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Duh. I knew that three years ago just by observation (this disease started early in Santa Cruz (there's a clue). There were totally uneducated people around here who knew a fair amount about how this disease worked when the "experts" up at Berkeley thought the problem was amphora and oak bark beetles (I'm forgetting the name of the the original lead academic cheese, I've got it somewhere).
Thanks for the link, btw. You ought to go look at the task force org chart to see all the agencies and activists feeding off this mess.
I've lost two small trees to phytophthora so far (which is nothing on my place). One (about three years ago) I caught early and bagged and burned it to control the beetles, the other (two years ago on a remote part of the property) I left standing because it was too late and I hadn't received any information out of these scientific geniuses on how to clean my equipment after cutting it (as if there won't be dust, spores, and beetles flying away all over the place). In the latter instance, I thinned the understory pretty substantially in that area to see what would happen (so far, I haven't lost another tree). There are a number of trees across the road about 200 yards away from it that have died, but my place is otherwise relatively unaffected. Guess why?
The way this disease has been managed really pi$$es me off. It was so very preventable, and represents a magnificent example of the structural failure of government risk-management systems (although they would never see it that way, much less admit it in public). The principal cause of the introduction of this pathogen is that we subsidize plant importers by not making them either pay for the risk of infestation (an astronomical cost) or else institute a way to assure that no pathogens are in the product (the story of how this disease spread out of nurseries has been totally spiked). They had the option of importing sterile cultures for micropropagation and didn't do it because they didn't have to. Somebody "saved money." Worse, the moment this came to the fore, the activist creeps and their thug buddies in government immediately started trotting out the predictable junk science to use it as a source of money and power toward their own ends. They claimed it was moved on boots, logging equipment, and car tires because they wanted to close the parks and stop all timber operations. Never mind that birds fly all over the state, or that the places that are the worst hit are overgrown riparian corridors.
The story was EXACTLY the same with botryospheria infestations in madrone that started twenty years ago after they'd already had the example of Dutch Elm Disease. Nobody did anything to fix the system that allowed it to happen, as if they couldn't read the handwriting on the wall. Well, there's a reason they don't fix it, and it is financial. Importers don't want to be accountable for their products or suffer having them inspected, much less pay for it. Why? Because they can use political power to get the public to deal with the risk.
It's the risk-management system that has to change. Yeah, I know... that book again.
So9