Originally Posted By Darkbeer Here are a couple of stories that are dealing with the change in policy the last 20 years or so, where now many of the activities that helped to prevent fires and help to stop them from spreading have been stopped or greatly reduced due to enviromental laws being passed. <a href="http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/mostert/071022" target="_blank">http://www.renewamerica.us/col umns/mostert/071022</a> >>In the 1980s, over 2.18 billion board feet of lumber was harvested annually from the ten million aces of National Forest in the California Sierras. By 1994 only 360 million board feet was being harvested in the Sierras and by the time I left California in 1999, the harvesting of lumber in El Dorado National Forest had dropped to such an extent that logging in El Dorado County, once its major industry, had almost disappeared, bringing economic disaster to thousands of people connected with logging and construction in the area. It has been known for many years by those actually involved in the forests that the Sierra Club policies, which became public policy in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, would cause exactly the kinds of fires we are now experiencing. This is because the public has been deceived by the Sierra Club and others who have made claims such as the spotted owl being endangered. I identified the real culprit in the growing forest-fire problem in an article in 2002 entitled, Our Burning Forests — the Legacy of Radical Environmentalism: "It was just about 100 years ago that America began to try to protect the national forests by quickly putting out any fire. About thirty years ago, the environmentalists began their determined and largely successful effort to halt logging in our forests. "So, what has happened in those largely conifer Western forests in the meantime? They have been largely overrun by brush that creates the kind of mammoth fires we are now witnessing in the West. Fire is nature's way of keeping conifer forests healthy, as even the Sierra Club is now belatedly beginning to comprehend. Without the small regular fires that we have been putting out in our forests for the last 100 years what we now have are forests overrun by brush that not only strangles the conifers but also changes the ecology of the conifer forests. "Instead of allowing nature to take its course in the conifer forests, 93 years into the forest policy of preserving the underbrush in our forests, a new policy was introduced that halted logging and removing dead and dying or over crowded trees and underbrush in the forests with Vice President Al Gore as its chief proponent. In his book, 'Earth in Balance,' published in 1993 he wrote, of 'the heated dispute between the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest and conservationists eager to protect the endangered spotted owl.' (Page 194) "Actually, the spotted owl was never endangered. The spotted owl boondoggle was the result of an owl counting venture in 1972 when Eric Forsman, a city-bred graduate student at the Cooperative Wildlife Research United at Oregon State university, reported, after only a year of study, that Spotted Owl pairs were found only in areas of old growth forests slated for timber harvest. Yet, Spotted Owls in California have been found nesting in a K-Mart sign and they increased in the El Dorado National Forest in the early 1990s after a severe fire that burned a huge segment of the forest. Gore had a major role, he tells us, in implementing 'Save the Spotted Owl' regulations that reduced or stopped logging in National Forests. "However, a widely ignored July 23, 1990, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report warned: 'Past fire protection practices in the forests have caused abnormal fuels conditions to develop" and noted that the practice of "protecting snags, dead but standing trees which are favorite nesting spots for the Spotted Owl are obstacles to fire suppression" and that "current practices are creating forest conditions that most likely will lead to large, high severity fires.' "In 1997 I attended a Congressional hearing held in California on the issue of management of the 10 million acres of National Forests in the Sierras where the supervisor of a one of the California forests stated, 'It is not IF the forests will burn, it is only a matter of WHEN they will burn, because of the huge amount of fuel we have allowed to grow in them.'" It is now 10 years after that Congressional hearing and 17 years after the 1990 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Report. We didn't listen to those who really understand the forests, and have now lost millions of acres of our forests. Those trees could have been used to build homes and businesses and been enjoyed by hikers and campers if we had not given in to the Sierra Club. We also would have had trees for birds to nest in and wildlife to graze on. But, instead, they are dead because we listened to Al Gore and his friends in the Sierra Club instead of to forest rangers and managers.<< <a href="http://www.bannerofliberty.com/BOL1-02MQC/6-26-2002.1.html" target="_blank">http://www.bannerofliberty.com /BOL1-02MQC/6-26-2002.1.html</a>
