No Winners in CA Fire Blame Game
Thursday, July 5, 2007
The Angora Fire at Lake Tahoe is contained, but the "fire blame game" is still burning out of control. Conservation groups and local officials are bearing the brunt of the criticism. Barbara Boyle with the Sierra Club says the fact is that those are precisely the people who have been working for ten years to reduce fire danger at Tahoe and throughout the state. And she says there is a lot Californians should learn from the fire, based on the houses that didn't burn.
“We think that we're going to find out, and preliminary evidence shows, that those are the ones where the brush and trees were cleared and where the roofs were non-flammable.”
Boyle notes the aggressive forest fuel reduction plans they supported were never completed because federal funding was cut. The state has a law that requires homeowners to clear out flammable brush and weeds in rural areas for 100 feet around a structure. She says investment in education outreach would help spread the word. Many Tahoe homeowners were not aware of the law or how to get permits to clear brush on nearby public land.
Boyle adds that the extreme fire danger in California didn't happen overnight. There have been at least ten years of drought, several years of rising temperatures due to climate change, and decades of suppressing the natural fire cycle in forests.
“We are now having to work to go back to the structure of the forest the way it was 50 or 100 years ago. And that's going to take a long time.”
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