| Area called ripe for a disaster
- Lake Arrowhead: Fears of a Landmark Disaster
(Note: CBD's 'wildlife biologist' Monica Boyd has a definition for 'big trees,' but it's not mentioned here; nor is Sen. Feinstein's admission that many of her actions have helped to bring on this conflagration.) October 30, 2003 By Paul Rogers and Josh Susong [San Jose] Mercury News 35 South Market Street San Jose, CA 95113 408-920-5476 Fax: 408-271-3792 progers@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5045. http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/ To submit a Letter to the Editor: letters@mercurynews.com Lake Arrowhead, California - The oil industry had the Exxon Valdez. Nuclear power had Three Mile Island. Wednesday, with flames menacing one of Southern California's most beloved mountain resorts, Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains risked becoming forestry's equivalent -- a disaster so overwhelming it could change U.S. environmental policy for decades to come. The area, filled with overgrown, diseased and dying trees, has gained a reputation in recent years as one of the worst examples of forest mismanagement in the West. If much of Lake Arrowhead or nearby Big Bear Lake ends up burning, fire experts said it could prompt rapid changes, including congressional orders for much more logging to thin out the nation's overgrown forests, a loss of public confidence in environmental groups that have resisted such logging, and billions more taxpayer dollars spent on fire protection. Flames destroyed more than 300 homes near Lake Arrowhead Wednesday, with no end in sight. Fire crews worked desperately to stop the advance as it moved toward 44,000 homes, 2,000 businesses and 80,000 outbuildings -- property with an assessed value of $8 billion. "This may be a landmark event. This fire could take out 20,000 homes in the next day or two,'' said Richard Minnich, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California-Riverside. Warnings of danger The loss of Lake Arrowhead would be stunning but not entirely surprising. For the past three years, fire experts have described the resort community 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles as a catastrophe waiting to happen. Four years of drought have hammered the region. The area's weakened ponderosa pine and fir trees became infested with bark beetles, and by this summer millions of trees were dead across 350,000 acres. Limbs fell on cars and homes. Local residents, facing county citations, paid up to $1,000 per tree to contractors in a frantic attempt to remove the tinder-like fuels. They barely made a dent. The reason: The forests are unnaturally thick. Fire crews began putting out fires in the area in the early 1900s, when James Gamble of Proctor & Gamble built a dam to create the lake, and vacation cabins from a growing Los Angeles began to spring up in the 1920s and 1930s. Forests there would have burned naturally every 20 years, said Tom Bonnicksen, a professor of forest science at Texas A&M University. But with homes at risk, the blazes were regularly extinguished. Areas that historically had 50 trees per acre now have 500. "Who's to blame? It depends on which decade you are talking about,'' said Bonnicksen. By the 1970s and 1980s, warnings from fire experts went unheeded by homeowners' associations around Lake Arrowhead. They protected their trees to preserve property values. "You couldn't even cut the limb off a damn tree without getting a permit,'' said Minnich. "These people have wanted to save every leaf.'' The last sawmill in the area closed in the mid-1980s. More recently, environmentalists have pushed hard to limit logging of large trees there. "The handwriting was on the wall several decades ago,'' said Bonnicksen. "Anyone in forestry could forecast that the inevitable outcome would be the forest would burn down or the insects would kill it and then it would burn down.'' The U.S. Forest Service said Wednesday its policy on forest thinning has been guided by public opinion. "People didn't move there to be next to a logging operation,'' said spokesman Matt Mathes. Mathes said when the trees began to die off from bark beetle infestation, the San Bernardino National Forest increased its budget for fire-thinning from $2 million in 2002 to $12 million this year. Charles Griego, who's been trimming trees in the area for years, left his home near Lake Arrowhead on Wednesday with his wife and three sons and a pile of family pictures. He shook his head when he talked about the downed trees and the agencies -- federal, state, anybody. "They've known they had a problem for years,'' he said, "and they didn't do anything.'' Angry e-mails As the fires burned, angry e-mails began pouring in Wednesday to the offices of environmental groups blaming them for the disaster. Monica Bond, a wildlife biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity in Idyllwild, said that although her group has appealed and sued to block a government forest-thinning operation in the Sierra Nevada, it had not done so in the San Bernardino Mountains. The trees need to be logged and removed, but large trees should be left for wildlife habitat, she said. "Some people are shamelessly exploiting this tragedy as an excuse to log big trees in remote areas,'' she said. "There is no need to do that.'' Bonnicksen, who has worked with the timber industry, said he supports President Bush's "Healthy Forests Initiative,'' to thin overgrown national forests and cover the costs by allowing timber companies to take some large, old-growth trees. "If Lake Arrowhead burns down, there will be a massive reaction,'' he said. "It will be finger-pointing like you can't believe. I'm more interested in having us understand why it got this way, and preventing it from ever happening again.'' On the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., held up pictures of California forests. She succeeded in convincing the Senate to pass an amendment to Bush's logging plan that would require 50 percent of thinning to be done near homes, and to provide $760 million to offset the costs. "Look at these homes. Look at the dead and dying trees,'' she said of Lake Arrowhead. "Does anyone believe they have a chance of surviving if this forest is not cleaned?'' |