(CA fire) Areas 'disaster waiting to happen'
Brandon Skile
Areas 'disaster waiting to happen'
By Laura Parker, Tom Kenworthy and Patrick McMahon USA TODAY
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Lance Cross, a U.S. Forest Service fire
chief, and his crew of 135 firefighters held back the flames that
roared up the slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains last week.
Now, he wonders, to what end? In Crestline, one of many small
neighborhoods Cross fought to save, dozens of wooden houses are jammed
together, surrounded by pine trees so dense they are wedged against
roofs, eaves, porches. Half are dead.
"This is a disaster waiting to happen," Cross says. With such
conditions in the forest, it was no surprise that the wildfires that
swept through Southern California in the past two weeks became the
worst in state history. Once-wild areas are now heavily populated. And
the mere presence of people has created fire risks and altered the
ways forest fires can be attacked.
The story is not unique to California. Across the West, the relentless
push by hundreds of thousands of people into areas naturally prone to
fire continues unabated. Places as different as the affluent
playground of Aspen, Colo., and the rustic outskirts of Salmon, Idaho,
face increasingly destructive wildfire seasons. And with that, come
new questions about who pays for the risk of living in fire-danger
zones.
"There's an almost direct correlation between growth and the number of
ignitions," says Tim Duane, a University of California-Berkeley
professor of environmental planning. A study he did in the Sierra
Nevada showed that as the population nearly doubled, so did the number
of fires and acres burned. Property damage went up 5,000%.
In California, new subdivisions in once-wild areas are packed in so
tightly they might as well be in Los Angeles. Some have been built,
experts say, in "indefensible locations" that will almost certainly
burn. That was the case in a narrow funnel called Hook Canyon on the
southeast side of Lake Arrowhead. There, 350 houses burned.
On top of the "urbanization" of wild areas, there was a four-year
drought that kiln-dried chaparral shrub lands near the Pacific Ocean
and so stressed the pine trees in the San Bernardino forest that they
became vulnerable to an attack by beetles. The 11 fires in Southern
California have consumed almost 750,000 acres, killed 20 people and
destroyed almost 3,500 homes. Many expected the fires to be worse.
Lessons to be learned
Mike Davis, an environmental history professor at the University of
California-Irvine, sees the rash of wildfires around the West as the
beginning of a pattern for fire disasters in the 21st century.
"My fear is that we are seeing the template of the future — fires like
this once a generation in California, once a decade in other parts of
the United States," he says. "I would say tragedies of this scale are
possible all over. ... These wildfires should be seen as really a
national tragedy, with national lessons to be learned from it."
Many hope the catastrophic fires in California will teach those
lessons, especially to the insurance industry, developers, homeowners,
the real estate industry, as well as local, state and federal
government.
Already, insurers are growing less willing to cover homes at high
risk. In Colorado and five other interior Western states, State Farm
has begun surveying the homes of 23,000 policyholders living in areas
vulnerable to fire.
Policyholders will be told what they need to do to create "defensible
space" and given up to two years to complete roof replacements, brush
clearing and other work. The implicit threat: Their policies won't be
renewed if they balk.
Congress, spurred in part by the California fires, is near approval of
the Bush administration's so-called Healthy Forest Initiative, a
program that would greatly expand forest thinning throughout the West.
California has recognized since the 1970s that a key to limiting
damage from wildfires is getting homeowners to take precautions.
Homeowners in hazardous areas are required to maintain firebreaks
around their homes, free of plants that burn. Trees cannot extend near
chimneys. Dead limbs cannot overhang homes. This year, the Legislature
got tougher. It gave the state fire marshal powers to impose strict
standards requiring better fireproofing of new homes.
Violators could face fines up to $500, plus the cost of the work. But
enforcement has been limited, officials say, and hundreds of thousands
of residents ignore the rules.
Last week, thousands of them paid an awful price for doing so.
In Scripps Ranch, an upscale San Diego suburb, Betty McGuigan, 58,
stands as an example of why such regulations have been imposed.
Last year, after a small fire close to her home, McGuigan replaced her
wooden-shingle roof with one made of fireproof tile.
She also made sure the steep slope behind her back lawn was cleared of
plants that could burn. As the massive Cedar Fire roared out of the
chaparral shrub land to the east a week ago, it spared McGuigan's home
while destroying 385 houses. Most of them had wooden roofs.
But there is still resistance to the sort of steps McGuigan took.
McGuigan's homeowner's association turned her down when she asked to
replace a small section of wood siding on her stucco home with vinyl
siding.
At Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains, the Lake Arrowhead
Association, in order to help preserve the area's natural beauty, long
banned property owners from cutting trees. The ban was lifted a year
ago. But by then, it was too late.
Consequences of development
What happened in the San Bernardino Mountains tells the story of the
consequences of "urbanizing" the forest. The fires in the San
Bernardino National Forest consumed more than 150,000 acres and more
than 900 homes last week.
About 100,000 people live within the forest boundaries. The forest has
not experienced a severe burn in nearly 100 years, in part because the
U.S. Forest Service policy was to suppress fires. That left the forest
with an unprecedented buildup of dry, dead fuel that fed the fires
last week.
On top of that, four years of drought, followed by a beetle
infestation, killed huge stands of pine trees. By October, more than
half the pine trees in the 800,000-acre national forest were dead or
dying. The trees are currently dying at a rate of 600 acres a day.
Two months before the Old Fire and others broke out in the region,
Texas A&M University forest ecologist Thomas Bonnicksen warned
Congress that "never have I seen anything more dangerous than the
overgrown, beetle-ravaged forests. ... I am concerned for the safety
of people living in communities surrounded by these forests."
Residents around the resort town of Lake Arrowhead say they first
noticed the trees dying several years ago.
Even so, not until recently did many face the magnitude of their
peril. Copper-colored pines, brittle and dry, surround the houses.
Residents do what they can to remove them, but there are too many.
"You and your neighbor could cut down your trees, but there'd be 75
dead trees behind you where the owner could care less," says Don
Morel, 49, a lake resident.
Bruce Stone, 50, has lived at the lake for 20 years. "I told the
mountain people here those dead pine trees are just gasoline on a
stick," he says.
Contributing: Parker reported from San Bernardino, Kenworthy from San
Diego and McMahon from Big Bear Lake Contributing: Martin Kasindorf in
Los Angeles
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-11-02-fires-usat_x.htm