Posted on 07/23/2007 8:57:22 AM PDT by george76
Well, there you go! :-) Guess I'm just a medium fart - but old-fartdom is creeping up on me fast!
Arizona has been going through this as well.
Testimony for AZ Senate 4-6-2004, by Kathy Gibson Boatman
Thursday June 20, 2002 I called my Mom to try and warn her of the coming danger in the form of the Rodeo fire, joined by the newly reported Chediski fire.
You see, I knew exactly where Chediski peak was. I grew up nearby, and my Mom worked on fire watch for the Forest Service serving as a lookout, first on Dutch Joe, and for many years on Gentry lookout tower. We watched over the area that burned in the Rodeo Chediski inferno.
Saturday June 22, 2002, I watched my brother Larry Gibson operating a loader with the sky a fiery red backdrop behind him, as he pushed brush away from the fire.
This was the night the reporters and all non-essential personnel were sent out of town shortly after Michala Medina and the NBC news crew finished their story.
I talked to Larry the next morning, about 5:30am when I called his house to get reassurance from his answering machine.
I was shocked when he answered the phone; relieved to hear his voice, and amazed that he was still there. We discussed the conditions near Artists draw where he had worked most of the night.
He told me the fire had jumped their line 3 times, but they werenÂ’t giving up. He said it was bad, but he was going back. “I have to go help Frank,” he said. Frank Despain, a family friend was also working on the fire.
I asked Larry, “Why does your voice sound so raspy?” He replied,“It’s really smoky out there, and I didn’t drink much all night, we didn’t have any drinking water on the line.”
I found this amazing after watching the news reports and seeing the major production going on in Show Low just fifty miles away. I asked Larry about the Red Cross, and questioned him on the support they were receiving.
He is not a fire fighter by trade. Local residents came to help the authorities when they realized that resources were stretched to the limit and this fire-breathing dragon was more powerful than our firefighting assets.
Larry told me that the local men, boys and some girls were going around town putting out spot fires. Using borrowed equipment they were pushing brush and sometimes buildings to put out the fires.
While Larry was working to help save Heber, our childhood home southwest of town burned to the ground. This was a home that had been a part of Arizona history since 1916.
Previous owners rode horses for their primary transportation, as they settled the land.
They had cleared a defensible space around the home, and my parents had a new metal roof. My parents understood the danger surrounding them; they had done everything possible to prepare for fire season.
My family like others in the Southwest has watched our forest health decline over the past 30 years. We have watched the land change.
Historically, Arizona pine forests had 50 to 200 trees per acre. Under current practices, there are as many as 2000 trees per acre. As Harv Forsgren, the regional forrester for the Southwest put it; “Our forests are literally choking themselves to death.”
Wally Covington, the respected Northern Arizona University forestry expert has warned everyone on more than one occasion that, “The acceleration is such that if these trends continue we really have about 20 years left before every acre is affected and degraded by these disturbances.” He has stated,“We need to remove the excess trees and reintroduce periodic low-intensity surface fires”.
The bill sponsored by Marilyn Jarrett and Cheryl Chase is the only tool that brings real solutions to thousands of Arizonans surrounded by these unhealthy forests. We need private industry; we need to hear chainsaws working in our forests.
In Arizona alone, aerial surveys show 1,750,719 acres affected by beetle infestation in 2003. This acreage has increased from 53,795 acres affected in 2001.
The fires we are experiencing now are not normal and they will continue until the problem is addressed.
One half mile thinning and clearing near communities will not stop fires like the Rodeo Chediski.
It does not even begin to address the insect infestations occurring in our forests. Wildland Urban Interface projects are needed and they will help make communities more fire resistant.
This buffer zone will be important as we witness more super-inferno fires burning at 2000 degrees, moving faster than people can run and sometimes drive as evidenced by the recent fires in California.
I witnessed Sandy Bahr’s testimony yesterday, and I have read the same statements from other environmental representatives. They claim to support thinning the forests and making them healthier. Then they dig in their heels and say only focus on the corridor around communities.
This procedure is not really thinning the forests; it is a smokescreen to shift the focus away from the need to manage the forests.
In spite of the devastation we are experiencing and the facts that support the need to treat the land, some groups still adamantly oppose thinning and continue to blame our unhealthy conditions on those “awful timber companies, and the people who choose to live in forested communities.
Creating more restrictions on private property like House bill 2693 does, fails to address the real issue and erodes American freedom.
Statistics show that the Timber industry has been pressured out of existence, 13 mills have shut down in Arizona since the 80’s.
This is one factor contributing to the current problems we are experiencing. Failing to recognize and address the need for a sustainable timber industry is hazardous to everyone’s health.
Not just the people but the animals too.
I can still hear the sound of the baby elk separated from its mama during the fire. When we returned to the charred remains of our home after the fire, we saw the elk with burned hair and fear in their eyes.