Originally Posted By Darkbeer <a href="http://www.ocblog.net/ocblog/2007/10/foothill-south-.html" target="_blank">http://www.ocblog.net/ocblog/2 007/10/foothill-south-.html</a> >>The 241 Toll Road has proven to be a godsend both for firefighters and for families fleeing the flames (if you'll pardon my alliteration). Firefighters have used the 241 as a staging area to battle the blaze and the 241 provides a firebreak protecting homes to the west, although the extreme high winds did cause the fire to jump the 241 in Irvine. Thankfully, there is currently no fire east of San Clemente that threatens that community. But if there were, the I-5 freeway would be the only escape route out of town and if that is gridlocked, there are no other alternatives. Despite 20 years of environmental analysis conducted by TCA, EPA, US Fish & Wildlife and others designed to protect the native plants and habitat of the Arroyo Toad and Pacific pocket mouse, it took just a few days of a fire to do more to damage tens of thousands of acres than the completion of a 16-mile roadway could ever do. In fact without the 241 in the foothills of Lake Forest, the fire damage and destruction to both homes and wildlife would probably have been worse. The completion of the 241 would give our firefighters access to east San Clemente, it would provide a firebreak to protect the homes to the west, and it would provide an escape route for the residents. Suddenly investing $20 million and 20 years into analyzing the protection of a two-inch mouse from a roadway is put into perspective.<<
Originally Posted By Darkbeer <a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110004233" target="_blank">http://www.opinionjournal.com/ diary/?id=110004233</a> >>Brush With Disaster California's fires may end a legislative logjam in Washington. Thursday, October 30, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST The horrific fires in California have finally prompted the Senate to begin debate on President Bush's "Healthy Forests" bill to curb such conflagrations by actively removing brush and other forest "fuels" from federal land. The House passed the bill five months ago, but the Senate has failed to act, largely because of environmental objections. Rep. Richard Pombo, chairman of the House Resources Committee, now urges the Senate to "wake up and smell the smoke." Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who has brokered a compromise, agrees: "We need to take action now." The debate over "Healthy Forests" will be a good test to see if the environmental lobby can overcome its more extreme members and embrace common-sense reforms. Interviews with officials and residents of California leave no doubt that while "Healthy Forests" won't prevent fires on private land, it may prompt local authorities to alter policies that allow brush to build up and become a fire hazard. Mark Price, the chairman of the planning board in the San Diego suburb of Alpine, which is now in the path of one of the major fires, told me that local regulations often prevent residents from engaging in preventive behavior. "When you block brush-clearing and creation of firebreaks, it can put homes and people on the endangered species list too," he says. "When you do get permission to clear anything, the environmentalists come out and make sure you don't clear one bit more of brush than you're allowed." << >>Similar disasters are lurking in the nation's forest land. There environmental groups have used political influence and legal challenges to prevent the clean-up of millions of acres of dead or dying trees. The Bush "Healthy Forests" bill would allow the immediate thinning of the areas at greatest risk and also limit judicial review of projects designed to reduce the fire hazard. Environmental groups oppose the measure because, in the words of a Sierra Club spokesman, it "might open the door to runaway logging" on the U.S. Forest Service's 196 million acres of land. Tom Bray, a columnist for the Detroit News, says the real fear of environmentalists is that successful brush-clearing operations would "bring into question the dogma that the forest primeval should be protected from the contaminating touch of mankind altogether." The fires in California should demonstrate once and for all that the romantic notion that man shouldn't have a role in shaping nature for the good of all is fraught with peril. Mark Rey, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's undersecretary, says that a century of misguided suppression of fires and brush clearing has to be reevaluated. "Fuel loads have built up to unnatural levels, and that is what is fueling the intensity of these fires" in California. As the Senate debates President Bush's modest steps to fix the problem, environmental opponents should be forced to meet some of the people who've lost their homes in California and look them in the eye as they defend the status quo. <<
