People are understandably upset after losing their homes to forest fires. The following article tells part of the story. The question is who to blame, and what can we do? Are environmentalists to blame? Can we control nature or do we just make things worse by trying to manipulate a complex ecosystem we don't fully understand?
Peter
from: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-clearance26jun26,0,2914697.story?coll=la-home-center
TAHOE FIRE: A CHALLENGING FOE; TREE-CLEARING CONTROVERSY
Crowd aims fury at regional panel
Land use agency is criticized for failing to allow adequate clearing of combustible materials.
By Eric Bailey and J. Michael Kennedy, Times Staff WritersJune 26, 2007
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE — The mood of the crowd jammed into the meeting room was angry. Many had lost their homes to the forest fire that swept through the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe.
They said they were angry at bureaucrats and environmentalists who made cutting of trees and clearing of land difficult. There was always too much red tape, they said, and now it was too late. In all, a crowd of nearly 2,000 people descended on the South Tahoe Middle School auditorium Monday night, wanting to be heard in the face of their losses. And if there was an object of scorn in the crowd, it was the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a powerful bi-state environmental land use agency charged with managing the resources of the basin.
When a speaker mentioned the agency, the crowd responded with a chorus of boos. "What a joke!" yelled one man. The wrangling began in earnest over the assignment of blame, including arguments over whether federal and state forest managers had made their tree clearing rules too strict in the face of pressure by environmentalists.
A common sentiment Monday was expressed by Jerry Martin, a bartender at the Horizon Casino Resort, whose house was still standing, although eight others around it had burned to the ground. He said U.S. Forest Service rules regulating the harvesting of dead trees were too stringent for those living next to government land. "I hate to get political, but environmentalists wouldn't let us cut down the dead trees," he said.
The amount of fuel in the Tahoe Basin has reached critical levels after years of discord among environmentalists and government agencies over how to thin forests and reduce the fire threat. And it has led to predictions of a devastating wildfire because the basin is one of the areas with the most fire starts in the Sierra Nevada. More than 21,000 acres of Tahoe land have been cleared to guard against wildfires, at a cost of $50 million, but an additional 67,000 acres need to be cleared and thinned.
"It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge," said Julie Regan, a spokeswoman for the regional planning agency. "Once you're finished at one end it's time to start again on the other. "In April, the U.S. Forest Service finally settled on a 10-year plan to thin and burn 38,000 acres of land to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. But the plan had little effect on the homes in the community of Meyers, where most of Sunday's fire damage occurred. Regan said only 462 acres within the Angora fire boundary had been treated for fuel reduction because it was low on the priority list.
Sgt. Don Atkinson of the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department said heavy growth in the area, especially manzanita plants, contributed to the danger. He said fire officials request that underbrush be cleared at least 30 feet from residences. "Sometimes people do it and sometimes people don't," he said. "There's a lot of residences where manzanita grows right up to the house, and that's unfortunate. It's very flammable and it's got oils and stuff in it that really tend to drive a fire.
But the people at the meeting Monday said that regional planning agency regulations were the source of much of the problem when it came to clearing the land. A man got up and said, "I've lived here 35 years. Is this going to open TRPA's eyes?" The room erupted into cheers and applause. Regan said that of the 1,300 parcels in the neighborhood that sustained the most damage, only 274 were new or remodeled — and therefore more likely to have cleared "defensible space." "The majority of homes in Lake Tahoe have not completed defensible space," she said.
She also said part of the reason may be that residents don't realize that no permit is necessary to cut down dead trees on private property. "It's important to relay the message that homeowners can cut a tree down without a permit," she said. "If they want to cut down trees, all they have to do is call their fire districts," she said. Lauri Kemper of the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board said most people in the basin are reluctant to clear out trees. "I've lived here for 22 years and folks like their trees," she said. "They like it for the habitat and the beauty they create."
eric.bailey@latimes.com michael.kennedy@latimes.com reported from South Lake Tahoe, Kennedy from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Lee Romney and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Showing posts with label forest fires. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forest fires. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Forest Fires and Global Warming: Who Is To Blame?
