Communities, Agencies, Tackle State's Growing Wildfire Threat

Fire officials and civic leaders, confronting a menacing risk of catastrophic fire in the dying forests that encircle Lake Tahoe, have initiated an unprecedented effort to clean out diseased and dead trees from thousands of privately owned lots.

Like other significant community based fuel reduction efforts, such as Shingletown Community Fire Safe Project in Shasta County, the Highway 50 Project, and the Oakhurst Project, Tahoe Re-Green aims to protect the delicate Sierra ecosystem.

A lightning strike or errant flame in dead, dry timber could ignite a disaster at Lake Tahoe, one of the states top tourist destinations and vulnerable wildfire areas, whose 50,000 year-round resident population swells to 200,000 during the summer.

In the Lake Tahoe basin, a persistent beetle infestation of plague-like proportions has killed at least 25 to 30 percent of the trees, and seemingly cannot be stopped except by fire or tree removal.

"Virtually every acre in the basin has dead and dying trees on it," said John Swanson, fire and vegetation manager for the Forest Service at Lake Tahoe. "Thinning the forest and removing the current overload of dead trees improves its health and biodiversity. The healthy trees that are left grow more vigorously and are less susceptible to fire."

Tahoe Re-Green is a campaign by local, state, and federal firefighting agencies, nonprofit, and civic organizations to induce property owners to remove diseased, dead, and dying trees from among 51,000 lots and replant, if necessary, with healthy seedlings to improve fire safety and biodiversity.

"Our goal is to get these trees down and out of the basin to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire that would destroy property, threaten lives, and diminish the water quality of Lake Tahoe," said California's Assistant Resources Secretary Terry Gorton. "We're also in a race between Mother Nature and insurance companies to keep fire insurance premiums from escalating."

Tahoe Re-Green, organized by Gorton in September 1995, will focus during the winter on obtaining approval for tree removal in the spring and summer. Cutting and removing thousands of trees from privately and publicly owned parcels is a complex mission that requires public cooperation, economic incentives to hold down costs, and suitable ways to dispose of felled trees.

Property owners can call the Tahoe Re-Green hotline 1-800-824-6347, for information about tree removal.

"It is up to all property owners to recognize the danger and do their part by removing these trees," said Hank Weston of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) and the Tahoe Re-Green's three-member unified command that includes the U.S. Forest Service and local fire chiefs.

What's Involved

Tree removal in the basin is regulated by the bi-state Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), which oversees environmental quality. In October, the TRPA approved measures to streamline and expedite removal of dying trees from parcels 20 acres or smaller, whether privately or publicly owned. Owners of the 80 parcels affected no longer are restricted to a salvage limit of 100 dying trees, and now can obtain a CDF tree removal permit in five days, instead of the traditional waiting time of three months or longer. Similarly, the state Board of Forestry voted to exempt owners of 20 acres or less from having to file a timber harvest plan to remove dead and dying trees in the Lake Tahoe basin. The rule change is effective upon approval of the state Office of Administive Law, expected by January. The TRPA already allows removal of dead trees without a permit.

"These changes encourage complete forest health instead of a piecemeal approach that left infected trees so the beetle infestation could spread," said Steve Chilton, the TRPA's environmental compliance chief.

Tree removal and logging, generally confined to the dry months to minimize soil disturbance that causes erosion into the lake, also can be done over heavy snows that provide added soil protection.

Currently, state law requires property owners to clear flammable or combustible vegetation from 30 to 100 feet around homes adjoining mountains, forest, brush, or grasslands, but doesn't require removing trees. The law also doesn't apply to vacant lots, which are covered by local ordinances and other measures.

Tree removal is expensive for property owners who must bear the burden of the cost, which can range from several hundred to $1,000 or more per tree.

"Property owners need to weigh the cost of tree removal against the cost of fire, damage from falling dead trees, and insurance coverage," Gorton said.

To assist property owners, the California Resources Agency is working with the State Water Resources Control Board on plans to make available $5 million in low-interest loans from a revolving loan fund.

Sites must be created to collect large numbers of trees, and markets found to sell them for their highest value. Tahoe Re-Green is exploring with private industry the prospects for converting the trees to saw logs, pulp chips, or biomass, which uses forest vegetation to fuel cogeneration plants that produce electricity.

The entities sponsoring Tahoe Re-Green include the Resources Agency, CDF, Forest Service, Lake Tahoe Regional Fire Chiefs Association, local fire protection districts, the TRPA, California Tahoe Conservancy, League to Save Lake Tahoe, California Department of Parks and Recreation, California State Board of Forestry, California Regional Water Quality Control Board- Lahontan-Region, California Conservation Corps, Natural Resources Conservation Service , Tahoe Resource Conservation District, Nevada Division of Forestry, California state Sen. Tim Leslie, and the Lake Tahoe Kiwanis Club, which donated material for the public information campaign.

The Big Picture

Tahoe Re-Green is a small part of a big picture. The 200,000-acre Lake Tahoe basin, including 150,000 acres of national forest, is literally filled with dead and dying trees whose gray and brown spires cast an unhealthy hue upon the once verdant vistas.

"At Tahoe we have a two-pronged mission: to restore the health and biodiversity of our national forests, and to protect human life and property," Lake Tahoe Basin Forest Supervisor Bob Harris said.

The Forest Service already has thinned and removed trees from tens of thousands of acres around the lake, but says it will take at least a decade to get the forest on the road to better health and more than a century to restore a balanced, healthy forest ecosystem.

Of the 10,000 acres at highest potential for catastrophic wildfire, two-thirds are privately owned and the other one-third is managed by the Forest Service, California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the California Tahoe Conservancy.

In thinned and cleaned-up forest areas, such as Camp Shelly on the south shore, operated by the City of Livermore Park District, sunlight shines through healthy green trees, reaching seedlings that now have room to spread their branches. Gone are the dead, diseased, and dying trees whose lifeless limbs blotted out the sun or littered the darkened forest floor. Even so, when the forest is thinned, a few dead trees are left behind for wildlife and fungus, necessary elements of biodiversity.

Just extracting dead trees, however, doesn't solve all the problems. The prescription for restoring forest health includes removing trees infected by beetles or crowded too closely together to compete for nutrients and breathing space, replanting with pine and other species that promote biodiversity, conducting prescribed burning where appropriate, and restoring watersheds.

Fuels Reduction In Other Places

In Shingletown, a Shasta County community about 20 miles from the site of the disastrous 1992 Fountain fire that destroyed 747 dwellings and other buildings, a vegetation management program by CDF and local landowners has removed 450 tons of green vegetation under a project begun three years ago with a CDF grant. The removed vegetation is chipped and burned as fuel at the Wheelabrator Shasta Energy Co. biomass power plant in Anderson. The CDF also is working with local property owners and industry on plans for a shaded fuel break around Shingletown.

Along heavily traveled Highway 50 in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento, where homes are interspersed with wildlands, the CDF and local firefighting agencies work together to protect an area that still bears the blackened scars of the 25,000-acre Cleveland Fire, which destroyed 26 houses in 1992.

The CDF's Highway 50 Project demonstrates how the agency and local communities can protect structures, wildlands, and wildlife, reduce vegetation that fuels fires, and educate people about wildfire and ways to maintain fire-safe landscapes. In the 15,000-population Oakhurst-Ahwahnee basin near the gateway to Yosemite National Park, communities are heeding the lessons of the disastrous Harlow fire that burned 41,000 acres 34 years ago. A coordinated program led by the CDF is reducing risk of another catastrophic fire by clearing volatile vegetation, creating a permanent firebreak on Deadwood Peak, and reforesting brush-covered timberlands.