We can’t sit idly by while our treasured forests and communities go up in smoke. We need action, and to quote Jim Paxon, “Hope is not a strategy.”
See the website www.azfire.org for additional information on forest health and fires.
Thank You
EnvironMENTALists
for Making the 2002 Fire Season
All It Could Be!
Yet these same judges are positively bold when it comes to abridging our rights.
Why is that, do you suppose?
the pine beetle epidemic that has killed nearly half of the state’s lodgepole pine trees ....Ritter said the outbreak is part of a natural cycle
About 44 percent of the state’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine are now infested by beetles, or about 660,000 acres.
the bulk of the thinning falls to the U.S. Forest Service, which plans to treat 18,000 acres of dead trees this year. Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Rick Cables said he wishes the agency could do more, but....
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What a travesty! Half the trees in the state are dead, and the Feds can only deal with a small fraction of it.
Years ago at a logging conference, i asked Alton Chase why the enviros won’t admit that the balance of nature theory is garbage...this was after the Yellowstone fires..
He stated that the enviros are blinded by dogma, and have deluded themselves into the belief that catostrophic fire is somehow natural and good for the animals.
This theory ignores the fact that we have interrupted the natural fire regime for the last 100 years. Unfortunately this misguided policy will not end until we get a truly major catostrpohy along the lines of the great 1910 fire that burned three million acres in 36 hours....only this time, it will kill thousands, and not hundreds......
Crisis on our National Forests: Reducing the Threat of Catastrophic Wildfire
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1008628/posts
Good to see you back ranting and pushing back the frontiers of ignorance as Walter Williams is fond of saying.
Read another article on fires this eve...nobody wants to state the obvious: the USFS is no longer an effective fire fighting agency. Social engineering has chased all the experienced people out, and the liberals have filled these high level positions based on skin color and genatalia.
We got an elderly female psycologist as head of our local National Forest. It is only a matter of time before they appoint a disabled black lesbian vet with a masters degree in liberal studies to oversee the whole agency...pfffft!!!!
Will the Vail Valley look like this?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1498422/posts
Vail creating barrier against fire
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1887826/posts
“Ritter said the outbreak is part of a natural cycle”
I read an article awhile back and the guy was saying that when it was replanted all with lodgepole pine was bad - having a diverse forest would have limited the destruction to just the lodgepole I think - the beetles don’t touch the other types I guess.
The guy said something like - “well, fires or beetles, either way we’ll have a new forest here in the years to come.” And he mentioned something about replanting it with a more natural and diverse variety of trees. However, I imagine most of it will be left to nature’s own devices.
(Is it the lodgepole pine that the cones burst open during a fire to reseed the area?)
The enviros don’t want to save trees, they want to destroy the logging/building/trucking/sawmill businesses. It’s called anticapitalism.
However, I imagine most of it will be left to nature’s own devices.(Is it the lodgepole pine that the cones burst open during a fire to reseed the area?)
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Most of these areas were never replanted after they burned in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The basic understanding of reforestation was in its infancy at that time. The guy in the article you cite is disenguenuous. He is insinuating that the replanting of the logging in the 1970’s thru the 1990’s is somehow responsible for the current situation. This is untrue. The trees planted after logging 30-40 years ago are only 30-40 years old. These are not the trees being attacked in the current epidemic.
As I stated in my last reply to this article http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1498422/posts the trees around Vail and other areas are 100+ years old. They resprouted after the fires 100 years ago as you suspected: Lodgepole pine has a sap coated (ie serrotinus) cone that opens after disturbance like wildfire.
So is it really that these trees are just dieing of old age? (The beatles only can thrive in weak trees?)
So is it really that these trees are just dieing of old age? (The beatles only can thrive in weak trees?)
Trees in trouble
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1874268/posts
Lots of logs, not enough loggers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1922413/posts
Crisis on our National Forests: Reducing the Threat of Catastrophic Wildfire
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1008628/posts?page=91
Vail creating barrier against fire
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1887826/posts
CA: Inland forest a tinderbox despite tree thinning (drought and bark beetles ‘raise the stakes’)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1728582/posts
My question is, is the Pine Beetle indigenous to the US? If not, what dumbass scientist can we blame?
A more cynical explanation is that they will argue whichever way their money people tell them to
How much money do private forestry companies like Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, who own their own private forests, pay the eco-nuts to ensure there is no competition from logging on federal land?
How much of the anti-nuke crowd are subsidized by OPEC?
How much money do private forestry companies like Weyerhaeuser and International Paper, who own their own private forests, pay the eco-nuts to ensure there is no competition from logging on federal land?
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I read about this years ago in a Competitive Enterprise newsletter....something about the large timber corporations funding the enviro movement to keep the wood off the market...at this point it doesn’t matter, the sawmilling infrastructure has been eliminated from large portions of the west....but still the enviro’s protest cutting dead trees............
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