Division of Forestry lists accomplishments for past year

The Division of forestry in Franklin County has had a busy year. The Division oversees nearly 60 thousand acres of woodland in Franklin County. In a report given to the county commission Tuesday, forestry managers said that since last July they have dealt with 12 wildfires which burned close to 130 acres. That’s down from last year when 27 wildfires burned nearly 2500 acres. Of the 12 wildfires this year, 2 were caused by campfires, 4 more by authorized burns that got out of control, 2 were caused by lightning and one each were caused by carelessly used cigarettes and fireworks. The Division has also done plenty of other work – including issuing 263 authorizations for outdoor burning; they’ve helped landowners with fire line plowing and they have done controlled burns on nearly eight thousand acres of state owned forest land. The total cost to the county for the work was just over 4100 dollars – which comes out to about 7 cents an acre. The state covered the rest of the cost to the tune of nearly 63 thousand bucks. The Division of forestry even presented the school system with a check for almost 176 thousand dollars this year which represents 15 percent of the total revenue collected from state forests – that’s the largest check Forestry has provided since Tate’s Hell was established as a state forest. The Division says it also has a big project planned over coming months. The majority of the local forestry staff is working on inventorying all of Tate’s Hell State forest – a job they expect to complete by March of 2010. The Division is also developing two additional campsites in the Tate’s Hell forest and seeking approval to develop three more.

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