Posted on 08/27/2004 1:16:57 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
BIG BEAR LAKE, Calif. (AP) - In the mountains of Southern California, it's the new sound of summer: the whine of a chain saw followed by the whoosh and thud of a falling tree.
Logging crews are moving through neighborhoods and across densely forested hillsides, racing to cut as many dead and dying trees as they can before the area erupts in flames.
It's a battle no one expects to win this year - and perhaps not anytime soon.
"We have an extremely hazardous situation out there even though we've made a lot of progress," said San Bernardino County Fire Chief Peter Hills.
Drought and infestations of bark beetles have killed millions of trees in the forests of San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties, posing a major threat in what has been called an extremely dangerous fire season.
Last year, the same conditions fueled the most destructive wildfires in state history. Throughout Southern California, 15 blazes killed 24 people while scorching 750,000 acres and destroying 3,673 homes and businesses.
One fire in the 670,000-acre San Bernardino National Forest charred 91,000 acres and destroyed 993 homes. Big Bear Lake, a resort city of 6,000 people east of Los Angeles, was evacuated.
"It was pretty scary," recalled Joe Carcerano, 69, a restaurant owner. "It was like a ghost town."
Despite the devastation, plenty of fuel is still available. Vast areas of dead trees are visible as rust-colored streaks amid the pine-covered mountains.
If they aren't removed, the trees "will go up like fireworks on the Fourth of July," said Thomas Meixner, an assistant professor in the environmental sciences department of the University of California, Riverside.
"It's going to burn eventually. All you can do is reduce the risk," he said.
The effort to clear the trees is part of a broader wildfire strategy that includes stationing of additional firefighters in the tinder-dry forest region and increased training, Hills said.
Forest thinning has sparked bitter battles in the Sierra Nevada and other parts of the West. Environmentalists argue that such projects are often a backdoor to wholesale logging in sensitive areas or increase fire danger by spreading debris and destroying fire-resistant large trees.
No one, however, disputes that the drought and bark beetles, which kill trees by cutting off their flow of water and nutrients, have created a huge problem in Southern California.
Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club endorse dead tree removal from around mountain communities in San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles counties as a way to reduce the danger to the public and firefighters.
"It is a race against time ... to create defensible space around homes," said Bill Corcoran, a Sierra Club regional representative.
Carcerano is also an enthusiastic supporter of the tree clearing.
"I'm glad they're knocking them down," he said last week as a logging crew disturbed the morning calm on his street.
There are so many dead trees that the task of removing them falls to various federal, state and local agencies.
In May, the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service began hiring contractors for what is projected to be a three-year effort to remove hundreds of thousands of dead and dying trees from land in San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties.
The effort, which has so far received $120 million in funding, is about 20 percent complete and will need more money, said Bill Ward, the project coordinator for the service.
Separately, local crews have cleared dead trees that could fall and block evacuation routes throughout the region; energy utility Southern California Edison has cut more than 80,000 trees in the past year that could tumble onto power lines; and the San Bernardino National Forest alone has thinned 6,000 acres, public affairs officer Ruth Wenstrom said.
The work is complicated by the rugged terrain and the fact that Southern California, which has not been a traditional source of timber, has no lumber mills. Trees that are suitable for milling must be hauled more than 200 miles to the Central Valley community of Terra Bella.
Trees unsuitable for lumber are ground into wood chips, burned for energy in biomass plants or cut up for low-grade uses like firewood or to build pallets.
But the larger problem is the sheer number of trees that must be removed.
In many places, there are 10 times as many trees as the ecosystem can sustain - a result of fire protection efforts over the past century as people flocked to the area to escape urban Southern California.
The overcrowding forces trees to compete for scarce water, making them more vulnerable to infestations like the bark beetle.
A more comprehensive project of general thinning in the San Bernardino National Forest alone would take 10 to 20 years, Wenstrom said.
"We've spent 100 years getting our forests to this point. The problem is not going to go away overnight," she said. "We can't just expect to throw money at it for a few years."
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On the Net:
http://www.calmast.org/mast/public/
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/cleveland/fire/
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/news/thisweek/2004/040819/cabeetleeffort.html
fyi
Pure spin.
This is against the Clinton Accords. Where will the squirrels live now? We are doomed!
BTTT!!!!!
Lack of logging is the problem.
"The work is complicated by the rugged terrain and the fact that Southern California, which has not been a traditional source of timber, has no lumber mills."
High value manufactured products can be made from forest wood resources.
Man made composites. Stronger than lumber, and safe from rot and termites. Fire resistant, too.
Scandinavia makes such materials. I'll bet we do, too. Just not in SoCal.
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