August 13, 2021 — With fire season and drought well underway, PG&E is hard at work on the 1800 miles of enhanced vegetation management it plans to finish by the end of the year. The company is responding to wildfire threat by limbing and cutting down trees and any other vegetation its arborists deem present a possible danger to its infrastructure.
Cathy Monroe of Redwood Valley is a long-time member of the California Native Plant Society and an original member of the Mendocino County Climate Action Advisory Committee. She’s also a fire survivor who understands the need to take preventive measures. Electricity, she acknowledges, is key to getting away from fossil fuels. This week, Monroe and Eileen Mitro, a fellow member of the CNPS and co-founder of Climate Action Mendocino, looked out over an area near the intersection of Road A and Highway 20 in Redwood Valley, which was cleared in May.
Some willow remained along a small seasonal tributary to the Russian River, but now, with the heat and the drought and the absence of shade, that willow is dying. With it, protection from sediment and the force of heavy rain also disappears. In June, PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said that “A substantial amount of vegetation was left near the waterways to help protect water resources in the area,” and that “the protection measures we applied precluded the need for a water quality permit.”
Mitro and Monroe worry about erosion damage from upcoming winter floods and the loss of the carbon-sequestering blue oaks that once provided habitat and held the slopes together.
*Update, August 16: PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras got back to kzyx a few days after this story appeared, and answered questions about erosion control. Here is her statement in full:
“We did not perform work on the willows as part of the riparian vegetation work, because they neither posed a hazard, nor created a clearance risk, to our overhead lines and facilities in the area. As a standard practice, when PG&E cuts down trees it leaves the root systems in place, which helps prevent erosion. Further, in accordance with industry standards and as appropriate to the local environment, we scattered the wood chips from the trees we felled and chipped on site, as described previously, which provides the best soil surface stabilization. Our vegetation management supervisor field-checked several of the subject locations today and didn’t see any significant die-off of willows. At this time, we do not have plans for additional erosion control measures or to plant additional native species.”