Volunteers and commercial crews hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are giving nature a helping hand to recover from the summer 2005 fires on the Hanford Reach National Monument.

Crews are scheduled to plant 13 species of riparian or water-loving plants this week after finishing up brush plantings. That will use up the remainder of $4.5 million in emergency stabilization and rehabilitation funds for the 2005 fires.

On July 5, 2005, a fire scorched 5,000 acres in the remote area north of the Vernita Bridge. Officials suspect it was started by the careless handling of fireworks.

A month later, 6,000 acres burned on the Wahluke Slope on the east side of the monument near the irrigation waste way ponds, the result of an escaped agricultural burn that spread onto federal land.

Rehabilitation of the land began in 2005 with work to cover burned ground with native grasses, such as Sandberg's bluegrass and needle-and-thread grass.

Work included aerial spraying, hydromulching and aerial and ground seeding of grasses. Now, work has progressed to other plant species.

Commercial crews and volunteers, most of them from Mid-Columbia outdoor and environmental groups, have been hand-planting about 218,000 Wyoming big sage, 1,000 bitterbrush and up to 700 spiny hop sage.

It will take at least 50 years to get back to prefire conditions, said Greg Hughes, monument project manager. And even then, plantings cannot exactly replicate the natural spread of the brush.

This week, crews and volunteers will plant 25,000 to 27,000 riparian plants, Hughes said.

"This will complete what we can do with emergency funds," he said.