As the recent forest fire near Lake Tahoe in California is being controlled, after a great loss of property, there will be the inevitable cry that these wild fires a being caused by, or made worse by global warming. Once again there will be the finger pointing and the blame game going on. The Forest Service will be accused of neglect. The Federal Government will be accused of under-funding and catering to the "big lumber companies". And of course anyone burning fossil fuels anywhere in the world is to blame for global warming.
All of this of course is nonsense. There have always been wild fires, and there always will be. As the following article clearly explains, what has changed is the millions of people moving into our forests and putting themselves and their dwellings in mortal danger. Just like building on a flood plain, below sea level (New Orleans), or on the beach in a hurricane-prone area, it is people to blame, not the weather, or "climate change".
Of course the climate changes, it always has and always will. The irony of all of this stupidity is the people making these poor decisions then expect "big brother" (the Government, i.e. taxpayers) to protect them, and help them rebuild.
We should be getting smarter, with all of our education and availability of information, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case.
Peter
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fire.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th
At Your Peril
On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Wildfires Meet
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Published: June 26, 2007
COLEVILLE, Calif. — Lori and Don Morris had just started unpacking the boxes this month in their new dream house — four acres, national forest view, wide open land at their doorstep — when a wildfire raced down the stark bluffs over this high-desert town near the Nevada border.
Lori Morris of Coleville, Calif., stood on a hillside overlooking her home, which was spared by a wildfire that devoured 1,100 acres nearby.
More than 300 federal firefighters from as far away as Montana arrived, battling heat, 60-mile-an-hour wind gusts and flames bolting through 1,100 acres of bone-dry sagebrush and juniper. The Morrises, along with 200 other residents, watched helplessly as, miraculously, their homes were spared.
“Both of us were aware that these things happen,” said Ms. Morris, 47, as she looked out the window to the charred hillside. “We just didn’t think it would happen this fast.”
A new generation of Americans like the Morrises, in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.
Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin — has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.
“It’s like a tsunami, this big wave of development that’s rolling toward the public lands,” said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. “And the number of fires keeps going up.”
But now federal agencies at the front lines of defending these new communities from peril are starting to say enough is enough. The constellation of federally owned parks, forests and arid sagebrush fiefs in the lower 48 states is collectively about three-fourths the size of all the land east of the Mississippi River, and is becoming too expensive to protect with so many people pushing up against the fringes.
This spring, the United States Forest Service began warning state and local officials across the West that they would need to pick up more of the tab from the federal government, and do more to make homes less vulnerable to fire. About 45 percent of the Forest Service’s proposed budget for 2008 is designated for firefighting, compared with 13 percent in 1991. Last year, the agency spent $2.5 billion, a record, thinning fuels and fighting fires that burned 9.9 million acres, also a record.
“A lot of people are saying, ‘If you’re not going to do your part, we’re not going to risk our lives,’ ” said Stuart McMorrow, a forest-fuels expert with the North Tahoe Fire Protection District, which covers 31 square miles near Lake Tahoe.
“It’s coming to a head,” Mr. McMorrow said, “this notion that people move out to the woods and put themselves in dangerous situations.”
The Costs
Costs are also spiraling up like smoke for states and other federal agencies.
Wyoming budgeted $1.2 million for its 2006 fire season, then ended up spending $30 million. California, braced for what fire officials have said could be one of the worst seasons in history this year, has set aside $850 million for wildfire suppression.
The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the country’s largest landlord, spent $424 million fighting fire last year. Early season firefights have cost $215 million already this year even before the traditionally worst months arrive.
The insurance industry, in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, has also begun taking a much harder look at the places where people and trees meet, and is less willing to write policies for homeowners who do not meet a “wildfire checklist” by taking measures to protect their homes.
“Fire has emerged as more and more a megacatastrophic risk like we saw with Katrina,” said Carole Walker, the executive director of Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. “The financial exposure is huge, well into the billions.”
The result is a new tough-love approach from fire officials, where the soft and fuzzy reminders from Smokey Bear have given way to blunter assessments. The new rural Westerners, fire officials say and insurers increasingly demand, will have to start thinking more like the self-reliant Westerners of old.
