Sierra Club working for real fire solutions
By Barbara Boyle
Opinion: Special to the Reno Gazette Journal
July 19, 2007
The Angora Fire at Lake Tahoe provided all of us with a painful lesson in the difficulty of preventing fires in rural, forested areas where homes have proliferated. The loss of homes and human lives to wildfire in California is continuing to increase, and the costs of firefighting are skyrocketing.
Over the past several years, Sierra Club has worked with CalFIRE (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection), local fire departments and legislators from both sides of the aisle at state and federal levels to develop real fire-prevention strategies that will protect communities.
We are facing a problem that has taken many decades to develop. A well-meaning policy of suppressing every wildfire for a half-century or more has resulted in forests in many parts of the region that are unnaturally dense. Prior to this policy, most Sierra forests saw regular fire, but typically "cooler" fires that burned the surface fuels (small trees and brush), traveled along the forest floor and left the largest, most fire-resistant trees intact. Today's fuel-laden forests, when ignited, can under the worst conditions generate extremely hot and damaging crown fires that burn even the largest trees as well as most other things in their path, including homes.
Fire experts now recognize that one of the most effective ways to protect homes near wildlands is to reduce the fuel (small trees and brush) adjacent to a home. With little fuel, fires in such cleared areas "lie down," lose their intensity and tend to burn slower and less destructively. Additional measures include removing small trees and brush from forests within one-quarter mile of communities, and replacing roofs and home siding with non-flammable materials.
In 2003, Sierra Club sponsored legislation -- supported by CalFIRE -- that increased the clearing requirement in forest interface areas from 30 feet around the home to 100 feet. Unfortunately, there is still much work to be done to fully educate homeowners and enforce this provision. For example, many homeowners in the Tahoe area did not know that they could obtain permits from the local fire department for needed tree thinning.
On the federal level, shrinking budgets have hampered the Forest Service's ability to conduct thinning where it is needed throughout the West. The Bush administration's refusal to focus on areas near communities and its insistence on cutting down large, fire-resistant trees to pay for the thinning have further wasted funds.
The Bush administration needs to focus its prevention efforts where they will do the most good: within one-quarter-mile of communities, not out in the back country. We also need solutions to address the states' huge firefighting costs, as well as the increased expense of much-needed prevention measures. We all have a stake in meeting this challenge. If we hope to avoid the kind of heartbreak Tahoe residents are enduring as a result of the Angora Fire, we need decisive action that is based on science, not politics.
Barbara Boyle is Sierra Club senior regional representative for California, Nevada and Hawaii.