As the fall rains finally began, Janet Millard hoped it would calm fear of the fire burning miles away in north central Washington during last year’s historic fire season. But Millard, a spotted owl specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, was mistaken.

Managers on the Wolverine fire still opted to cut one of the largest firelines ever in Washington, logging 114 acres of critical spotted owl habitat and felling big trees — including a giant that had stood for centuries, so large, it was a one-log load on a semi truck. Steel-tracked heavy equipment tore up fragile ground along streams. Erosive soils unique to the area were bulldozed.

Cut by the U.S. Forest Service with none of the usual environmental review, the firebreak was up to 300 feet wide and stretched more than 50 miles, from the Entiat drainage on the east, to Twin Lakes to the west. Loggers cut enough trees to fill more than 930 logging trucks.

Yet the fire never came anywhere near.

The Wolverine fire looked threatening when the decision to cut the line was first made last August. By then, the fire was moving fast, and making runs of as much as three miles a day during Washington’s historic and deadly fire season. firelines are intended to slow the advance of a blaze, and give crews time and safer space to work.

But field notes, emails and documents released by the Forest Service under a Freedom of Information Act request by The Seattle Times show Forest Service employees working on the firebreak believed there was no emergency by the time the logging began about two weeks later.

Some tried to stop the cutting, but they were overruled.

As work on the line progressed, Cindy Raekes, a fisheries biologist then working at the district, wrote her supervisors about the damage she was witnessing.

“This,” Raekes wrote of the logging, “is essentially a … ground-based timber sale without any best management practices to minimize resource impacts.”

The fireline is typical of the sort of environmental price paid for emergency decision making, instead of managing forests and backcountry development better to resist fire before it starts, said Jerry Franklin, a professor of ecosystem analysis in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “One of the problems with fire fighting is a mentality completely takes hold that pretty much you are going to double down on things just simply because you want to protect your rear,” Franklin said. “It is very characteristic, they just freak out. Basically in a sense it’s war. And you don’t worry a whole lot about side effects. It is what’s called collateral damage.”

The timber was later sold as salvage logs, even though fire never touched the forest, with $769,913 in proceeds paid to the Forest Service.

Some said the fire provided just the impetus long needed.

“We were tickled pink to have it put in,” Mick Lamar, chief for Lake Wenatchee Fire and Rescue said of the fireline. The community’s wildfire-protection plan had since 2007 called for strategic fuel breaks, and Lamar said he had long wanted a fireline cut as a preventive measure but could never get the money or permits to do it.

The fire burning at least 8 miles away changed all that: the perceived emergency lifted any need for environmental permits, and opened a federal spigot of money.

“I don’t think this project ever would have been done at this scale if we had not had the impending threat of the Wolverine fire,” Lamar said. “It is the bureaucracy, and the people who don’t live in the woods telling people who do how it ought to be.”