That means clearing defensible spaces around homes and inspecting roofs and vents through which flying cinders can descend. Those measures protect homes, but also firefighters, since structures cleared of fuels are less dangerous to defend.
(Page 2 of 3)
All the while, federally owned public lands continue to attract more people as they evolve into something they were never intended to be: a real-estate amenity. As golf courses were to a past development wave, wild and scenic is to this one.
In Lake Tahoe, for example, glossy home magazines are filled with advertisements including cheery phrases like “adjacent to Forest Service land” and no mention of the fire risks.
“It’s like ocean frontage,” said Larry Swanson, an economist at the University of Montana in Missoula who studies public lands. “You would not have these high private property values without the public lands nearby, and the public lands are a huge part of the package that is driving the growth trends.”
Usually a summertime phenomenon, fire season has come early this year in many parts of the country, including Florida and Georgia. But it is in the West, where acres have always outnumbered humans, that the scale is greatest and the threat most acute.
Forests in the West are more prone to catastrophic fires than are Eastern ones, said David M. Theobald, a professor at Colorado State University who has analyzed population growth and fire patterns.
That puts a higher percentage of the new housing areas in severe-fire zones — more than 50 percent in California and Colorado, 47 percent in Montana and more than 65 percent in Washington and Oregon, according to a soon-to-be published paper by Mr. Theobald and a colleague, William Romme. In the 37 states east of the Rockies, only about 10 percent of the new rural housing areas are in so-called high-fire zones.
Drought and the possible effects of climate change on the seasons have added their own vehement kick. In California, Nevada, Idaho and Montana, officials are prepared for a devastating fire year. Wildfires erupted throughout the winter.
“We had fires every month,” said Joe DuRosseau, division chief of special operations for the fire department in Reno, Nev., which fought a 750-acre fire west of town during the last week of May. “It’s a very dry year, and the fuels are extremely dry.”
In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked for additional firefighting personnel, and officials worry that this summer could rival 2003, when fires caused more than $2 billion in damage, including 5,000 homes that burned in San Diego County.
Set for Battle
People like Robert A. Harrington, Montana’s state forester at the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, are haunted by the possibility of a year like 1910, when devastating fires in the northern Rockies could be not stopped. There are similar fears in more heavily populated areas like Lake Tahoe.
On Monday, in Lake Tahoe firefighters battled a fire that had destroyed 160 homes.
“On a good weekend there’s a couple million people in and around the Tahoe area, with ingress and egress along Interstate 80, essentially one way in and out,” said George D. Gentry, the executive officer of California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Imagine a conflagration starts and we have to evacuate people.”
North of the lake, where second homes pepper the 1.2 million acres of often remote wilderness, Forest Service firefighters train on roads, where turning a fire engine around is tricky even on a good day.
Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, a fire management officer there, said new housing in the far-flung fringe had made her job infinitely more challenging.
“There’s a housing area going up where the 80 and Highway 20 come together, with one-acre plots going at $1 million each,” Ms. Pincha-Tulley said. “I thought, ‘Oh great, this is just what I need.’ ”
Some residents in the high-risk areas worry that the federal government will be tempted to pass the problem along to local governments or homeowners.
“The federal government is there to protect the community from disasters,” said Ron Ehli, 50, a volunteer fire chief in Hamilton, Mont., an increasingly popular getaway in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula.
“Where Florida might have hurricanes, or California earthquakes, we have wildfires,” Mr. Ehli said. “And the federal government should be there to protect us.”
Truth be told, the nation’s founders would probably be shocked that the government was still in the land or firefighting business. Land, as the early framers of the republic saw it, through legislation like the Homestead Act, was for settlement and farming, and especially for private ownership.
(Page 3 of 3)
But much of the western half of the United States did not cooperate. It was too steep, wooded, wild and dry to be tamed the way land was in the East. So hundreds of millions of acres became and remained public land, owned by the government. For most of the past century, the government’s policy of fighting fires on that land was single-minded: if it burns, put it out and figure the costs later.
So the natural fire cycle that cleans out the undergrowth and dying trees broke down, and combustibles began to mount. At the same time, the timber industry paid huge fees to the Forest Service to allow cutting of valuable forest sections that kept the firefighting budget afloat.
