‘The Slaughter Has Begun’: In an Attempt to Mitigate the Threat of Wildfire, PG&E Cuts a Wide Swath Through a Southern Humboldt Community

Harry Vaughn leans against one of the giant trees PG&E plans to remove. [Photo provided by Harry Vaughn]

So Vaughn was alarmed when PG&E contractors started showing up en masse over the summer, marking almost 700 trees on his property with numbers, dots, and huge yellow X’s. He says he found them in his yard at odd hours of the day; that they came to his door without masks and took offense when he asked them if they had been vaccinated.

Gradually, he learned that PG&E was conducting what’s called an enhanced vegetation management (EVM) operation along its power lines, which run along the road and through his and his neighbors’ properties. The yellow X signifies that the tree has been selected for removal. Vaughn, who has a nonindustrial timber management plan on his property, realizes a significant amount of his family’s income from logging the large Douglas firs that he takes to a local mill. He estimated it would cost him tens of thousands of dollars in high-value timber if PG&E removed all the trees it had marked.

Vaughn also maintains an area of “dappled shade,” or just the right combination of sunlight through canopy, for a mushroom farm alongside a fuel break, where he grows more than twenty varieties of mushrooms for the farmers market in Miranda. Taking down trees around the farm would ruin those conditions.

But a special ache was reserved for a grove of tanoak trees on the edge of an oatgrass meadow — and within sight of a power line. In 2006, Vaughn devoted that plot to a UC Davis study of sudden oak death. “It’s kind of a shame,” he remarked, “to have PG&E contractors come through and cut down our success story on saving our tanoaks.”

After months of marking trees, the cutting on his and his neighbors’ properties has begun in earnest. PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said work in the Salmon Creek community is expected to last through the end of the year, mostly seven days a week, between 7a.m.-5 p.m., along approximately 23 miles of circuit, aka PG&E’s power poles and lines.

PG&E is working in multiple areas of northern California. This shows an in progress EVM in the Rancho Sequoia area of Southern Humboldt. [Photo provided by LaDonna Avera]

Vaughn and his neighbors aren’t the only ones trying to make sense of PG&E’s tree removal. Enhanced vegetation management, or EVM, is part of PG&E’s pledge to stop catastrophic wildfires, in part by clearing vegetation from 2,400 miles of lines in high fire risk areas by the end of the year, according to the company website. The Sierra Club Wildfire Mitigation Task Force wrote a scathing white paper, arguing that other methods of hardening the lines, like increasing the number of circuit miles with steel-core triple insulation and installing computerized circuit breakers, would be more cost-effective, would prevent more fires, and would reduce environmental damage.

The EVM program has not been subject to external environmental review or much at all in terms of regulation. Company representatives claim that their internal environmental review and best management practices meet or exceed state and federal standards, but those assessments are not available for public comment or review. 

The practice of clearing trees around power lines is allowed, under the Forest Practice Rules and the Public Resource Code, though the PRC also requires a permit and a license for timber operations. The work is under the jurisdiction of Cal Fire, which is authorized to enforce violations. In some counties, inspectors have sent notices of violation to the company and the licensed timber operators it employs, informing them that they have not filed Utility Right of Way Exemption permits. For instance, the San Mateo/Santa Cruz Unit issued eight notices of violation over the last year and a half, citing the lack of appropriate permits, conducting logging operations during the winter operating period without a winter operating plan, failure to water the roads or install water bars, and inappropriate treatment of slash and debris.

More locally, Vaughn was staggered by what he viewed as the ineptitude of company arborists, whom he reports as having identified some fir trees as tanoaks. “Where is that at?” he wondered.

PG&E took down multiple trees at this EVM in Rancho Sequoia. [Photo provided by LaDonna Avera]

Salmon Creek Road and its offshoot, Thomas Road, dwindle to narrow, steep stretches with intermittent pullouts. Residents have reported seeing between 50 and nearly 100 trucks on the road during one trip to town, including chippers, cherry pickers and personal vehicles of the workers.

On Thursday, November 11, a dump truck belonging to Johns’ Trucking went over the edge of the road into the ravine. No injuries were reported, but a witness told us that he nearly went off the road in the exact same place in his pickup truck. He said crews were using chainsaws above the area and he believes the bar oil for the equipment had made the road slippery. The California Highway Patrol hadn’t yet finished their investigation on Friday when we spoke to them.

A dump truck hauling gravel wrecked off Thomas Road last week. [Photo from Noel Soucy] 

PG&E has an encroachment permit from the county for routine maintenance “within the County highway or right of way.” But Kevin Church,* a licensed civil engineer who retired as the Chief of Environmental Engineering for Caltrans District 1 and 2, has observed the work firsthand. “To call [the tree work] routine is a stretch,” he said. The permit PG&E holds with the County requires workers to conform to state standards for warning signs and flaggers, and, while Church acknowledged that crews have “upped their game a bit” since the start of the project, “they are still not complying.” 

He added, “I know they’re not complying” with another requirement that crews follow Caltrans regulations about lane closures.

The work that is being done outside the boundary of county-maintained roads is not covered by the permit as the county does not have the authority to allow encroachment onto private property. We checked with Humboldt County code enforcement on Wednesday afternoon about additional documents/permits, but the office requested more information before the Veteran’s Day holiday and have been unavailable since then. Calls and emails to Cal Fire asking about PG&E vegetation management permits in Humboldt County were not immediately returned.

