- "There is forest as far as my eye can see and 70
percent of the trees are dead. It's impossible to cut them all down. You
can't keep the beetles out. You can take one tree out and two weeks later
100 more are dead."
-
- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A
perfect storm, an apocalypse, a blaze of biblical proportions.
-
- These were no cliches as an inferno swept up to the stupendous
Rim of the World, some 5,000 feet up in the San Bernardino Mountains, and
bore down on the weekend playground for Angelenos of Lake Arrowhead and
Big Bear.
-
- Seventy thousand people fled their homes in evocative
places like Running Springs and Sky Forest, knowing that their idyllic
rural hamlets had long since become a tinderbox.
-
- "Lake Arrowhead is the perfect storm of factors
combining to produce a really dangerous situation -- three or four years
of drought, a bark beetle infestation, decades of fire suppression and
really widespread residential development all mixed up together,"
said Jay Watson of the Wilderness Society.
-
- Even before the fire hit the picturesque lake and ski
resort on Wednesday, 70 percent of the majestic pine and fir trees were
dead, turned brown and dry by a bark beetle epidemic that has devastated
400,000 acres of southern California forests.
-
- California Gov. Gary Davis proclaimed a state of emergency
in the San Bernardino forest back in March, releasing funds to allow forest
and fire officials took to clear dead trees from near roadways, clear evacuation
routes and make fire plans.
-
- But the scale of the problem was simply too great.
-
- "There is forest as far as my eye can see and 70
percent of the trees are dead. It's impossible to cut them all down. You
can't keep the beetles out. You can take one tree out and two weeks later
100 more are dead," Joe New, a ranger with the U.S Forestry Department,
said as the fire neared Lake Arrowhead.
-
- The bark beetle -- a creature as small as a grain of
rice -- saps the tree's ability to absorb moisture, killing the tree but
leaving it standing like a giant match with no resistance to flame.
-
- DISASTER AWAITS
-
- Add to that a four-year drought, gusting winds, and a
policy of fighting small fires rather than letting Mother Nature periodically
clear the undergrowth -- and the San Bernardino forest was a disaster waiting
to happen.
-
- "If fire hits the dead trees, they explode. It's
like throwing pitch on a campfire," said New.
-
- Andrea Tuttle, director of the California Department
of Forestry, warned that when the week-long wildfires reached the diseased
trees around Lake Arrowhead, the blaze would be "of biblical proportions."
-
- "If it goes up, we will not have seen a conflagration
of those proportions once it gets started," she said.
-
- People have moved into the San Bernardino mountains in
droves in the past 20 years as it evolved from a community built on the
logging industry to a recreational resort. For months they had been well
aware of the fire risk and that their very encroachment into the wilderness
was part of the problem.
-
- "The fear was that all these factors would merge
at the same time, and they did. That's why the community was trying so
hard to do what they could to get the trees out before a fire started.
They were desperately trying to come up with some sort of protection plan,"
said Candysse Miller, executive director of the Insurance Information Network
of California.
-
- Miller had been working with local fire-safe councils
to try to reduce the risk. But she said that removing dead trees from hilly
slopes was both a dangerous and expensive task for individual homeowners.
-
- A "Healthy Forests" bill now going through
Congress attempts to address the long-running conflict between environmentalists
and the timber industry over the management of the nation's forests.
-
- The legislation would streamline environmental reviews
to speed up the thinning of national forests near communities in order
to reduce the risk of fires.
-
- But some commentators are dubious about whether legislation
alone will prevent the kind of fires seen in southern California this week.
-
- "To pretend that you can solve this fire problem
on the cheap is a charade. It is a cruel hoax on the American people. It
is going to cost a lot of money and it is going to take a couple of decades
to reverse the situation we find ourselves in," said Watson of the
Wilderness Society.
-
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