root systems that help hold soil in place and take up tremendous amounts of water helping mange massive amounts as it falls to the earth. Trees take up huge quantities of water that is simply returned to the air through the trees respiration system, insuring future rains. One tree can take up more than 400 gallons of water a day that is simply evaporated into the air, preventing soils from becoming over saturated, a contributing cause of landslides.
The first image above is form 1989 showing that a large area of trees, on the edge of the restricted landslide area, was harvested using the clearcut method. ?The second image from 2005 shows signs of the slide area beginning to slough, at which time another clearcut harvest was done the extended into the zone designated as not to be logged due to landslide danger. The third image shows clear signs that massive movement of the slide is taking place, only 9 months after the most recent clearcut logging activity.
The first image above is a satellite photo taken in March of 2014. It is not very clear, due to partial cloud cover, but does show the catastrophic failure of the slide prone area. It is hard to imagine the extreme steepness of the area being logged but the second image above shows the topography of the mountainside and also indicates that a large portion of the toe of the plateau that was being logged fell away from the mountain. The third image above shows the most recent logging activity on the upper right edge of the slide. You can see into the logging clearcut. A portion of this logged land collapsed onto the homes and people below.
Clearcutting is much like strip mining, you totally devastate an area to harvest the product in the most “economical way possible” and then try to regenerate the forest by decreasing the gene pool of trees planted on the devastated land.
Edited/Published by: SB