Does EVM Work? Environmental Concerns

Removing all the vegetation along the powerlines does not create a shaded fuel break. Some experts regard it as a clear cut that converts the landscape from forest to grassland.

In September, Michael Jones, the UC cooperative extension Forestry Advisor for Mendocino, Lake, and Sonoma counties, led this reporter around a clear cut site at the Hopland Research and Extension Center, a rural research outpost in inland Mendocino County. He identified the swathes of denuded hillside as a conversion, from oak savannah to rangeland. “Now that they’ve opened up the canopy and there’s a lot more light,” he observed, “there’s gonna be a lot more shrub and grass buildup under those power lines…[Y]ou’ve removed the risk of trees falling into the lines, but now you’ve added a bunch of fine fuels, that, should you have equipment failure, you are gonna have different fire behavior.”

Jones is not squeamish about prescribed burns or removing trees to create fuel breaks. “I’m not at all against fuels reduction and managing the forest,” he said. “There’s a huge surplus of biomass that we need to figure out how to manage…but what PG&E is doing in some areas they deem are high risk is conversion. It’s really clear cut and conversion along these right of ways that create really significant ecological impacts on the continuity of forest structure…for a small animal that lives in these ecosystems, or trees that are trying to grow in here, this is a huge barrier to their ability to move through the system. So there could be some potential big impacts from this kind of management.” 

Jones described shaded fuel breaks as “really powerful in helping us to do fire suppression and defensible space management. But you still leave a portion of the canopy there. These are basically denuded of all their vegetation right now. So it’s pretty aggressive. And frankly, it’s not sustainable…this is going to require an extensive amount of long term follow-up management that  I don’t know if they have the longevity for.”

One method of keeping returning vegetation in check is using herbicides. PG&E spokesperson Deanna Contreras said, “It is very rare for us to use herbicides during EVM work but if we do come across a resprouting species, we may look to use herbicides…if a property owner requests we not use herbicides on their property, we will not use them.”

But the fine fuels Jones mentioned are often invasive species that flourish after a fire. Kyle Keegan is a restorationist and ecological design consultant who lives a few miles up Salmon Creek Road. He’s worked on stream restoration with the Eel River Recovery Program and native grassland restoration with his neighbor Harry Vaughn. “The prescription for preventing fire along a road is a shaded fuel break,” he said, but that means leaving the overstory intact so the shade discourages invasive plants like Scotch and French broom.

Forest showing signs of Sudden Oak Death [Image from the Lost Coast Interpretive Center]

Christopher Lee, the Chair of the California Oak Mortality Task Force, agrees that this is a valid concern. He said the Task Force, UC Cooperative Extension, and Cal Fire have made efforts to reach out to the company’s subcontractors over the years, but “the cast of subcontractors is very large and frequently changing.” Sanitation protocols are complicated, because different tree species spread the disease differently.

Contreras assured us that PG&E followed the Task Force guidelines, and that transporting potentially infected material from one county to another is “allowable but discouraged…Material may not pass through an “uninfected” county or into an “uninfected” county without a compliance agreement filed with the agricultural commissioners of both involved counties.”

However, many of the fallen trees and brush are chipped and the chips trucked to other properties potentially spreading Sudden Oak Death within the county.

Approved timber harvest plans include a declaration of how the harvest will not contribute to the spread of Sudden Oak Death, but Lee acknowledges that this can get “murky,” under ministerial harvest documents, or the exemption permits under which PG&E may be operating.

The permit status of the work is unclear. In San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties last year, PG&E declined to obtain permits for EVM work along power lines after the CZU Lightning Fire, though a notice of violation by Richard Sampson, the Division Chief and forester in Resource Management and Fire Prevention at the San Mateo/Santa Cruz unit, notes that the company did prepare exemption permits for the same kind of work prior to June 2020. Local Cal Fire offices did not respond immediately to queries about the permit status of PG&E work in Humboldt County. We are still attempting to locate and gain access to the permits and environmental documents under which PG&E is operating.

A cost-benefit analysis of PG&E’s enhanced vegetation management program, prepared by members of the Sierra Club’s Wildfire Prevention Task Force and others, argues that EVM only addresses, at most, 35% all ignition drivers, or events that start fires. The paper invites readers to compare the program with triple layered covered conductor, used by other utilities, “which addresses a prevention of up to 90% of all ignitions. PG&E for all it does is still left with an aging system.” Citing the Liberty Consulting Group’s study of risk assessment and PG&E’s General Rate Case from 2013, the report adds, “Most ignitions are within PG&E’s forested regions, where thousands of circuit miles are antiquated bare copper wire.”

‘The Slaughter Has Begun’

In late October, Harry Vaughn had high hopes for holding off PG&E, with the help of the forester who writes his nonindustrial timber management plan. The forester filed a no-work order with the company, and PG&E was paying for the re-evaluation. “We’ve got time,” Vaughn said. “I don’t know what PG&E’s rush is.”

But late last week, Vaughn learned he had only managed to save about 25% of the marked trees on his property. However, at least the test plot grove is safe for now, and so is the mushroom farm.

He walked the power lines with a cousin early Friday morning and took commemorative pictures of trees scheduled to be cut down any day now. “I sure wish we could appeal the decision before PG&E cuts down our old growth,” he wrote. “But the slaughter has begun.”

Harry Vaughn barely can begin to reach his arms around this giant slated for removal. [Photo provided by Harry Vaughn]