BLM is six days into the 21 day ESR planning process. The clock began ticking last Friday October 2, the date of full fire containment, and the draft plan must be submitted to BLM headquarters by October 23. The ESR plan will request funding sufficient to implement the plan’s recommendations.

As you recall, the ESR team is composed of staff from my office, as well as two members of the Department of the Interior’s National BAER Team (Dave Mattern, a New Mexico BLM hydrologist, and Chuck Jachens, BIA’s Pacific regional hydrologist).

The team has prepared a soil burn severity map for the 12,000 acres of BLM lands, based on preliminary BARC maps and site visits to each affected parcel. Hardest hit lands appear to be the big BLM parcel in the Jesus Maria Creek canyon, some smaller BLM parcels just south of Highway 26 in Glencoe, and the south slope of the Mokelumne River between Ponderosa Way and Glencoe. CalFire completed a comparable exercise Tuesday for private lands. We have developed a methodology that uses this and other data to prioritize erosion control work, and are applying the methodology to develop a map prioritizing treatment areas.

The BLM and CalFire data has been combined into a soil burn severity map for the entire 71,000 acre burned area. We have provided the data to Nic Enstice at the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, for use in a modelling exercise to be conducted by the folks who did the modelling for the Mokelumne Avoided Cost Analysis, the Forest Service’s Bill Elliot and Michigan Tech’s Mary Miller. They will extend the scope of lands to be modeled from the Mokelumne watershed to the entire burn area. Hopefully their results will be useful as we finalize our erosion control measures in the next week or so. These measures are important due to the location immediately downstream of the Mokelumne River’s Pardee Reservoir (which provides water to eastern San Francisco Bay communities) and the Calaveras River’s New Hogan Reservoir (source of water for Stockton and central valley farmers).

Other issues we are addressing include: (1) condition of timber stands on BLM land; (2) foothill yellow legged frog habitat, particularly in the Calaveras River watershed; (3) potential implications for the Mokelumne River Canyon, recommended as suitable for wild and scenic river designation by our land use plan; (4) cultural and archaeological sites; and (5) damage to BLM recreation facilities along the Mokelumne River.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Bill Haigh
Mother Lode Field Manager
916 941-3102