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BLM road culvert removed again By PAUL FATTIG WILLIAMS - Call it the case of the covert culvert crew. It's a case federal officials aren't taking lightly, however. A large culvert under a Bureau of Land Management road that was uprooted by environmental extremists last weekend and then replaced has been uprooted again. The replaced culvert, three feet in diameter and 40 feet long, was removed sometime Thursday night, reported Steven Shrader, district ranger for the BLM's Medford District. An environmental group calling itself the Kangaroo Wilderness Defense had claimed credit for originally removing the culvert last weekend. In a fax sent to the Mail Tribune earlier this week, the group said it intended to protect from logging an area of Grayback Mountain known as the Kangaroo roadless area. The BLM's Clapboard Gulch Road leads to a tract of Boise Cascade Corp. forestland slated for logging in the area. The cost of replacing the culvert was $1,990, said Don Ferguson, district spokesman. "It looks like we're dealing with some pretty persistent folks here," he said, adding that the agency will again replace the culvert. The agency intends to prosecute those who removed the culvert, he said. No logging is occurring at the site now. Anyone who has concerns about harvest activities should express their concerns in a legitimate way, not illegally, said Bob Smith, human resources manager for Boise Cascade's Central Point office. But a spokeswoman for the Kangaroo Wilderness Defense said removing the culvert was a last-ditch effort to halt the planned logging. "We are at a point where we have to resist Boise Cascade at all costs," said Lorraine Ashton, of Williams. "They are such a destructive entity and have been for so many years." Ashton, who had contacted the paper after the first culvert was removed but not after the removal of the second, said the group intended to make it expensive for the firm to log its land on the mountain. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.