Posted on 07/01/2007 9:23:36 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
Here I sit, looking down at lovely Lake Tahoe, but also looking down the hill at the fir forest growing ever thicker and more deadly. Fires always burn uphill. If a fire ever starts at the bottom of our hill, we'll have 10 minutes to escape before the one road out is cut off by the fire. Behind my home, it's nearly impossible to hike off trail because you have to wade through knee-deep piles of dead branches.
The forest is ready to explode. We have too many trees, but no one dares do anything about it.
Plenty of ingredients during the past 150 years have fueled the fire that has denuded hillsides at Lake Tahoe. Gold Rush clear-cutting. Home and ski resort development. Mismanagement of the ecosystem.
But sometimes lost in the discussion is another key ingredient: the legal, political and bureaucratic battle between old and new conservationists. This war has led to policy paralysis -- and the forests and the fire danger keep growing.
The Forest Service finally is mending its ways and, led by traditional science-based conservationists, has tried to get approval for more commercial thinning of the forests. Thinning the forests commercially is the only economically viable option: There isn't enough money for publicly funded hand clearing, and high fuel loads make controlled burns too dangerous.
Commercial thinning isn't pretty, but it works. The publicly funded hand thinning is like trying to empty the ocean with a teacup. The Sierra forest problem is like Iraq; there is no good way out of the mess we've created for ourselves.
Effective but environmentally safe forest thinning requires compromise between environmentalists and commercial loggers. Unfortunately, the new, more ideological environmental movement refuses such compromise. This refusal is exemplified by the Quincy Library Group.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
In Tahoe, the situation is exacerbated by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (known locally as the Tree Nazis). The agency’s rules override fire marshal guidelines and generally make desperately needed tree thinning impossible. Unless you go through an insanely complex, expensive and lengthy permit process, you can’t touch a tree that’s larger than 6 inches in diameter, even if it’s next to your house. And 6- to 12-inch firs are exactly the type of tree that is the greatest fire danger.
Environmentalism is one of those fads which has this tendency to show that good intentions really can pave the way to disaster.
The TRPA should be forced to man the fire lines with picks and shovels each and every time a wild fire breaks out.
This is so insane - here in northern Idaho, we’re encouraged to make our places fire-safe.
In a better world, we’d have public hangings of those whose policies resulted in events like this Tahoe fire.
Prior to 1992 all of the eco nuts in Baton Rouge complained about the tree thinning done by the local power company. The company complied and cut less.
Then came Hurricane Andrew. It’s funny how people change their minds when they are without electricity for 2 or 3 week.
My brother is out fighting fires this summer. Whenever he sees a house nestled in some picturesque forest glen he just shakes his head. Fuel type “H”.
I was surprised to read about the no tree cutting laws around Tahoe. In Colorado, they encourage people who own homes surrounded by forests to clear the trees and brush near their homes. When a forest fire sweeps through, firefighters triage the houses, and will not defend those without a clearing around them.
This isn’t the first time. I believe the fires in San Diego county a few years ago were much more devastating than they would have been because the environazis had made it impossible to clear away dead underbrush.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Because my district is heavily forested, I have helped to encourage establishment and direct RAC funding to local Fire Safe Councils. I believe we have 20 now:
http://www.firesafesiskiyou.org/Public/HomePage
More funding is needed to thin shaded fuel breaks around vulnerable communities. (These drop fire from a fast moving crown fire to a controllable ground fire.) The Forest Service needs additional funding to heavily thin in the Wildland Urban Interface. Many of my communities are surrounded by forests with heavy fuel build up. This is due to a combination of prohibitions
on logging from the Northwest Forest Plan, repeated environmental lawsuits, expanding Wilderness areas, fire suppression, budget cuts, the direction of funds to Southern California and steep slopes making thinning more expensive and requiring more hand treatment.
Our County even declared the National Forest to be a public nuisance due to fuel conditions. We frequently have huge forest fires.
The environmentalists have to get off their high center on not harvesting trees above a certain diameter. They have this belief that these trees mean protection of “Old Growth.” Anyone who has seen density depressed tree growth can tell you a very small diameter tree can be a hundred years old. It just doesn’t get the water sunlight and nutrients to grow bigger.
Silvaculture is the art of growing trees. You thin to encourage the growth of the dominant trees to produce park-like old growth characteristics. To do this, trees need to be spaced, just like carrots in a garden. Some larger sub-dmoninant trees may be taken to make the dominant trees more healthy and fire resistant. The commercial value of these trees may also help to offset the costs of thinning.
(With the new fire-resistant building material requirements that will go into effect on 2008, hopes for use of thinned trees as building material -with commercial value - is rapidly waning.)
Of course, part of the problem is that we have dismantled and shut down most of the timber mills in these forested regions of California that can actually mill a big tree. And you can bet that no one will build another without a long term guarantee of timber supply. Perhaps we will end up like Southern California hauling the wood out into the desert to rot in piles.
If you want to read and see something about the scientific study of fire and how it moves through different densities of forest, this is a great site: http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/programs/ecology_of_western_forests/projects/blacks_mountain/blacks_mountainres.shtml
It is the Pacific Southwest Research Station at Blacks Mountain. They had done various treatments of the forest to observe growth. A forest fire went right through the area and they now have examples of what the fire did to each treatment area.
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