The discussion continues about what was done and what should be done, to prevent this devastation from reoccurring.
Ending the cycle of catastrophic fires
By Dave Cogdill - Special To The Bee
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, July 20, 2007
Once again, catastrophic fire has left its devastating footprint on our California landscape.
It seems that this time every year, we find ourselves in the same precarious situation of watching our hillsides get drier and drier while the summer gets hotter and hotter, until a fire erupts and we scramble to contain it and minimize its effect. Once the fire's been put out and things return to normal (for the most part), we do little to prevent future fires. Then summer hits once again and we're back to square one. It's time we put an end to this cycle.
This reality has never been as evident as with the Angora fire that devastated the South Lake Tahoe area. A drier than usual winter, low humidity, illegal campfires, wind gusts and an abundance of undergrowth all served as catalysts that fed the fire.
The existing hands-off approach is simply not acceptable -- suppression alone is a flawed policy whereby forest fires are merely put out and there isn't enough active forest management. This policy has resulted in the Lake Tahoe basin having twice as many trees as normally would be sustained. As a result of certain crippling environmental laws regarding forestry, this calamity has endangered our families, children and firefighters, destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced thousands of residents, threatened our air and water quality, and caused millions of dollars of damage to the Lake Tahoe region.
There is a group of people who tend to the more extreme side of environmentalism, who insist upon stricter air quality regulations on industries and agriculture, and yet endorse policies such as an arbitrary limit on the size of trees that can be removed from our forests and the exclusion of biomass (converting forest waste into usable energy) as a form of alternative fuel. These are the same policies that have led to overgrown, dense forests that act as "powder kegs," as termed by Thomas Bonnicksen, a professor at Texas A&M and an expert on forestry and forest management. Once that powder keg is ignited and a runaway wildfire ensues, unheard of amounts of carbon are dumped into our air, completely undermining any progress made in improving air quality.