But that has changed. The timber money has slowed to a trickle in many national forests as companies have moved operations to places where trees grow faster, like the South, or gotten into the real estate business themselves, like the giant Plum Creek Timber Company in Montana, which owns hundreds of thousands of acres in the state.
Still, some Forest Service critics say the agency remains too dependent on timber sales and firefighting money from Congress. Together, suggest the critics — an odd-bedfellows coalition that includes local environmental groups like the Friends of the Bitterroot and free-market libertarians from the Cato Institute — the financing sources have skewed wildfire policy.
“We have now turned the fundamental function of the Forest Service into the fire service,” said Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona and chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.
Mr. Grijalva said the knowledge by Forest Service administrators that Congress would pay for firefighting in defense of the nation’s public lands had led to a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of more and more money for firefighting.
Cuts in Spending
The surge in fire costs has in turn forced spending cuts in recent years in many other Forest Service programs, including campground maintenance, research, road repair and backcountry wilderness management.
“They’ve shifted the priorities,” Mr. Grijalva said. “And that puts property and people at risk, no question about it.”
Forest Service officials say they are used to being blamed. “Neither our strategy nor our priorities have changed,” said Mark E. Rey, under secretary for natural resources and the environment at the Department of Agriculture.
Safety of firefighters comes first, Mr. Rey said, then safety of residents, protection of structures and protection of resources.
What has changed, he said, is growth in the number of people living in harm’s way. That has bumped up costs because defending structures, Mr. Rey said, is more expensive than wilderness firefighting. At the same time, the knowledge of the woods and their dangers are fading as rural residents age and newcomers move in.
Ravalli County, Mont., for example, around the town of Hamilton, grew by 25 percent, to about 40,000 people, from 1995 to 2005. In the 2000 census, almost one-third of the residents said they had lived somewhere else five years earlier.
“I personally feel if they’re stupid enough to build their house with trees and stuff all around, it’s their dumb luck,” said Nancy Garness, 53, a baker at the Coffee Cup Cafe in Hamilton, who came to the area with her parents in the late 1950s when she was 4.
Insurance professionals say much the same thing.
“We all went through a period of, ‘write the policy and take the money,’ ” said Barry Whitmore, a State Farm Insurance agent in Hamilton. “Now we’ve got a wildfire checklist, and based on the answers, a home is either insurable or not insurable.”
In Coleville, a town of 400 people in the eastern Sierra Nevada, Ms. Morris and her husband are leaving little to chance.
Not much more than a wide spot in the road about 200 miles east of San Francisco, Coleville is showing signs of discovery, with a handful of new houses and real estate signs along the main road, which is also lined with cottonwoods and scrub brush.
Ms. Morris said it was love at first sight when she discovered the town a few months ago. The Morris abuts land owned by the Bureau of Land Management.
“There’s hundreds of miles of forests,” she said. “The beauty of it. We have every kind of tree you can imagine right out the backyard.”
Now, after the fire, many of those trees are charred and blackened, and soot and ash fill the air every time the wind kicks up. Still, Ms. Morris says she is not going anywhere; instead, she is joining the local volunteer fire department.
All of this of course is nonsense. There have always been wild fires, and there always will be. As the following article clearly explains, what has changed is the millions of people moving into our forests and putting themselves and their dwellings in mortal danger. Just like building on a flood plain, below sea level (New Orleans), or on the beach in a hurricane-prone area, it is people to blame, not the weather, or "climate change".
Of course the climate changes, it always has and always will. The irony of all of this stupidity is the people making these poor decisions then expect "big brother" (the Government, i.e. taxpayers) to protect them, and help them rebuild.
We should be getting smarter, with all of our education and availability of information, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case.
Peter
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fire.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th
At Your Peril
On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Wildfires Meet
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Published: June 26, 2007
COLEVILLE, Calif. — Lori and Don Morris had just started unpacking the boxes this month in their new dream house — four acres, national forest view, wide open land at their doorstep — when a wildfire raced down the stark bluffs over this high-desert town near the Nevada border.
