The costs of fire
Going to have an interesting piece in the paper tomorrow. Colleague George Watson and I looked into the budgetary considerations of wildland firefighting in light of President George Bush's proposed budget, which would reduce fire prevention spending.
While the budget proposal is just that - a proposal that must go through Congress - the news gave us an opportunity for a careful look at the tremendous operation that has been going on in our local San Bernardino National Forest for about the last six years.
The work is fire prevention, and it consists of thinning forests, gathering and controlled-burning of tinder brush and dead foilage, and creating rings of thinned, well-manicured forests around towns, facilities and roadways.
Click below for an excerpt of tomorrow's story ...
In Angeles Oaks, a tiny ridgetop community perched above the Santa Ana River drainage channel along Highway 38, signs of the preventive fire work of the last few year years become as much a part of the landscape as the steep faces and plunging canyons.
The community represents a U.S. Forest success story, a small neighborhood tucked in a perilous spot where prevention work has signifacantly improved the likelihood of steering fire away.
Along the roadways, encircling the scattered homes and the local general store, and along the normally dry channel, the pines are widely spaced and the forest floor is conspicously clean of tinder and excess foilage. The tree trunks are shorn of branches up to ten feet high, making fire less likely to crawl up into the forest canopy and become a different animal altogether.
"This is one of the communities we identified as high risk," said U.S. Forest Service spokesman John Miller while looking out his driver's side window, winding down Highway 38 through the pocket of mountain homes.
"Here you have the drought, you had bark beetle devastation, and you have a whole community perched on the Sant Ana River drainage, which fire can just race up from and overwhelm without doing a lot of preventive work."
The prevention work includes burning piles of dry and dead floor-foilage, Miller said. In a brief trek through the snow-blanketed forest of Highway 38, Miller pointed out trees marked with blue paint, a signal foresters use to note trees that should come down due either to poor health or poor spacing.
About 30 miles south of Big Bear Lake, fire has enchroached on the Oaks, most recently with last year's Butler Fire, Miller said, but never reduced it to ashes.
"Fire has never challenged the perimeter" of thinned forests, Miller said.
The treated forests give residents a sense of security.
"What can you say, they've done a great job at keeping fire from burning the place down," said Elizabeth Benart, a 9-year-resident. "The fires have been around, but they've never got too close."
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