LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. (AP) -- The summer stillness in Southern California's mountain resorts is being broken this year by the roar of chain saws, the crash of falling trees and the warnings of extreme fire danger.
``I have been telling everybody to take everything that's valuable and take it down the mountain and store it,'' said Jaina Ko, 36, who has begun packing items ranging from tax papers to pictures to take from her Lake Arrowhead home to the safety of the city below the San Bernardino Mountains.
Ko and other residents of towns in the San Bernardino National Forest northeast of Los Angeles began taking such steps after fire experts warned of the potential for catastrophic fires because of the numbers of trees killed by drought and a bark beetle infestation.
The threat is so severe that Lake Arrowhead officials have been holding informational meetings with residents and business owners, and the Mountain Area Safety Task Force, a coalition of fire, law enforcement and local and state officials, has been put in place.
Lake Arrowhead, sitting more than 5,000 feet up the mountain range, has about 14,000 permanent residents and another 14,000 part-time residents. Thousands more people live to the east around Big Bear Lake and elsewhere in the San Bernardino forest.
Campground fires have been banned and tree removal services are working at a record pace to clear out dead trees near homes. Don Kniss, a manager for Great Scott Tree Removal Services Inc., used to get about 150 calls a month and now is getting more than 400, he said.
The U.S. Forest Service has given the state about $3 million to remove and replace trees killed by the drought-aggravated beetle infestation and has brought in firefighting crews from out of state to the San Bernardino.
``The problem is not being exaggerated,'' said Tracey Martinez, spokeswoman for the Mountain Area Safety Task Force. ``We are very concerned about the fire danger up on the mountain. We are doing everything we can in the event there is a large, catastrophic fire.''
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.
For most residents, the only way out of the forest is along narrow mountain roads threaded through towering trees. Forest Service supervisors said their biggest concern is evacuation in case of a major wildfire.
Business owners, meanwhile, were coping with fallout from news reports of the danger.
``Yes, a fire could destroy 150 homes. But just the threat could put 150 home owners into bankruptcy,'' said Lewis Murray, executive director of the Lake Arrowhead Chamber of Commerce.
Murray said local real estate agents have begun to experience ``a small crunch'' and the retail and lodging industry were ``a little soft.'' But he also acknowledged it was unclear how much of the falloff had to do with the fire danger or the state of the economy.
``Everybody wants to talk about the fire danger. Nobody has been talking about how we are more prepared now than we ever have been for it,'' he said.
Jeff Gruett, a tree service owner who lives in the Orange County suburb of Tustin and also has a home in Lake Arrowhead, said he came up to the lake seven months ago to do one clearing job and hasn't left because of demand.
``It was like being an ice cream man on a hot summer day. They just came swarming,'' he said.