Burned forest to yield lumber bonanza

BASTROP (KXAN) - On the surface, it appears that the once scurrying pace of burned tree removal from a Bastrop wildfire zone has ground to a halt. Tuesday, at a Bastrop County grinding site leased by Bluebonnet Electric Co-op, only a couple of trucks were being unloaded. Nearby, the huge grinder sat quietly as workers spent their time doing maintenance on the machine.

The slow down came because of the surprising emergence of some survivors of the fire, survivors that saved their lives by sitting out the blaze beneath the pine tree forest.

They are Houston toads, members of an endangered species thought to have been all but wiped out by the flames and the months of drought that preceded them.

Over the past week or so, unusually mild winter temperatures and regular rains coaxed the toads from their hiding places to feed and breed. That led regulators from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to put the brakes on efforts to clear dead trees from power line right-of-way in the 34,000 acre burn zone.

“It's the breeding season,” said Bluebonnet General Manager Mark Rose. “Clearly the fire has had an impact. FEMA and the feds want us to work around the breeding season. We're compliant. It's just not something we're arguing about.”

The slowdown impacts only areas controlled by agencies such as the co-op and the county, not private lands.

The feds are working to speed up the process. This week, they added two experts to the team overseeing the toads’ predicament. Michael Forstner, a Texas State University biology professor and James Dixon, professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, will help protect the animals as crews and their heavy machines remove the burned trees.

As the process goes forward, monitors will accompany the crews and look in places the toads would typically be before work begins. Any that are found will be moved to safety or sent to captive breeding programs. That will slow things down, but Rose sees a silver lining.

“The delay could provide an opportunity for some folks to really rethink about what we do with this lumber and maybe get some bigger and broader strategies in play.”

In the beginning, officials settled on mulching as the preferred approach to recycling removed trees. They appear to be changing their collective minds now. The reason can be found on a spot of land roughly an hour’s drive from the scorched forest.

Austin Wood Recycling has a huge yard just south of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. In that yard stands an enormous pile of mulch ground from pine trees taken from Bastrop and mixed with hardwoods like cedar elm and oak harvested from construction and highway job sites around Central Texas.

‘We've probably got around 130,000 (cubic) yards in this pile,” said Austin Wood Recycling President Jerome Alder.

Alder figures each yard weighs between 400 and 500 pounds. Do the math and you’re looking at a pile of coarse mulch that weighs in at roughly 6,000,000 pounds.

The mulch in the pile is left to “cook” for up to a year, and then run through another grinder that reduces the product to the proper size for use by consumers throughout the area.

“We deal with contractors,” said Alder, “and we sell it to Home Depots and Lowe's and landscapers and nurseries. We also sell it to the Natural Gardner here in town.

“We ground for Ranger Excavating on the F1 (race track) project abd we did the 183A toll road. We're currently working on the 290 Manor Expressway project. We clearing out there and grinding.”

So even without the Houston Toad-induced slowdown in Bastrop, it would take a very, very long time to go through the mountain of mulch material in the wood recycling yard.

“I don't think it should just be mulch,” said Rose.

“Now we're beginning to see some folks talking about actually turning this into wood for re-use and we're going to do everything we can do to help those folks make that happen.”

So at the co-op’s grinding site, incoming trees are sorted, and bigger logs are salvaged for free lumber for anyone with a good use for it.

According to a co-op spokesperson, a huge stack of logs at the site is bound for the Schlitterbahn amusement park company.

“They're building a new facility;” Rose said. “They're building cabins. As I understand it, Schlitterbahn is not what Schlitterbahn used to be; they have a lot more facilities.

“They contacted us early on. They wanted to be able to say that they used reclaimed wood; so we're processing that wood for them.”

Co-op workers are also setting aside 17-foot logs for use by a non-profit group called, “Logs to Lumber.”

“Their goal is to literally mill the trees and produce lumber,” Rose said. “They're zeroing in on folks who are building homes that didn't have insurance.

“We want to dispose of the lumber. I mean if Temple-Inland said they wanted it, they can have it, because for us, this is environmental stewardship. It's not about making money.”

That is Bluebonnet policy under Rose’s leadership, but