Lori Morris of Coleville, Calif., stood on a hillside overlooking her home, which was spared by a wildfire that devoured 1,100 acres nearby.
More than 300 federal firefighters from as far away as Montana arrived, battling heat, 60-mile-an-hour wind gusts and flames bolting through 1,100 acres of bone-dry sagebrush and juniper. The Morrises, along with 200 other residents, watched helplessly as, miraculously, their homes were spared.
“Both of us were aware that these things happen,” said Ms. Morris, 47, as she looked out the window to the charred hillside. “We just didn’t think it would happen this fast.”
A new generation of Americans like the Morrises, in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.
Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin — has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.
“It’s like a tsunami, this big wave of development that’s rolling toward the public lands,” said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. “And the number of fires keeps going up.”
But now federal agencies at the front lines of defending these new communities from peril are starting to say enough is enough. The constellation of federally owned parks, forests and arid sagebrush fiefs in the lower 48 states is collectively about three-fourths the size of all the land east of the Mississippi River, and is becoming too expensive to protect with so many people pushing up against the fringes.
This spring, the United States Forest Service began warning state and local officials across the West that they would need to pick up more of the tab from the federal government, and do more to make homes less vulnerable to fire. About 45 percent of the Forest Service’s proposed budget for 2008 is designated for firefighting, compared with 13 percent in 1991. Last year, the agency spent $2.5 billion, a record, thinning fuels and fighting fires that burned 9.9 million acres, also a record.
“A lot of people are saying, ‘If you’re not going to do your part, we’re not going to risk our lives,’ ” said Stuart McMorrow, a forest-fuels expert with the North Tahoe Fire Protection District, which covers 31 square miles near Lake Tahoe.
“It’s coming to a head,” Mr. McMorrow said, “this notion that people move out to the woods and put themselves in dangerous situations.”
The Costs
Costs are also spiraling up like smoke for states and other federal agencies.
Wyoming budgeted $1.2 million for its 2006 fire season, then ended up spending $30 million. California, braced for what fire officials have said could be one of the worst seasons in history this year, has set aside $850 million for wildfire suppression.
The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the country’s largest landlord, spent $424 million fighting fire last year. Early season firefights have cost $215 million already this year even before the traditionally worst months arrive.
The insurance industry, in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, has also begun taking a much harder look at the places where people and trees meet, and is less willing to write policies for homeowners who do not meet a “wildfire checklist” by taking measures to protect their homes.
“Fire has emerged as more and more a megacatastrophic risk like we saw with Katrina,” said Carole Walker, the executive director of Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. “The financial exposure is huge, well into the billions.”
The result is a new tough-love approach from fire officials, where the soft and fuzzy reminders from Smokey Bear have given way to blunter assessments. The new rural Westerners, fire officials say and insurers increasingly demand, will have to start thinking more like the self-reliant Westerners of old.
That means clearing defensible spaces around homes and inspecting roofs and vents through which flying cinders can descend. Those measures protect homes, but also firefighters, since structures cleared of fuels are less dangerous to defend.
(Page 2 of 3)
All the while, federally owned public lands continue to attract more people as they evolve into something they were never intended to be: a real-estate amenity. As golf courses were to a past development wave, wild and scenic is to this one.
In Lake Tahoe, for example, glossy home magazines are filled with advertisements including cheery phrases like “adjacent to Forest Service land” and no mention of the fire risks.
“It’s like ocean frontage,” said Larry Swanson, an economist at the University of Montana in Missoula who studies public lands. “You would not have these high private property values without the public lands nearby, and the public lands are a huge part of the package that is driving the growth trends.”
Usually a summertime phenomenon, fire season has come early this year in many parts of the country, including Florida and Georgia. But it is in the West, where acres have always outnumbered humans, that the scale is greatest and the threat most acute.
Forests in the West are more prone to catastrophic fires than are Eastern ones, said David M. Theobald, a professor at Colorado State University who has analyzed population growth and fire patterns.