Originally Posted By Darkbeer And Australia has the same type of problems... <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/07/1052280321826.html" target="_blank">http://www.smh.com.au/articles /2003/05/07/1052280321826.html</a> >>But the real environmental vandals are the misguided urban greens whose ongoing opposition to hazard reduction burning and the maintenance of fire trails has finally resulted in the annihilation of much of the flora and fauna in the high country national parks of NSW, Victoria and the ACT. So much for biodiversity. Environmentalists who fought to protect hollow logs on the forest floor, because they were home to the long-toothed rat, have ensured few rats, long-toothed or otherwise, could escape the inferno that hit their forest this year. The famed pygmy possum colony at Blue Cow ski-field was wiped out. Only three possums have been found alive, say locals. And that's not even to mention the four people killed by the fires when they reached Canberra on January 18, and the 400 houses destroyed. Angry Snowy Mountains farmers and volunteer firefighters, who blame green zealotry and incompetent land management practices for the disaster, have lodged blistering submissions to the federal parliamentary inquiry into those bushfires, which closes to submissions tomorrow and is expected to report in November. "The fires have been inexcusably hot in country where hazard reduction has been obstructed in our locality," wrote one farmer, Noeline Franklin, of Tin'ut, Brindabella. The federal inquiry, one of five inquiries into January's fires, may be the only one with the scope and political motivation to investigate the failure by state agencies to adequately manage the land in their care. The CSIRO's principal research scientist, Phil Cheney, Australia's foremost bushfire researcher, also blames the intensity of the fires on the fact that, "for the last 30 years there has been a continuing decline in operational prescribed burning". He said yesterday the January fires were "a truly historic event [producing] probably the most extreme, widespread and continuously burnt area in living history". And the reason history was made? "Really the only thing that has changed is burning practices." The gradual removal of grazing stock from mountain areas had also allowed undergrowth to build up, he said. The amount of fuel on the ground had a quantifiable effect on the speed and intensity of a fire, combined with weather and slope variables, said Cheney. If ground fuel was kept under control, with regular cool, controlled burns in winter, a fire would usually peter out in a eucalypt forest. Hazard reduction did not prevent fires, but it kept them manageable.<<
Originally Posted By Darkbeer A press Release from April, 2004 Senate Committee Fails Hollingsworth Fire Breaks Bill Measure would have allowed residents to clear dangerous brush and fuel in fire areas The Senate Natural Resources Committee today voted to kill a bill by Senator Dennis Hollingsworth (R- El Cajon) that was a response to the conditions and confusion that led to the disastrous wildfires of 2003. Hollingsworth's bill was also an outgrowth of the findings and recommendations of the Governor's Blue Ribbon Fire Commission which released its final report April 14th. Senate Bill 1255 would have exempted from the California Endangered Species Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, as well as other state and local regulations, clearing adequate and effective firebreaks up to 300 feet around homes and buildings in dangerous fire areas at the direction of fire authorities. However, the bill failed on a vote of 4-3. The votes were cast along partisan lines, with Democrat Senator Dede Alpert of San Diego joining Republicans in supporting the measure. "Yet again we see that the liberal Democrats in charge of the legislature refuse to set people and public safety over the Endangered Species Act, or the myriad other laws and regulations that hamper the ability to protect life and property and destroy private property rights," said Senator Hollingsworth. "My own constituents, and so many witnesses that I heard while serving on the Governor's Blue Ribbon Fire Commission, have clamored that the legislature once and for all, put protecting people's lives and property as a priority, without question," he added. "This has been an issue that has come up in investigations of numerous other fires over a long span of time, but once again, the liberals stood lock-step with the extreme environmentalists who want people out of the back country any way they can." Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club opposed Hollingsworth's firebreaks bill and their representatives testified before the Senate Natural Resources Committee hearing, saying the bill would lead to too much environmental damage. Responding to environmentalists' criticism Senator Hollingsworth said, "The irony here is that the very people and so called pro-environmental, pro-habitat policies that have contributed to the loss of thousands of homes in San Diego County and elsewhere, have caused environmental devastation that even our grandchildren will be able to see. These fires had so much to burn, and were so hot, that the beauty we once knew will take generations to return." "My constituents lost 2,700 homes in last year's fires, many of them in hillside and brushy areas," Hollingsworth noted. "Many homeowners expressed frustration and anger over environmental regulations preventing them from clearing the dangerous brush bordering their properties," the Senator added. "This is one of the tragic lessons seared on our consciences from the fires, and it is tragic that the pleas of those who experienced loss, and know what needs to be done fell on deaf ears in Sacramento."
