Ending the cycle of catastrophic fires

Sac Bee ^ | 7/20/07 | Dave Cogdill

[NormsRevenge]

Once again, catastrophic fire has left its devastating footprint on our California landscape.

It seems that this time every year, we find ourselves in the same precarious situation of watching our hillsides get drier and drier while the summer gets hotter and hotter, until a fire erupts and we scramble to contain it and minimize its effect. Once the fire's been put out and things return to normal (for the most part), we do little to prevent future fires. Then summer hits once again and we're back to square one. It's time we put an end to this cycle.

--snip--

The existing hands-off approach is simply not acceptable -- suppression alone is a flawed policy whereby forest fires are merely put out and there isn't enough active forest management. This policy has resulted in the Lake Tahoe basin having twice as many trees as normally would be sustained. As a result of certain crippling environmental laws regarding forestry, this calamity has endangered our families, children and firefighters, destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced thousands of residents, threatened our air and water quality, and caused millions of dollars of damage to the Lake Tahoe region.

There is a group of people who tend to the more extreme side of environmentalism, who insist upon stricter air quality regulations on industries and agriculture, and yet endorse policies such as an arbitrary limit on the size of trees that can be removed from our forests and the exclusion of biomass (converting forest waste into usable energy) as a form of alternative fuel. These are the same policies that have led to overgrown, dense forests that act as "powder kegs," as termed by Thomas Bonnicksen, a professor at Texas A&M and an expert on forestry and forest management. ...

[NormsRevenge]

Dave Cogdill is a Republican state senator for District 14, which includes Mariposa and Tuolumne counties and parts of Fresno, Madera, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.

[marsh2]

This is why Siskiyou County passed the resolution declaring the state of local National Forests to be a public nuisance and severe fire threat. (This was even before the Elk and China back fire complexes now burning in our area.)

[sergeantdave]

A resolution won’t do much good.

The county should move ahead, go into the federal forests and remove the fire threat. Then bill the forest service for the cost. If the fed won’t pay, seize all federal assets in the county, including the forestland, and sell it.

[marsh2]

We would have to have a nuisance ordinance such as Trinity Co. has. The private timber owners are afraid the enviros. would harass and hammer them with it, so such would never pass here.

[sergeantdave]

I would think a specific ordinance targetting the federal land as a public safety threat would cover it.

The federal courts have already ruled that counties and Indian reservations are sovereign entities, and the federal government can’t unilaterally create a potential nuisance without permission of the local governments. The key in these rulings is that counties must first pass ordinances forbidding specific federal practices that may cause harm to counties.

So I’d guess that the county should pass an ordinance stating that the debri build-up in the federal forests are a threat to public safety, which they are.

We have legal tools to fight the federal government and its capricious conduct and people need to start using these tools.