Logging Key to Protecting Water From Megafires, Officials Say

Protecting water supply and water quality in the West means spending billions in federal infrastructure money to intensely thin and log drought-stricken forests across the headwaters of the water-short Colorado River, US Forest Service and Colorado officials said Wednesday.

“The wildfire crisis has outpaced the ability to treat the landscape,” Frank Beum, the chief forester of the US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region, said at the Colorado Water Congress in Steamboat Springs, Colo.

The agency, through the Rocky Mountain Restoration Initiative and other efforts, is working with state and local governments, drinking water utilities, and the timber industry to log, ...