Originally Posted By Sport Goofy How about placing limits on suburban sprawl and development -- pushing the limits of cities and their ability to cope with disasters of this type beyond the boundaries that can reasonably managed? Of course, its easiest to blame the environmentalists. You don't have to point any blame at city councils and greedy land developers who have made absolutely no effort to limit the expansion of city's into former wilderness areas. It also helps city's that aren't keeping up with their growth in development from blaming themselves for not having adequate services for fire prevention and management of crises like these.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip <<How about placing limits on suburban sprawl and development -- pushing the limits of cities and their ability to cope with disasters of this type beyond the boundaries that can reasonably managed?>> Absolutely. I certainly agree that forest management practices in the past have been misguided. They were well intentioned but resulted in disaster. I think you would find few in the US Forestry Service or Park Service that disagree with the idea that fire prevention needs to change. But getting beyond that; why do people constantly push further and further into 'wild' areas and then bitch about it when bad stuff happens? What exactly do they expect? I'm not dumping on Californians... Minnesotans are the same way. They push development further and further into areas that were previously undeveloped forest and then freak out because they have bears in their backyard. What on earth did they THINK would happen?
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan I'm just glad that no one on the right is politicizing these fires. LOL!
Originally Posted By Kennesaw Tom I don't think that a road is going to provide a reasonable fire break when you have 60 mile an hour winds blowing embers all over. In terms of forest management, California has chosen to go in the direction that they have gone, basically leaving things alone. I'm sure it has been with good intentions. Sometimes you have to go with the hand delt you. Maybe the Governor is right and California has simply made the best they could under the current circumstances. I don't think anyone wanted to see this happen. And right now there are many people in California who are homeless or can't return to their homes just yet. Right now may not be the best time to discuss "what if" senerios. Lets help the people that need help and play the blame game later.
Originally Posted By Kennesaw Tom <<I'm not dumping on Californians... Minnesotans are the same way. They push development further and further into areas that were previously undeveloped forest and then freak out because they have bears in their backyard. What on earth did they THINK would happen?>> LOL, Roadtrip I was thinking of the bear thing too. I'm not going to point fingers when we have the same thing happening here in Georgia with water. The Governor has told everyone that we only have 80 days of water left for the metro Atlanta area. A little late to start thinking about a backup plan. We all need to be more responsible with the environment.
Originally Posted By Jim in Merced CA The fires in Southern California are the fault of the spotted owl. That asshole.
Originally Posted By debtee This whole situation is so eerie! It's exactly what happened here in Australia. Once the fires came and destroyed everything in it's path, the blame game started about who's fault it was that the undergrowth had been allowed to sit for years and years with no removal. As we are in the middle of a 100 year drought, it was like a tinderbox and it all just went up in flames with hundreds of houses and many lives lost as the outcome. The greenies took the brunt of the blame for not allowing trees to be cut down and being so vocal abound them not being cleared over the last 15 years or so. That policy has since changed here. Most of the Winter was spent back burning and removing dead material in the bush. It's such a waste that with our climates being quite similar between CA and Sydney and us hiring your water Erickson aircranes each year, (they just arrived last week) with your firefighters flying over to help during the fires, that some information about what should have been done in the Winter months in CA, could have been shared between our fire departments and helped prevent this disaster being so bad.
Originally Posted By jonvn "I don't think that a road is going to provide a reasonable fire break when you have 60 mile an hour winds blowing embers all over." Of course it's not a fire break. The embers of a fire can travel up to a couple of miles with winds like that. This recent fire jumped over a ten lane freeway.
Originally Posted By peeaanuut <<The fires in Southern California are the fault of the spotted owl. That asshole.>> Lets not forget the hippies. SHOOT ALL HIPPIES!!!
Originally Posted By Sport Goofy << Of course some of this "suburban sprawl and development " does create jobs. >> There are plenty of studies that have been done to demonstrate that the cost of expanding city services to keep up with suburban sprawl, particularly residential sprawl, exceed the revenue generated by these developments. What the sprawl does do is expand the business base so municipalities can issue more bonds to fund their operations. In the long run, the Ponzi scheme can't last and somebody has to pay back the debt.
Originally Posted By Moderation Commercial logging is a red herring. The so called 'forests' in Southern California are not close packed stands of old growth redwood, they are mostly brush and scrub with an occassional pine tree. They have no commercial logging value. This fire is about suburban sprawl and NIMBYs who want to live is a 'natural' setting surrounded by too much nature.
Originally Posted By vbdad55 <The fires in Southern California are the fault of the spotted owl. That asshole.< Hoot ! Hoot !
