Jun 25 2007
Tahoe engulfed in flames
Four years ago when I moved out to Los Angeles from Houston, a friend and I took a long road trip through the length of California. We drove through the Sierra Mountains, the Central Valley and through Lake Tahoe. We were careful to stay off the major highways and stuck mostly to the off-beat winding roads and small towns. It was the beginning of September and most of the tourists have gone back to work, and the all the children have gone back at school. Not that very many tourists would deliberately search for the nooks and crannies of small-town California, but it was nice still the same.
Of all the places we passed through and visited, Lake Tahoe was one of the most beautiful. Lush green pines trees, awesome mountain ranges and the calm, still blue waters of the lake. We passed through small, unassuming communities, many standing on stilts, others seemed to have built their foundations on hard granite.
All that’s gone now. Burned away. Cast into a fiery cavern and is devoured by its insatiable appetite.
Firefighters launched an aggressive attack Monday to corral a raging forest fire that had destroyed at least 220 homes and forced about 1,000 people to evacuate near the popular Lake Tahoe resort area.
The fire, believed to be caused by human activity, had charred nearly 2,500 acres - nearly 4 square miles - near the south end of the lake since it started Sunday afternoon. No injuries were reported.
It was less than 10 percent contained Monday morning, said Lt. Kevin House of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department.
“This is far and above the biggest disaster that has happened in this community, I don’t know, probably in forever,” House told reporters in an early morning briefing.
Flames came within a quarter mile of the 1,500-student South Tahoe High School during the night, and dozens of firefighters surrounded the school. A few miles south, hundreds of homes in Meyers were evacuated, authorities said.
Wind slowed to about 12 mph during the night, after gusting as high as 35 mph late Sunday, and temperatures dipped into the 30s, aiding firefighters’ efforts to corral the flames in the heavily wooded, parched terrain.
“Our incident commander is feeling very good right now,” said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Rex Norman. “We had more favorable conditions overnight. It was a good time to be charging in there and making some progress.”
“The fire is pretty much staying in the same place right now,” Norman said. “But that could change if the winds change.”
From the initial reports of the fire and how quickly its spreading, it sounds very much like wildfires in Colorado and Arizona in 2002 and the San Bernardino wildfire that raged in 2006. Both of these wildfires were able to consume tens of thousands of acres because the uncleared deadwood laying about became literally exploding tinderboxes. In 2002, approximately 410,000 acres of forests were burned in Arizona alone.
Environmentalists have blocked logging companies from clearing the deadwood for years, and in their efforts to preserve our pristine forests, they have succeeded in destroying it.
In 2002, CWA discussed much of the same thing in their article: Is Radical Environmentalism Fueling Western Fires
As raging, drought-propelled wildfires rip through western states, condemnation of the Clinton administration forest policy are tearing through state and local governments.
“We’ve got to clean up these forests,” Arizona Gov. Jane Hull told reporters this week from a meeting of western governors in Phoenix. Those comments were made as wildfires consumed 351,000 acres of forest and more than 390 homes in her state. Colorado, also ablaze, was already been declared a disaster area.
Critics say the previous administration enacted policies at the behest of environmental groups, including the elimination of 80 percent of logging on federal lands and the roadless area initiative, which hinder fire control efforts and maintenance by allowing deadwood and underbrush to accumulate.
“It is scandalous how the Clinton administration neglected our National Forests at the urging of wrong-thinking environmental groups,” said Tom Randall, director of the John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs for the National Center for Public Policy Research.
“Today we are losing millions of acres of forests, the habitat they provide, and the animals and birds—even people—that call these forests ‘home,’” he added.
To which the Environmentalists airily responded:
“The timber industry and its allies are quickly blaming decreased timber sales in national forests for the wildfires, with the hope of whipping the public into a hysteria to reverse attitudes and trends about national forest protection,” Mathew Koehler, spokesman for the National Forest Network told the Environmental News Network.
The Environmentalists aren’t the only problem though. After President Bush pushed through legislation to clear the deadwood, the West was in for a rude shock. Just shy of half of the timber companies in California have folded since 1992, a fact they discovered when they tried to thin out the forest around Lake Tahoe in 2003.
But it’s not working that way in the Tahoe National Forest’s Red Star
project, about 15 miles west of Lake Tahoe, and in a number of other
so-called salvage timber operations in California. Commercial loggers
are bidding low or not at all. The revenue envisioned by the Forest
Service is not pouring into the government’s coffers. The smallest
trees, which pose the greatest wildfire threat, are not being cleared
out, and the larger, more valuable and least flammable ones are hauled
away. Limbs and treetops left from timber cutting remain strewn across
the landscape like giant piles of kindling.It is a scene, repeated up and down the Sierra, that raises questions
about the degree to which the federal government can rely on
commercial logging to help with its fire prevention work.For one thing, the commercial strategy assumes a vibrant logging
economy that does not exist in California. It also implies that when
commercial logging makes a healthy profit, money will be immediately
available for clearing out the smaller trees and flammable debris. In
fact, much of that revenue, especially from salvage sales, is by law
earmarked for other uses. Last year, salvage harvests made up nearly
half the timber volume cut in California’s 18 national forests.California’s timber industry has shrunk dramatically, forest
economists say, hurt by cheap Canadian competition, a steep drop in
timber output in national forests in the 1990s and the cost of doing
business in the state.“The basic problem is that the industry in California, especially
production in the Sierra Nevada, has just gone away in the last
decade,” observed Rich Thompson, a resource economics and management
professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “The number of mill closures is
phenomenal. They’re gone. The few [companies left] know they
practically have the wood basket to themselves and … don’t have
to be competitive.”In 1992, there were 56 timber mills in California. Today there are 29.
Many of the remaining operations are owned by a single company, Sierra
Pacific Industries, which has for years been the biggest purchaser of
federal timber in the state.Fewer mills mean fewer bids. Records compiled by Timber Data Co. of
Eugene, Ore., show that timber sale after sale in California national
forests attracted little or no interest from loggers this year. That
was true of offerings of live green trees and those killed by fires,
insects or storms.“It is something that is becoming more common. It is really an effect
of the global market,” Jim Pena, supervisor of Northern California’s
Plumas National Forest, said of the anemic bidding situation. Parts of
a salvage project in the Plumas were offered three times this year
without getting a single bid.In the Klamath National Forest in northwestern California, seven
separate timber sale offerings last summer failed to attract any bids,
according to Timber Data. In the Modoc National Forest in the state’s
northeastern tip, silence greeted an October appeal for bids on
portions of a 9,000-acre salvage project.
I don’t know if this problem was rectified by now. I hope for the sake of Lake Tahoe and the residents there that the forest was thinned out and the deadwood cleared. But the fire has already destroyed the area I visited… and there is no going back.
I just hope this wildfire doesn’t destroy it all.
