RENO, Nev. (AP) -- Overstocked forests around Lake Tahoe are in danger of catastrophic wildfires like those that burned 750,000 acres in Southern California last year, according to industry experts.
``Tahoe could burn and if it does, it will be virtually unstoppable. ... I don't think people in the Tahoe basin fully appreciate exactly how dangerous it is,'' said Tom Bonnicksen, a forestry professor at Texas A&M University.
Supporting Bonnicksen's comparison, made Thursday at the 55th annual Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference, were three Californians - Bill Dennison, a Plumas County commissioner and director of the conference, San Bernardino County fire marshal Peter Brierty and Don Sterrenburg, president of a homeowners' association.
The men noted similarities between conditions at Tahoe and the ones that existed before fires destroyed more than 3,600 homes and killed two dozen people in Southern California last year.
They urged more intensive logging and thinning of forests miles away from residential areas.
``That's where the fires come roaring into communities from,'' said Bonnicksen, an expert on California forests who has testified before Congress for more than a decade in support of increased logging on federal lands.
``These flames are 200-feet tall, burning at 2,000 degrees, moving at sometimes a mile a minute,'' he said.
Some large trees will have to be cut as well as underbrush, Bonnicksen said. He criticized Forest Service restrictions putting most trees larger than 30 inches in diameter off limits to logging under the agency's latest plan for the Sierra Nevada.
Jay Watson of The Wilderness Society, based in California, described Bonnicksen as ``the timber industry's hired, scientist gun.''
``The wood products industry can play an important role in reducing fire risks and even in ecological restoration,'' said Watson, the group's wildland fire program director. ``But if they demand that they still be able to fire up the chain saws on America's old-growth forests, then they are in for a buzz-saw of opposition.''
