150 Years of Mismanagement? Or Seven Years of Misplaced Priorities?

When I drafted yesterday’s post about the Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe, I almost included speculation that local rules might have prevented residents from making their homes firesafe by removing the vegetation from around their homes. But I took it out before posting — this, after all, was a high-fire-risk area. Nobody could be that stupid.

Fighting the Angora Fire.
Flickr photo by joyseph.

It turns out you rarely lose by underestimating the intelligence of government planners. Local residents say that rules issued by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a federally chartered group, prevented them from making their homes firewise. One local resident says that he cut trees and shrubs in violation of those rules, and his house survived while his neighbors did not. Of course, the agency denies that the burned homes are its fault.

Maps also verify that much of the area burned had already been treated to reduce hazardous fuels. A major problem with the Forest Service’s approach to fuels is that there are so many millions of acres that it says need to be treated that it can never reach them all. The Angora Fire proves once again that, if any are left untreated, you might as well not do any at all.

A prescribed fire burning last October in the Tahoe area.
Flickr photo by mrjerz.

More important, evidence is piling up that the real problem was not untreated national forest lands but untreated private lots around the homes. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency has a report on its web site that looks at how well local homeowners have prepared their houses for fire. For the South Tahoe area, the report found:

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Looking at the photos of burned homes, Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen points out that many of the trees around the homes appear to still be alive. This brings to mind his review of a previous fire in Summerhaven, Arizona, in which the side of the trees facing burned homes were blackened, but the side facing away were still green.

In other words, says Cohen, “it’s the houses, stupid,” that are burning, not the forest. It is curious that one of the news photos of a home that was burned to the ground has a real estate sign out in front that was almost completely untouched. Someone must of firewised the sign. (Unfortunately, it turns out that links to LA Times news photos don’t work because they change the web address of each photo each time they add a new photo. I hope that didn’t cause any confusion in yesterday’s post.)

Here is what Cohen has to say about wildland fire in general:

“Research results indicate that the home and its immediate surroundings within 100-200 feet (30-60 meters) principally determine the home ignition potential during severe wildland-urban fires. Research has also established that fire is an intrinsic ecological process of nearly all North American ecosystems. Together, this understanding forms the basis for a compelling argument for a different approach to addressing the wildland-urban fire problem. It suggests that residential compatibility with wildland fire–homes and residential areas becoming the ‘fuel break’–can be more effective at preventing wildland-urban fire disasters than the current approach of emergency wildland-urban fire protection.”

“Fire management experts” who work for the Forest Service are already saying that the problem is “150 years of mismanagement,”, suggesting that the solution is to give the Forest Service more money for hazardous fuel treatments.

“People have interjected their homes into a system that has a natural tendency to burn very frequently, and where we have suppressed the frequency of those fires for so long, there’s an ungodly amount of fuel there,” says a Forest Service ecologist.

“We need to more aggressively manage our forests,” says a Tahoe-area homeowner who has bought into the Forest Service line. But this policy is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars each year and accomplishing little in the way of fire protection.

The Forest Service has been aggressively treating forest fuels now since 2001. But we now know that there are too many acres to treat and such treatments don’t stop the fires anyway. Making homes firewise is the only way to stop the destruction of homes. The “treatments” that the Forest Service wants to apply to the rest of the forests are, for the most part, simply a way for the agency to enhance its budget.