A pilot project to help stop the spread of wildfires in southern California appears to have proved its worth. A Federal program run by the US Forest Service to trim trees and underbrush created what are called "fuel breaks" that kept at least part of Lake Arrowhead from destruction. The program has been a tough sell up until now, with many residents objecting to it, thinking it is clandestine logging.
LAKE ARROWHEAD — As flames ravage surrounding communities, this resort town high in the San Bernardino Mountains emerged largely unscathed, an island in a sea of destruction.
The credit for that isolated victory, federal officials say, should go to firefighting tactics, shifting winds and favorable terrain — and a sometimes controversial U.S. Forest Service effort to eliminate the tinder that fuels forest fires.
Since 2002, the Forest Service has removed millions of trees, thinned brush and cut low-hanging branches, creating fuel breaks around almost 80% of the community. Fires don't spread quickly or easily through such areas, instead burning lower to the ground and with less intensity.
"The fuel breaks saved Lake Arrowhead," said Randall Clauson, the Forest Service's division chief for the San Bernardino National Forest and incident commander earlier this week on the two biggest wildfires still burning in the mountains.
He said he believes that, without the breaks, "the fire would have run right through Lake Arrowhead and gone to Highway 18, cutting off the evacuation route and probably resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives."
One person the paper interviewed didn't think the fuel breaks deserved the credit. But most of the area survived. Except one place where homeowners let their homes become surrounded by luxurious growth. That area had a different outcome:
And yet there is only so much the Forest Service can do. Lake Arrowhead didn't escape unscathed. In Grass Valley, an upscale part of the town about a mile from Lake Arrowhead, more than 100 homes were destroyed. Many had been surrounded by tall trees and lush vegetation left uncleared by the homeowners.
There were scenes of total devastation — lakeside homes reduced to their foundations, torched cars and, in one house, only a pair of smudged lawn jockeys survived. Power lines littered the ground or hung perilously overhead.
"We can spend $100 million to put fuel breaks around every town up here but if individuals don't take responsibility for their land I can't save them," Clauson said.
Lawhawk over at A Blog for All has more about things that work and a good roundup of other fire-related links.
I’ve been out of Southern California for a lot of years, but when I was a young man there, CDF, or USFS, and others bulldozed the tops of ridges just about every where to create “firebreaks”.
Don’t they do that anymore? Why not?!??
They don’t do that anymore because of Sierra Club lawsuits to prevent it. It’s become a common problem on US Forest Service land over the last 20 years or so. The Forest Service can only spend so much of it’s budget fighting lawsuits. Unfortunately people just don’t seem to understand that if you supress all fires, then you need to activly manage the forest. That requires removal of tinder from the ground so when fires do happen, they can be contained.