Wildlife Area Bisected With Good IntentBy STEVEN SLOSBERG Whack The Ripper, a yellowish excavation tractor painted to look benignly like a giraffe but maneuvering on assault-scale tank treads and brandishing a fearsome, chain-drooling drum head, just finished chopping and gouging a mile-long, 50-foot-wide, no-fire zone through Barn Island. The aftermath of decapitated tree trunks, severed limbs and shattered thickets resembles a Goya landscape. But the consequence, says the state Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the 1,000-acre wildlife management area in Stonington, will be for public good. As the notices posted at the state-owned hunting, woodland and tidal marsh enclave say, the hacking was done both to reduce the threat of fire and to provide access for fire-fighting vehicles. The “hazardous fuel reduction project,” as the state calls it and which is estimated to cost $10,000, isn't over, despite what's befallen the wetlands and vegetation. When the freshly rutted roadway heals a bit, the state intends to layer gravel over the 1.5 miles of clearing to preserve access. A shorter swath, about 500 feet long, has been similarly flayed open from Palmer Neck Road down to Wequetequock Cove. Kevin Grady, the DEP forester in charge of the work, says the genesis was a request a few years ago from William Buck, the recently retired chief of the Wequetequock Fire Department. Buck, says Grady, was concerned about residential development bordering Barn Island and cautioned that fires break out there every decade or so. The public boat launch at the end of Palmer Neck Road, recently renovated and expanded by the state, attracts steady traffic through much of the year. Using money from a federal grant, the DEP sent a contractor from Glastonbury into the protected terrain late in December. The plan was to re-open an old road used by farmers to get to the salt marshes. In addition to the 15-foot-wide existing roadway, long grown over but of sufficient width for fire apparatus, the state also wanted clearing done on either side to create a 50-feet-wide firebreak. The slash-and-hack job trundled across at least three areas of obvious wetlands. However, the DEP was able to proceed under a blanket permit, provided, of course, by the state, for such drainage issues. If the same work were proposed for private land, the property owner would be subjected to a serious permit process before the town and state. Apparently the justification for the project — the firebreak — was persuasive, whatever the intrusion on the wetlands. Grady, the forester, says culverts will be in place at two of the wetlands to allow streams to flow unimpeded. At the other wetlands crossing, on higher ground, a culvert is not practical. He also said gravel most likely would be washed away. So the state may place large rocks over the crossing. The shorter trail, from the road to the cove, creates a firebreak in what otherwise is solid layer of shrub from the boat launch east toward some sparsely settled areas along Palmer Neck Road. Ed Dennett, the new fire chief at Wequetequock, endorses what the DEP has done. His department utilizes a refitted military vehicle for fighting fires in such wooded and marshy terrain. The DEP also plans a burn every three to five years to maintain the fuel break. So Barn Island, already traversed with well-used trails, has been sliced open anew and will be surfaced with gravel and burned regularly to save itself, and peripheral properties, from fire. Preventive medicine is the beauty of it all, but what an extended and jagged scar. This is the opinion of Steven Slosberg. © The Day Publishing Co., 2005 |