A three-year-old legal challenge to one of the Allegheny National Forest's largest timber sales has been decided in favor of the U.S. Forest Service and the guys with the chain saws, but the victory may be a hollow one.

U.S. District Judge William L. Standish's ruling last week on a lawsuit filed in May 2001 by five environmental groups will allow millions of dollars worth of timbering on 7,600 acres of the 513,000-acre national forest to proceed.

Standish ruled for the Forest Service on nine of 10 counts in the lawsuit, and found the agency had complied with applicable environmental laws and rules protecting endangered species in putting together the timbering project.

"The judge's ruling not only underscores the merits of this project but also the rigorous, objective analysis the Forest Service uses to ensure high-quality projects,'' said Kevin Elliot, forest supervisor.

On the one count decided in favor of the environmental groups, Standish ruled that timbering should not be done on approximately 400 acres of wet, sensitive soils and along creeks and streams that could be damaged by the timber cutting activities.

Elliot removed those areas from the wood harvest plan in February.

"One of the things we've been trying to do for years is to get the Forest Service to protect sensitive soils,'' said Jim Kleissler, forest watch director of the Allegheny Defense Project, the lead group that filed the lawsuit. "In acreage it's not big, but we're glad to prevail on the soil health issue that could impact future logging projects.''

Kleissler said the groups are considering appealing the ruling.

Timber harvesting in Pennsylvania's only national forest has been a hotly debated issue over the last decade.

Established in 1923 in Elk, Forest, McKean and Warren counties to protect an Allegheny River watershed shaved bare by timber clear-cutting and prone to flooding, the national forest's second growth trees are maturing as conservation and recreational interests are growing.

Last year about 20 million board feet of timber was cut in the national forest, but 50 million board feet could have been cut.

The East Side Project is an outgrowth of the Forest Service's 1995 Mortality II salvage timber plan that was blocked by Standish in 1997 because it failed to follow environmental requirements of the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Environmental groups have questioned the need for any timbering on public lands, pointing to studies that show privately owned forests could fill commercial needs.

But counties, municipalities and school districts located around the forest claim environmental restrictions are hurting the local economy.

U.S. Rep. John Peterson, R-Titusville, Crawford County, said he was pleased that Standish sided with the Forest Service's professional managers instead of "extremists with little or no scientific training.''

But because the decision on the East Side Timber Project took so long, the value of some of the dead and dying trees that were marked for cutting in the "salvage logging'' project has declined. In addition, a severe wind storm in July 2003 damaged thousands of trees on approximately 1,000 acres of the project.

"Some of the timber, because the lawsuit took three years and the origin of the project is seven or eight years back, has deteriorated,'' Elliot said. "That means that some of the treatments we were proposing, even though we've got the green light now, may need to be changed.''

Even though the case has been tied up in court, timbering has continued on eight sale areas containing approximately 6 million board feet of wood -- mostly valuable woods like black cherry, oak and red maple.

But 19 tracts containing 23 million board feet of wood valued at $7.5 million have been held up by the lawsuit. If the cutting plans for those tracts are changed significantly, they would be subject to new appeals and litigation, Elliot said.

"We don't know yet, but if we do something different, if we have to make new decisions, all of that would be subject to litigation all over again,'' he said. "So it's not over yet.''