Posted on 03/07/2005 8:18:28 PM PST by NormsRevenge
RIVERSIDE, Calif. - A major shift in the century-old policy for suppressing the wildfire danger in Southern California's national forests could be coming this summer.
Unchecked growth has left the region's woodlands dangerously overgrown and the new plans will be part legacy of 2003's deadly firestorms, part science and part popular opinion.
U.S. Forest Service planners have worked three years on the new management guidelines and they are now poring over nearly 11,000 separate concerns contained in more than 3,000 letters and e-mails sent in response to an initial draft released last year.
Plans for the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Los Padres and Angeles national forests should be complete this summer, project leader Ron Pugh said.
It will be an aggressive strategy of thinning forests and controlled burns to restore the forests to a more natural state. Tightening restrictions on recreation and expansion of wilderness areas are also possible, Pugh said.
"The plan reflects a shift in the agency's philosophy," Pugh told The Press-Enterprise. "We spent the last 100 years or so suppressing fires. We need to look differently at the role of fire in the forest, and that's a tricky one because we have so many people living out there now."
From Idyllwild to Lake Arrowhead, more than 100,000 people live in the San Bernardino National Forest, and those numbers can triple on holidays and weekends. Also in the mix: The forests are home to 60 threatened and endangered species and 168 animal and plant species that are considered sensitive.
"We've heard from people, a lot of people - from people who think they ought to be able to drive their motorcycle wherever they want, to those who feel you shouldn't be allowed to wear shoes in the forest," Pugh said.
Drought conditions for six years exposed flaws in forest management that included suppressing wildfire, even when ignited naturally by lightning strikes deep in federal forests. Pine-killing bark beetles then moved in, killing thousands of trees.
"No one ever envisioned what would happen with the drought and the beetles," said Bernie Weingardt, deputy forester for the U.S. Forest Service. "It just got kind of out of whack when it wasn't doing what nature was used to doing."
Eighteen months ago, wildfires tore across about three-quarters of a million acres, leading fire officials, politicians and forest residents to call for federal policy changes.
"The fires and the bark beetle crisis brought it home for everybody," said Laura Dyberg, president of the Mountain Rim Fire Safe Council. "We've felt and experienced the downside of an unhealthy forest and now everybody is looking at the forest differently.
"I look at the trees and I see fuel for fires."
Forest managers and firefighters said thinning and controlled burning were now necessary.
Too often controlled burns get out of control due to poor management.
Well, the natural, uncontrolled burn sure got out of control this last year burning thousands of homes.
Well, that stuff is going to burn one way or another.
From what we've all seen of the fires last year the US Forest Service has been a dismal failure in trying to "manage" nature.
They didn't understand the unintended consequences of letting fire burn off the old growth, and now they're reacting to last years events by trying something "new".
"It just got kind of out of whack when it wasn't doing what nature was used to doing."
A comment like this from someone in the US Forest Service is scary. This guy seems to be clueless as to what nature will do as opposed to what "it was use to doing".
As unpredictable as nature is we can only hope that the US Forest Service doesn't screw things up too badly this time around.
What is needed is a water-fire coordinator to make sure the floods and the fires happen at the same time.
It's about time they started letting the stuff burn. You wouldn't believe how thick the underbrush is and in many areas the floor of the forest isn't dirt but many inches of pine needles and ground up bits of plants. So it's no surprise that those forests burn very easily now.
LOL. You are strange.
Burn, baby, burn
I get SO tired of those professional, government paid LIARS who masquerade as "Forest Managers". In California, they OUTLAWED recreational vehicles (mainly motorcycles or quads) from about 99.9% of all BLM, National, and State Forest areas. Then, they hiked tag fees for OHV's, ostensively to raise funds to (a) maintain existing OHV dedicated grounds, and (b) purchase additional acreage. In fact, the OHV fees collected and were never spent, and eventually were transferred directly to the State's general funds. Meanwhile, a systematic program has been underway to study every OHV area to death, to justify closing down additional acreage every year. These studies were simply the vehicle of Democrat radical's to outlaw every OHV from all California lands, and it's been largely successful.
This is what's so OUTRAGEOUS about this government paid LIAR's claim that California OHV operators constitute "... people who think they ought to be able to drive their motorcycle wherever they want". Of course, this man (or woman, or transvestite… who knows, it's California) knows the lie of which he speaks. He knows that OHV'ers have been lied to and robbed; they've had their rights violated, to favor the left's darling environmental extremists.
All OHV'ers want is what they've been promised. We don't care if they find "snail darters" or "kangaroo rats" in every designated OHV area. Go ahead and shut them down, by all means, and protect the wildlife there. But it should be at least an acre for acre exchange, of the same type of land, in the same geographical region (i.e. not all in Death Valley). And if OHV'ers funds are taxed from them to support OHV areas, the government has an obligation to spend those funds to support the cause for which they were taxed, i.e. expanded OHV acreage. In fact, it'd be very healthy to rotate land out of and into preserves every half to a dozen years, so that OHV areas can recover, just as with farming.
There is still plenty of land for all purposes, i.e. recreation, preservation, commercialization, and expanding home and towns. Not every acre of undeveloped land needs to be restricted, or in the case of this article, "saved" from man's intrusions, such as brush cutting around homes, farms, ranches, and even recreational areas. We lost 10,000 TIMES more acreage (not to mention homes, and human lives) to avoidable fire losses due to idiotic land management policies mandated by politicians and their appointed princes in the USFS, than all the OHV'ers have ever degraded though recreational use.
SFS
This idiot should be fired, not because he believes what he's saying (he doesn't), but because he really believes everybody is dumb enough to let him get away with it.
please don't allow the pine in the forests to be used for commerce, don't let our national forests help pay for our national debt. let seniors in $400,000 RVs get cheap camp sites and let tax paying teenagers camp in the wilderness and grow pot on federal land, but don't let the forest be managed for the benefit of the rest of America!! /rant off till next time.
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