That puts a higher percentage of the new housing areas in severe-fire zones — more than 50 percent in California and Colorado, 47 percent in Montana and more than 65 percent in Washington and Oregon, according to a soon-to-be published paper by Mr. Theobald and a colleague, William Romme. In the 37 states east of the Rockies, only about 10 percent of the new rural housing areas are in so-called high-fire zones.
Drought and the possible effects of climate change on the seasons have added their own vehement kick. In California, Nevada, Idaho and Montana, officials are prepared for a devastating fire year. Wildfires erupted throughout the winter.
“We had fires every month,” said Joe DuRosseau, division chief of special operations for the fire department in Reno, Nev., which fought a 750-acre fire west of town during the last week of May. “It’s a very dry year, and the fuels are extremely dry.”
In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked for additional firefighting personnel, and officials worry that this summer could rival 2003, when fires caused more than $2 billion in damage, including 5,000 homes that burned in San Diego County.
Set for Battle
People like Robert A. Harrington, Montana’s state forester at the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, are haunted by the possibility of a year like 1910, when devastating fires in the northern Rockies could be not stopped. There are similar fears in more heavily populated areas like Lake Tahoe.
On Monday, in Lake Tahoe firefighters battled a fire that had destroyed 160 homes.
“On a good weekend there’s a couple million people in and around the Tahoe area, with ingress and egress along Interstate 80, essentially one way in and out,” said George D. Gentry, the executive officer of California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Imagine a conflagration starts and we have to evacuate people.”
North of the lake, where second homes pepper the 1.2 million acres of often remote wilderness, Forest Service firefighters train on roads, where turning a fire engine around is tricky even on a good day.
Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, a fire management officer there, said new housing in the far-flung fringe had made her job infinitely more challenging.
“There’s a housing area going up where the 80 and Highway 20 come together, with one-acre plots going at $1 million each,” Ms. Pincha-Tulley said. “I thought, ‘Oh great, this is just what I need.’ ”
Some residents in the high-risk areas worry that the federal government will be tempted to pass the problem along to local governments or homeowners.
“The federal government is there to protect the community from disasters,” said Ron Ehli, 50, a volunteer fire chief in Hamilton, Mont., an increasingly popular getaway in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula.
“Where Florida might have hurricanes, or California earthquakes, we have wildfires,” Mr. Ehli said. “And the federal government should be there to protect us.”
Truth be told, the nation’s founders would probably be shocked that the government was still in the land or firefighting business. Land, as the early framers of the republic saw it, through legislation like the Homestead Act, was for settlement and farming, and especially for private ownership.
(Page 3 of 3)
But much of the western half of the United States did not cooperate. It was too steep, wooded, wild and dry to be tamed the way land was in the East. So hundreds of millions of acres became and remained public land, owned by the government. For most of the past century, the government’s policy of fighting fires on that land was single-minded: if it burns, put it out and figure the costs later.
So the natural fire cycle that cleans out the undergrowth and dying trees broke down, and combustibles began to mount. At the same time, the timber industry paid huge fees to the Forest Service to allow cutting of valuable forest sections that kept the firefighting budget afloat.
But that has changed. The timber money has slowed to a trickle in many national forests as companies have moved operations to places where trees grow faster, like the South, or gotten into the real estate business themselves, like the giant Plum Creek Timber Company in Montana, which owns hundreds of thousands of acres in the state.
Still, some Forest Service critics say the agency remains too dependent on timber sales and firefighting money from Congress. Together, suggest the critics — an odd-bedfellows coalition that includes local environmental groups like the Friends of the Bitterroot and free-market libertarians from the Cato Institute — the financing sources have skewed wildfire policy.
“We have now turned the fundamental function of the Forest Service into the fire service,” said Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona and chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.
Mr. Grijalva said the knowledge by Forest Service administrators that Congress would pay for firefighting in defense of the nation’s public lands had led to a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of more and more money for firefighting.
Cuts in Spending
The surge in fire costs has in turn forced spending cuts in recent years in many other Forest Service programs, including campground maintenance, research, road repair and backcountry wilderness management.
“They’ve shifted the priorities,” Mr. Grijalva said. “And that puts property and people at risk, no question about it.”
