California Fire Danger

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OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - This spring's late rains are keeping
California's hills green, but where hikers see a lush landscape
firefighters see potential calamity.
Fire season, which usually runs from May to October, hasn't yet
started. But come summer, what now look like rain-fed fields will
dry out into thick tangles of brush which could burn hotter and
longer than usual.
"Rain has a temporary benefit, and we appreciate it," said
Karen Terrill, a spokeswoman for the California Department of
Forestry and Fire Protection. "But, yes, what is germinating now
is going to grow and become straw."
Terrill said she's noticed that grass near her home in the hills
outside Sacramento is longer and thicker than normal. Fire
officials from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay area voiced
similar concerns.
"All we have to have is two straight weeks of some good, dry
Santa Ana wind conditions (and) we can have conditions set
significantly for a pretty huge event," Los Angeles County fire
Inspector Roland Sprewell said. "That could change a moderate fire
season into a very dangerous fire season in a matter of days."
A major concern is that light, highly combustible grasses might
provide sparks which float into oak and heavy chaparral areas.
"The longer the grass is when it burns, the more embers it will
throw off," said Tim August, Fire Captain with the East Bay
Regional Park Fire District Department. "The chance that embers
carried by the wind will land on other areas of vegetation is
greater."
In the Oakland hills where a 1991 fire destroyed more than 3,000
houses and apartments, residents on Saturday opened a
fire-resistant, drought-tolerant garden.
"You can't do much about the geography or the weather," said
Susan Piper, who helped organize the community committee that built
the park, which includes fire prevention displays. "But one thing
you can do is reduce the fuels."
Fire officials in the region are letting cattle and sheep graze
the hills later into the summer and hiring crews to prune trees and
remove grass from strategic areas, said Brian Cordeiro, fire
captain in charge of fuel management in East Bay parks.
He added that it's also important residents take responsibility
for clearing dry vegetation on their properties.
"We recommend people clear at least 30 feet around their homes,
and 100 feet if they live on a hillside," said August. "And it's
important to keep the gutters clean. Pine needles can accumulate,
and that goes up pretty quick."
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Associated Press Writer Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed
to this story.

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. (AP) - With fire season just weeks away,
hundreds of thousands of lifeless trees are choking the San
Bernardino National Forest.
Groves throughout the forest have been devastated by tiny
beetles that are preying on conifers weakened by a prolonged dry
spell in the mountains of Southern California, including stands
that for a century have grown, unchecked by flame or ax, to soaring
heights.
Were they to burn, the 100,000 people who live within the forest
boundaries would be at risk.
"You bet it's a concern," said Don Townsend, chief executive
officer of the Inland Empire Council of the Boy Scouts of America,
which owns two of the 30 summer camps inside the forest. "It makes
you ill just to drive up there. You see brown pines sticking up
like sore thumbs."
Already, trees across 175,000 acres, more than 20 percent of the
national forest, show signs of infestation by various native
species of bark beetle. Entire groves that a year ago were a
verdant green have turned brown.
"It seemed like it took place overnight," said Cedar Grove
resident Joan Starr, 49, who is unsure how she will pay the
thousands of dollars it will cost to remove the 10 dead trees that
stud her property.
Local forest officials estimate they will need to cut millions
of trees on federal land alone over the next decade, at a cost that
could reach $300 million.
The situation is the same over much of the parched West, where
21 million acres of forest on private and public land are at risk
over the next 15 years to the ravages of drought, insects and fire,
according to federal estimates.
Nowhere is the risk to life and property higher than in the San
Bernardino National Forest, home to several sizable towns,
including Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear City. The forest is just 70
miles east of downtown Los Angeles and within a short drive of some
20 million Californians.
It stretches across several mountain ranges and varies in
elevation from 1,500 feet to the 11,502-foot summit of San Gorgonio
Mountain, Southern California's highest peak.
Years of drought and overgrowth have stressed the forest's
trees, leaving them incapable of producing sufficient quantities of
pitch needed to repel the beetles. As a result, the numbers of
beetles have exploded. It can take several thousand of them weeks
to kill a 100-year-old tree.
A fire would likely spread quickly through the tinder-dry
forest, spread by embers blown from the crowns of trees that push
100 feet or more into the sky.
"That's fuel. That's all it is. You drop a match in there, it's
gone," said U.S. Forest Service ranger Gabriel Garcia on a recent
tour of the forest, as he looked over a tight mountain canyon
packed with the spindly skeletons of dead bigcone Douglas firs.
For most residents, the only way out is along narrow mountain
roads threaded through forests of towering, dead trees. Forest
Service supervisors said their biggest concern is evacuation in
case of a major wildfire.
A fire also could burn hot enough to sterilize the soil,
delaying the recovery of species that normally would spring back
after more frequent, but less intense, fires.
"It would be a human and ecological disaster," Forest Service
spokesman Matt Mathes said.
Before that happens, the Forest Service and private land owners
are struggling to cut down and remove dead trees and brush within
the 820,000-acre forest.
In Southern California, state officials have declared Riverside,
San Bernardino and San Diego counties disaster areas. They now seek
equivalent federal status for the counties, home to the Cleveland
and San Bernardino national forests.
On a recent afternoon in Lake Arrowhead, the sound of chain saws
filled the air as trucks hauling logs, stumps and wood chips
rumbled past.
For years, strict homeowner association rules restricted the
cutting of trees in the neighborhoods that surround the
once-brimming lake. Now, the lake has shrunken and the rush is on
to remove the dead trees.
The work gets expensive, because many trees stand close to
houses and utility lines and must be cut in segments.
Dozens of crews have descended on the area, charging residents
$300 to $3,000 a tree, said Anthony Sellers, 26, of Yucaipa, who
has spent the last four months cutting dead trees in the area.
"It's unreal what's going on," Sellers said.
On Forest Service land, those trees adjacent to private
property, along evacuation routes and near communications towers
are being cut or thinned first.
What to do with all the wood remains undecided. Enough lumber to
build the equivalent of 10 homes is trucked out of the forest each
day, taken 160 miles north to a mill run by Sierra Forest Products,
said Larry Duysen, the Terra Bella company's logging
superintendent. The lumber, cut into 2-by-12 inch boards used for
shoring, is the first in any appreciable quantity to be harvested
from Southern California in decades.
Hundreds of piles of woody debris are being torched in the
forest. Some wood chips may be shipped to a power plant in the
Southern California desert, where they would be burned to produce
electricity.
But most of what's cut is good only as firewood, which residents
can't give away. Rare is the house in the Lake Arrowhead area
without a thick pile of stumps at the foot of the driveway.
For now, there is little opposition to thinning trees within the
San Bernardino forest. Both the Forest Service and timber industry
are pressing to continue thinning the forest in future years, even
when rains are abundant and the beetle threat abates.
Tom Bonnicksen, a professor of forest sciences at Texas A&M
University, said the forest would have to be periodically thinned
over the next 70 years to guarantee its health. The Bush
administration proposed last year the Healthy Forests initiative,
which promotes the thinning of woodlands to cut the risk of fire.
"If they plant it and leave it, it will be a disaster," said
Bonnicksen, who recently toured the San Bernardino National Forest
as an adviser to The Forest Foundation, a California nonprofit
group supported by the timber industry.
Environmentalists fear the present bark beetle crisis could be
used as a justification for stepping up logging on public land.
"The question that you have to ask is, whenever there is some
natural occurrence, whether it's fires or bugs, whether that gets
raised by the Bush administration as a rationalization for just
going out and logging a lot more trees," Sierra Club spokesman
Warren Alford said.
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On the Net:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/sanbernardino/

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)