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us out of it. This did not get us into it. This is one year in a very, 

 very long program and we need to start talking about how we are 

 going to get from A to some desirable condition further downline. 

 That is my answer, and excuse my speech. 



Mr. Vento. I appreciate it, but I just think it is an important 

 question because the presumption is that this is sort of a downpay- 

 ment and that you can reduce the amount of salvage, but I think 

 it is obvious from the economics and from weather and other fac- 

 tors that are going on that it is not likely to happen even if you 

 hit the so-called targets here, even if the market sustains it. 



I think the other issue, of course, is the whole fire regime issue 

 and the suggestion that simply the lack of an aggressive salvage 

 program is responsible for the fires. It would be good just for fires 

 to burn where there are salvage laws, but unfortunately, they do 

 not do that. 



Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 



Mr. Hansen. Thank you. 



If I may ask Nancy Hayes another question, we had some inter- 

 esting testimony to start out with. Sue Kupillas testified today 

 about the blowdown/snowdown salvage sale possibility and testified 

 there are tens of millions of board feet of timber, probably 100 mil- 

 lion board feet of timber in these lands. They say a lot of this is 

 sawmill quality timber. This is kind of under your jurisdiction. Do 

 you intend to harvest that? 



Ms. Hayes. Yes. We try and harvest any — well, if it is too dis- 

 persed, it is difficult to harvest it. It may not be cost effective. We 

 may not get bidders. But assuming that the blowdown is condensed 

 enough that it makes sense, we try to harvest that. My under- 

 standing, also, is that the forest plan does not preclude such har- 

 vest in LSRs, which 



Mr. Hansen. You have two of them. One is yours and one is the 

 Forest Service's. What does the Forest Service intend to do? 



Mr. Thomas. We ordinarily pick up any salvage opportunity that 

 we have that we can do under environmental restriction and that 

 makes some semblance of economic and social sense. But as Nancy 

 was trying to point out, even in the Northwest, where their lands 

 are located, and in Region 6 that we are discussing, such salvage 

 is not even precluded within late successional reserves. 



Mr. Hansen. I do not disagree with what you said earlier. Chief, 

 regarding the bigger picture. I agree with that, and I know that 

 some of these targets are sometimes arbitrary, just like we have ar- 

 bitrary things. We just kind of like to follow it out and see what 

 we can do to get the best of both worlds, if there is a way to do 

 that. You could salvage some of this timber, keep the prices of tim- 

 ber down, which seems to be totally prohibitive today. In fact, a 

 guy was telling me the other day you can build a steel house cheap- 

 er than you can a wood house, which I thought was an amazing 

 statement. 



Mr. Thomas. Mr. Chairman, I might want to point out to you 

 that we have had a precipitous decline in stumpage value, which 

 is part of our problem in being able to get some of this stuff mar- 

 keted. Things that we could have obviously marketed when we 

 started preparing the sale, by the time we got through, the price 

 had declined to the point where it was difficult for us to sell it. 



