Dubbed the Forest Health Act of 2011, Senate Bill 267 (pdf) was sponsored by Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass. The bill is sponsored by state Reps. Millie Hamner, D-Dillon, and Don Coram, R-Montrose, in the House.

“As we continue our work to combat Colorado’s serious beetle epidemic, the group of experts brought together by this bill will help us harvest fuels, develop healthy forests and allow our state to address the threat of tragic forest fires,” Schwartz said in a release.

Colorado and southern Wyoming have been ravaged by an ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed more than 4 million acres of lodgepole pine trees. Several communities, including Vail and Avon, have explored ways to mitigate the impacts by using forest waste to create heat and electricity in biomass power plants. Vail was on the verge of developing a multi-megawatt biomass power plant but lost out in the final round of Department of Energy funding.

Such facilities have been producing power in Europe for years, utilizing a process called high-heat wood gasification that consumes forest waste with very low emissions. It’s considered carbon neutral when compared to the emissions that would occur in a fire or even in the normal process of decomposition on the forest floor.

However, environmental groups have expressed concerns about accessing the dead trees in and around mountain communities, fearful that new networks of logging roads will be needed to thin forests on public lands, thereby creating erosion problems and impacting streams and rivers.

The new group formed under the bill and convened by the Colorado State Forester “will help us to identify market-based solutions to protect our forests, stimulate biomass energy development and create good paying jobs,” according to Schwartz.

If the bill passes out of the House in the waning hours of the session, the group would be required to complete its initial report by Nov. 1 and then finalize it and present it to the State Legislature by Jan. 1 of next year.

[Image: Gail Schwartz ]

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Hurricane Katrina victims take note. Michael Brown is safe.

A series of wind-whipped wildfires north of Boulder, Colo., have forced the evacuation of more than 11,500 residents — including Brown, the vilified ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency head.

Brown was lauded by President Bush for doing a “heckuva job” in the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, which took the lives of 1,836 people and caused more than $81 billion in damage. Brown resigned in disgrace and the event looms as a national turning point against the Bush administration.

This week, PBS’s “Frontline” broadcast a heart-wrenching investigative report, “The Old Man and the Storm,” about struggling post-Katrina rebuilding efforts more than three years after the massive hurricane destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

FEMA has promised to pay up to 75 percent of firefighting costs, according to a Daily Camera story.

The latest images and ground reports via Twitter can be found at twemes.com/boulderfire.

h/t Westword

Wendy Norris is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Colorado Independent. ]]> http://washingtonindependent.com/24440/ex-fema-head-michael-brown-evacuated-from-colorado-wildfire/feed 0