Forest Service officials say they are used to being blamed. “Neither our strategy nor our priorities have changed,” said Mark E. Rey, under secretary for natural resources and the environment at the Department of Agriculture.
Safety of firefighters comes first, Mr. Rey said, then safety of residents, protection of structures and protection of resources.
What has changed, he said, is growth in the number of people living in harm’s way. That has bumped up costs because defending structures, Mr. Rey said, is more expensive than wilderness firefighting. At the same time, the knowledge of the woods and their dangers are fading as rural residents age and newcomers move in.
Ravalli County, Mont., for example, around the town of Hamilton, grew by 25 percent, to about 40,000 people, from 1995 to 2005. In the 2000 census, almost one-third of the residents said they had lived somewhere else five years earlier.
“I personally feel if they’re stupid enough to build their house with trees and stuff all around, it’s their dumb luck,” said Nancy Garness, 53, a baker at the Coffee Cup Cafe in Hamilton, who came to the area with her parents in the late 1950s when she was 4.
Insurance professionals say much the same thing.
“We all went through a period of, ‘write the policy and take the money,’ ” said Barry Whitmore, a State Farm Insurance agent in Hamilton. “Now we’ve got a wildfire checklist, and based on the answers, a home is either insurable or not insurable.”
In Coleville, a town of 400 people in the eastern Sierra Nevada, Ms. Morris and her husband are leaving little to chance.
Not much more than a wide spot in the road about 200 miles east of San Francisco, Coleville is showing signs of discovery, with a handful of new houses and real estate signs along the main road, which is also lined with cottonwoods and scrub brush.
Ms. Morris said it was love at first sight when she discovered the town a few months ago. The Morris abuts land owned by the Bureau of Land Management.
“There’s hundreds of miles of forests,” she said. “The beauty of it. We have every kind of tree you can imagine right out the backyard.”
Now, after the fire, many of those trees are charred and blackened, and soot and ash fill the air every time the wind kicks up. Still, Ms. Morris says she is not going anywhere; instead, she is joining the local volunteer fire department.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Slashing and Warming: See How Deforestation Causes Global Warming
Whatever the cause of global warming, the cutting and burning of vast amounts of forest to create farmland can not be good. However, it is difficult for rich countries to tell poorer countries to change their methods of agriculture when their expanding populations are demanding more food and jobs. What is the solution?
Note the amount of carbon dioxide produced from these man-made fires (20% of all man-made carbon emissions, as much as all the worlds cars and trucks)......also consider the amount of particulate matter (soot, ash) produced. Are these numbers accurate? I wonder how the climate computer models factor this into their computations. I'll bet it is another "fudge factor", more guess work. It sure is complex.
Peter
from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/opinion/16sat3.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Editorial
Slashing and Warming
Published: June 16, 2007
Buried in the final communiqué issued at the recent Group of 8 summit in Germany was an important and overdue pledge to help poorer nations reduce the global warming emissions caused by the slashing and burning of their tropical forests.
One of the glaring weaknesses in the 1997 Kyoto Accord was its failure to address deforestation, which now amounts to an astonishing 50 million acres a year. Because it releases huge quantities of carbon stored in trees, deforestation contributes at least 20 percent of all carbon emissions, quite apart from the toll it takes on plant and animal life and biodiversity generally. That’s more carbon dioxide than all of the world’s cars and trucks produce.
A collective effort to bring deforestation under control, and to plant new trees in areas already laid bare by the chain saw, could substantially reduce these emissions. It would also provide developing countries with outside revenue and draw them into the broader fight against climate change.
The industrialized world now needs to follow up its pledge with hard cash. Several big environmental organizations — including Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund — have already embarked on privately funded efforts to protect forest land. But there is no substitute for collective government action, and on this score other rich nations are well ahead of the United States.
Australia recently announced a commitment of $200 million to forest preservation efforts worldwide. The Europeans have agreed to put $150 million into a World Bank facility aimed at strengthening the ability of poorer countries to manage forests and prevent illegal logging. The governments that demonstrate management strengths are likely to attract foreign investors eager to satisfy their own obligations to reduce emissions by helping others do so.
