Tahoe fire yields lessons
There's agreement on the need to thin forests in places like Tahoe. As of Wednesday 55 percent of the Angora fire has been contained and 229 homes, valued at $141 million, have been destroyed.
from the June 29, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"The science of this is pretty clear," says Mr. Fairbanks, who now works on wildfire management and policy for the Wilderness Society. "It's just a stark fact that if you don't do that for various political reasons, then you're going to have problems."
In the past five years, the Forest Service has stepped up its efforts, logging or burning out 14,512 acres in the Tahoe Basin, roughly 20 percent of what needs to be thinned, says Matt Mathes, spokesman for the agency's Pacific Southwest regional office in Vallejo, Calif.
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Even those initial efforts, says Mr. Mathes, saved an estimated 500 homes during the Angora blaze.
The hopscotch pattern taken by the fire partly reflects the mix of private housing and public undeveloped lots in the area. Several residents noted with frustration how they maintained a defensible border around their lots, only to be abutting public lands choked with dangerous fuel.
"Some of the lots are quite overgrown, and we need to go in there and thin them," concedes Mathes. Money was a major sticking point. "Lake Tahoe is the most expensive place in the US Forest Service for [cleaning] and prescribed burning." The pace now can go faster having secured enough money from Congress and federal land sales, he says.
The thinning efforts at Tahoe cost $3,000 an acre, far above the average of $600 to $1,000, says Mathes. The reason: Proximity to private housing requires extra staff during controlled burns, and the terrain often requires removal of trees by helicopter.
"This reminds me of hurricane Katrina where [the government] didn't have the money to build the levee right the first time," says resident Tim Coolbaugh. "But they have the money to replace everyone's house, and then rebuild the levee."
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