Mike Janicki has spent 40 years as a logger, and his work brings him to the unstable hillsides around this upper Skagit Valley town. During past decades, there have been large and small slides here, some on cut land and some on forested land. Those slides have damaged homes, dumped a hillside of silt into a reservoir and spilled onto roads. Again and again, Janicki and other loggers have returned to harvest fir, cedar and other trees.
Since the Oso disaster in neighboring Snohomish County one year ago, there has been only one application to log nearby slopes behind Concrete. That compares with a half-dozen requests in the 15 months before the landslide in the same 11,520-acre area.
The searing images of the March 22, 2014, landslide — where homes were buried by a surge of mud, logs and debris carried across the valley floor and 43 people lost their lives — gave new definition to what can happen when the land gives way. “We look at hillsides different now,” Janicki said. “So how are we going to treat the resource now compared to a year ago? More cautiously.”
That caution extends to the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The department faces lawsuits from survivors and families of those who died that assert lax regulation of logging in a groundwater-recharge zone above the slope played a role in the disaster.
In public statements during the past year, DNR officials have downplayed the possibility that logging could have contributed to the Oso slide. But during the past year, the agency has scrambled to beef up oversight of timber harvests on unstable slopes.
From The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/state-tackles-steep-challenges-to-step-up-logging-oversight/