Lake Tahoe: Angora Fire Statement

Lake Tahoe:  Spectacular and fragile:  See Sierra Club statement about Angora Fire Below.  (D. Ghiglieri)

Sierra Club Statement on Lake Tahoe Fire
For Immediate Release: June 29, 2007
Michael Donahoe (Lake Tahoe), 775-588-5466

STATEMENT OF SIERRA CLUB ON LAKE TAHOE FIRE

Lake Tahoe: Sierra Club members and staff in the Lake Tahoe Basin and throughout the nation are dismayed about the damage and losses people have suffered from the Angora Fire. We are enormously thankful for the hard work by the thousands of firefighters working to protect lives and homes, and we are grateful that no lives have been lost.

Many of us who live in the Basin are working in our community to try and lend a hand to those who have lost their homes and possessions. This help will be needed for quite some time. It's going to take a united community to provide it.

Now is the time to focus on the goal that is common to all of us - to do all in our power to prevent this kind of destruction from ever happening again.

We are facing a problem that has taken many decades to develop. A well-meaning policy of suppressing every wildfire for a half century or more has resulted in forests in many parts of the Sierra Nevada range that are unnaturally dense. Prior to this policy, most Sierra forests saw regular fire, but these were typically "cooler" fires that burned the surface fuels (small trees and brush), traveled along the forest floor, and left the largest, most fire resistant trees intact. Today's fuel-laden forests, when ignited, can generate extremely hot and damaging crown fires that burn even the largest trees as well as most other things in their path, including homes.

For more than a decade Sierra Club has played an active role in encouraging and supporting efforts to improve Tahoe residents' protection from wildfire. We actively participated in the Presidential Tahoe Summit in 1997, where we urged increased forest thinning and brush removal focused in and around communities, while sparing old growth trees that are most fire resistant. We asked the federal government to prioritize funding for Lake Tahoe because, beyond the potential for loss of life and property, catastrophic wildfire could have devastating impacts on the Lake's water quality and clarity which are so important to the region's beauty and its economy.

Since that time, we have helped write and have signed on to local planning agency resolutions to increase fuel reduction efforts. We have supported pilot projects to determine if there are less expensive methods to reduce fuel loads in stream zones without destroying lake clarity.

During the past decade scientists have learned a great deal more about the best ways to protect homes in "wildland-urban interface" (WUI) areas. The most important advice the scientists are giving us is:

• Remove most vegetation up to 100 feet away from the home that could carry flames up to the building, including surface fuels (grass and brush) and ladder fuels (smaller trees and shrubs that carry flames from the grass and brush up to the crowns of trees and/or to the roof and sides of a house).

• Be sure the roof and, if possible, the siding are made of fireproof materials to prevent ignition from cinders and sparks carried through the air.

• Thin smaller trees and surface fuels from any adjacent wildland forest areas within one quarter mile of structures, if possible followed by prescribed burning which further reduces the fuel load.

To accomplish all these in an area the size of the Lake Tahoe Basin requires a great deal of community education as well as funding for homeowners and the major public forest landowners, most importantly the U.S. Forest Service. Even prioritizing areas near communities, we would still need several decades to do the needed work.

Unfortunately, the first Tahoe Summit's goal of thinning 30,000 acres in ten years in the Basin has not been accomplished, although much has been done. Many landowners have worked hard to reduce fire risk by removing vegetation around their homes, and it appears that many of those who did so in the Angora Fire area saw their homes spared from the fire. In the Sierra Club, we have attempted to educate our members and the general public and have tried to secure adequate funding for fuels treatment and more needs to be done in the future.

Local procedures have changed to make it easier for residents to get a permit to cut down trees that threaten their homes. The fact that many people don't know this is an indication of how much more public education is needed. Today, people in most Lake communities can simply call their local fire department, which will send someone out to assess the situation and mark the trees-to-be-cut right then and there. Hopefully in the wake of this terrible fire, more people will become better educated on both the value of clearing defensible space and on how to get it done.

On the federal forest lands adjacent to our communities, we have been faced with ever-shrinking federal budgets under the current Administration. Further, to reduce the cost of fuel treatments, the Administration is advocating measures that jeopardize the clarity of Lake Tahoe. We believe we should not have to choose between fire safety and a pollution-free Lake Tahoe. There is a better way.

Some have charged that environmental groups are responsible for holding up federal fuel treatment projects through appeals and litigation, but there have been no appeals or litigation of such projects in many years in the Tahoe Basin. In fact, Sierra Club and other conservation groups in the Basin have advocated for additional funding for fuels treatment. Sen. Harry Reid recently led an effort to acquire such funding from sales of public land in the urban Las Vegas area, which may increase the number of projects in the Basin in the next several years.

The following are some efforts Sierra Club plans to focus on in the future:

First we need to acknowledge that under certain conditions, including some that have occurred with the Angora fire such as drought, extremely low humidity (8-13%) and high winds, there is little to nothing humans can do. When a fire becomes "catastrophic" and is burning through the crowns of large trees, it creates its own wind and has enormous destructive capacity. With this type of fire even the best thinning and defensible space efforts may not be enough.

However, much can be done to improve our odds and make the Lake Tahoe Basin and other forest communities better prepared. Sierra Club has been and will continue to be actively engaged in a number of these actions locally, in Sacramento, and in Washington, D.C.

• We must work to ensure that all residents clear adequate defensible space around their property. In 2003, Sierra Club sponsored California legislation, supported by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and authored by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, which increased the defensible space clearing requirement in rural areas from 30 feet to 100 feet. But only a minority of Lake residents have completed this work, and everyone in our community must do more to educate our neighbors, get the word out, and help people accomplish this important task. Currently, only Incline Village has been a leader on this-we need to challenge all Lake communities to follow their lead.

• We need to insist that all the regulatory agencies around the Lake work cooperatively to get the fuels treatment work done on public lands, without finger pointing and blaming. And we must agree that we don't need to compromise Lake Tahoe's clarity in the process.

• We must all work together to come up with creative funding solutions to get the work done on both the private and public lands. And we must support one another to address the challenges we face with wildfire. We who live here are all in this together.