13. The Radar Installation

12. THE COLUMBUS DAY STORM

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: What do you remember about the Columbus Day Storm?

William A. Davies: Well, I remember how upset I was, for one thing. I was at the school in late afternoon. I remember my wife called. We had a big maple tree in our backyard - covered half our backyard. The stump was about that big. It broke right off the bottom like that, much of it catching the house, but it broke all the electric wires off, and they were down. They were bare. She was afraid that somebody would come in the yard, so I went home. It was a Friday, as I remember. The next morning I went out to Lewisburg Saddle; couldn't get all the way out there. As far as I could, I went up there; and the trees were just crossed like this, all of them. I got up there, and here was Marv Rowley coming up there too, because he was doing the logging for us, and I told Marv, "Now we have a big job ahead of us, to clean up this mess before we get a bug epidemic." Because you know downed timber, that's just duck soup for the dendroctanus beetle. They build up a big population that jumps on the green trees and kills a lot of them. So we started in Monday morning and we had some of those logs at the sawmill by 10 o'clock. I hired a second contractor, and both contractors worked there for about a year, cleaning up that blow down stuff. We got it out of there quickly enough before the big beetle epidemic built up.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Did the school realize quite a bit of money out of that?

William A. Davies: Oh yes, we cut about twice as much as our plans called for. Our allowable cut was about three and a half million a year, as I remember, at that time. And, I think for that year, we cut seven million, or something like that, to get that picked up.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Is that the most devastating event that has happened in the forest since you have been associated with it?

William A. Davies: Oh yes, by far. Gosh, I forget how many million feet blew down, but it was a lot of them. Marv went up in an airplane and sketched in all of the areas on aerial photos. I had aerial photos flown of the forest. He took these and flew the forest and sketched in the areas that had blown down and estimated a percentage blown down. Then we came back and went through our cruise records and figured just how much had blown down. That's just how much we got out of there.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Do you remember any forest fires that occurred during your association?

William A. Davies: Yes, some minor ones. We had, I think, six lightning fires going at one time up in the Soap Creek area. That night lightning hit, and gosh, I got up early and called the state foresters' office out there and they had them spotted and got Marv and his crew out there, and got those fires out soon after ten o'clock in the morning. And then another time we had a fire that didn't burn too much of ours, but it sure burned a lot of T. J.'s. The logger out there had clearcut an area that we bought afterwards. We didn't own it then and the state insisted that he burn the slash. It wasn't the time of year to burn it but he burned it. It burned up hundreds of acres of timber around it too, some of T. J.'s; that's the worst fire. That's right up near the top where you can see the old - what they call McCulloch Peak, if you know where that is. It was just in the north, around McCulloch Peak, north and east of there.