Biography

I'm Roger Jaegel. I’ve lived in Redding for the last eight years, and before that I was in a small town in Trinity County. Nadine lived there for quite a while as well. Hayfork, California, and I was there for almost 70 years -- served a career in the Forest Service primarily in fire control, as we called it then. Fire control, engineering, and resource management.

So, in addition to that, I was timber utilization specialists for the Watershed Research and Training Center and their Training Director for about nine years and then served on the Trinity County Board of Supervisors for eight years, and that was the most challenging part of my working career.

So we all, I mean all of the people in NWI [National Wildfire Institute], have been in the trenches now for decades. We all have watched this occur, and what the damage that's been done to our National Forests, with amazement.

It is unbelievable what we are seeing happen, and I think Jim Peterson put it well in his book [First, Put Out the Fire!]. There's been several books, lots of research done, and it continues to happen.

We all need to assure that the legacy, the beauty, and the bounty, of our National Forests are preserved -- and somehow, in the last 30 years or so, a lot of the things we, you know, did and fought for, for our entire careers, have been undone. And it's very, very sad to see.

So I was gonna start out with an op-ed I did August 24th, 2004. At that time I was Director of the Hayfork Fire Protection District, and we were very concerned with what we saw in terms of fuel loading and lack of attention to fuel conditions in Trinity County that was affecting the volunteer fire departments, the ability to do necessary fuels work, you name it.

There was a real concern. So on August 24th, 2004, I submitted an op-ed to the [Redding] Record Searchlight regarding the lack of fuels management on National Forest and Trinity County.