Regrettably, the United States seems headed in the opposite direction. President Bush’s foreign aid budget proposes a one-third cut in funding for the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. Comparable cuts are targeted for a program that helps Madagascar’s struggling population protect its tropical forests. This is embarrassing, to say the least. As the world’s richest nation — and also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — the United States should be leading this parade, not bringing up the rear.
Note the amount of carbon dioxide produced from these man-made fires (20% of all man-made carbon emissions, as much as all the worlds cars and trucks)......also consider the amount of particulate matter (soot, ash) produced. Are these numbers accurate? I wonder how the climate computer models factor this into their computations. I'll bet it is another "fudge factor", more guess work. It sure is complex.
Peter
from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/opinion/16sat3.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Editorial
Slashing and Warming
Published: June 16, 2007
Buried in the final communiqué issued at the recent Group of 8 summit in Germany was an important and overdue pledge to help poorer nations reduce the global warming emissions caused by the slashing and burning of their tropical forests.
One of the glaring weaknesses in the 1997 Kyoto Accord was its failure to address deforestation, which now amounts to an astonishing 50 million acres a year. Because it releases huge quantities of carbon stored in trees, deforestation contributes at least 20 percent of all carbon emissions, quite apart from the toll it takes on plant and animal life and biodiversity generally. That’s more carbon dioxide than all of the world’s cars and trucks produce.
A collective effort to bring deforestation under control, and to plant new trees in areas already laid bare by the chain saw, could substantially reduce these emissions. It would also provide developing countries with outside revenue and draw them into the broader fight against climate change.
The industrialized world now needs to follow up its pledge with hard cash. Several big environmental organizations — including Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund — have already embarked on privately funded efforts to protect forest land. But there is no substitute for collective government action, and on this score other rich nations are well ahead of the United States.
Australia recently announced a commitment of $200 million to forest preservation efforts worldwide. The Europeans have agreed to put $150 million into a World Bank facility aimed at strengthening the ability of poorer countries to manage forests and prevent illegal logging. The governments that demonstrate management strengths are likely to attract foreign investors eager to satisfy their own obligations to reduce emissions by helping others do so.
Regrettably, the United States seems headed in the opposite direction. President Bush’s foreign aid budget proposes a one-third cut in funding for the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. Comparable cuts are targeted for a program that helps Madagascar’s struggling population protect its tropical forests. This is embarrassing, to say the least. As the world’s richest nation — and also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — the United States should be leading this parade, not bringing up the rear.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Forest Fires, CO2 and Global Warming, An Interesting Idea
Think about forest fires and prairie fires, mostly caused by lightening, mostly natural. How to they contribute to the Earth's atmosphere and global warming. Think about this.
Peter
from:
http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=7157
Actually more water in the atmoshere means less CO2. The reason this is so is that water scrubs CO2 out of the air to form carbonic acid, which has a low vapor pressure. This rains to the earth, and is neutralized by the oceans to become fixed as carbonates, i.e, limestone and sea shells.
One big source of CO2 that rivals industrial input are forest fires. This year alone over 3.5millions acres have burnt in the US. If one poured out the world's production of oil, for this year, on that area it would be 1 ft deep. It shows that US forest fires alone can almost compete with emissions due to oil. If we add all the forest fires in Europe, Asia (Siberia), Africa, Austrlia, South America, the rest of north America, this is the real culprit. It is probally responsible for the cyclic heating and cooling that has occurred before humans were around.
Peter
from:
http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=7157
Actually more water in the atmoshere means less CO2. The reason this is so is that water scrubs CO2 out of the air to form carbonic acid, which has a low vapor pressure. This rains to the earth, and is neutralized by the oceans to become fixed as carbonates, i.e, limestone and sea shells.
One big source of CO2 that rivals industrial input are forest fires. This year alone over 3.5millions acres have burnt in the US. If one poured out the world's production of oil, for this year, on that area it would be 1 ft deep. It shows that US forest fires alone can almost compete with emissions due to oil. If we add all the forest fires in Europe, Asia (Siberia), Africa, Austrlia, South America, the rest of north America, this is the real culprit. It is probally responsible for the cyclic heating and cooling that has occurred before humans were around.
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