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Environment Specialist John Hollenhorst reporting
After last summer's devastating wildfire season, the White House has ordered federal agencies to speed up 10 projects to protect communities.
Two of the 10 are in Utah.
A major environmental group is cautiously supporting those two, but watching warily from the sidelines.
This is one thing guaranteed to get your attention. A giant wildfire, bearing down on a town. It happened repeatedly last summer, most agree, because too much fuel has built up in forests and on rangeland.
"Once the fire gets going, we just can't control them," says Dave Thomas with the U.S. Forest Service.
Agencies want to get ahead of the curve by removing vegetation.
In two demonstration projects near towns like Holden and Scipio, Pine Valley and Central, they plan to burn, mow, saw, or chop trees, shrubs and grass.
"We want to do everything in our power to prevent forest fires, brush fires, from coming at the towns and burning them down and hurting people," Thomas says.
Here's one case in which the Sierra Club, cautiously, tentatively, supports government intervention, as long as the agencies do what they promise: focus on protecting homes instead of cutting trees deep in the forests.
"But the sounds of it are that these might be the kind of projects that in fact we should be doing throughout the west," says Lawson LeGate with the Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club's larger worry is that fire fears will be an excuse for the Bush administration and timber companies to cut trees for profit in the national forests.
"The Bush administration has a very carefully plotted policy to cut back on environmental protections," LeGate says.
Environmentalists are doubly suspicious of the 10 demonstration projects. The White House specifically asked agencies to streamline approvals, supposedly without weakening environmental protections.
"But doing it in a manner that we don't get all clogged up with process and paperwork so we can be in the field and doing the work," Thomas says.
Usually the approval process takes a year or two. Now, the agencies hope to be removing vegetation in a matter of months before the next Season of Fire.
Similar projects are done often in Utah, but without the streamlined approval process.
By one estimate, Utah will see at least 30 fuel reduction projects this year alone.
