Hot and dry, Lake Tahoe fire a taste of things to come this summer
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Did you see NBC Nightly News last night? They had a story on the extent of the drought conditions that are now affecting nearly half of the US land mass. The raging fires around Lake Tahoe have put our US tinderboxes in the news once again. (When you click on the link, look for the story “Drought widespread as summer heats up.”)
Maybe this would be a good moment to reflect on the meaning of water in our lives, something we take for granted like the air we breathe. It’s one of those things we count on, something we think will always be there upon demand. We go out into deserts and semi-arid lands to live, to get nice views, to have summer homes, and we still expect water to be there for us.
But in large parts of our US West, the water has stopped falling from the skies. The land is parched, and now it is getting very hot. Some meteorologists are saying that this drought could persist for years yet.
Fires fed by dry conditions are burning right now in California, Colorado, Alaska, and still smoldering in Georgia.
The Lake Tahoe fire is really frightening firefighters who, 
once again, are talking about raging flames like they have never experienced before.
The season is only beginning, of course.
Maybe this would also be a good time to think about development, where we build our houses, the lack of balance reflected in how humans live with their natural environment. We are shocked by the loss of homes, but we are not shocked by how we build in these areas to begin with, and then how we deal with water and land use issues once we build there.
The fire was fed by a very dry winter. By May, the snow pack was 80 percent below normal, which created the conditions for this explosive fire.
We humans, too, create the conditions for these fires. Here’s a quick summary of the issues from The Daily Green. I don’t care how rich anyone is, it is wrong to build in these places and to disrupt so severely the natural rhythms of these places. We just keep learning that when we mess up nature, nature messes with us.
Then here are a couple of longer, very good articles about how we created the conditions for the Lake Tahoe fire, one from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and another from the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Chronicle says of the fire that it is “the final product of 150 years of mismanagement of the Sierra Nevada ecosystem.”
I guess we could say that about a lot of our natural wonders, put in the hands of profit-seekers, developers, timber companies, forest management agencies, etc. It’s a tragedy; it’s a sin.
“It’s the fire we’ve been anticipating for 20 years,” said Patsy Miller, who owns a residence at Fallen Leaf Lake, about a mile from where the flames had spread by late Monday.
“People have interjected their homes into a system that has a natural tendency to burn very frequently, and where we have suppressed the frequency of those fires for so long, there’s an ungodly amount of fuel there,” Forest Service regional ecologist Hugh Safford said.
If we cannot find within ourselves what we need in this culture to impose restrictions on how and where we live, in tune with the balance of life, we will just keep on facing disasters like these. If we continue to believe that humans, and especially rich humans, do not need to submit to nature, or have greater rights than nature, well, just brace yourselves for plenty more shocking scenes like the ones we’ve been watching from Lake Tahoe.
[tags] Lake Tahoe fire, living out of balance with nature, drought, fire season[/tags]
Photo credit: by Virginia, found at The Daily Green
June 27th, 2007 at 12:03 am
More than 2,500 acres have been burned along with over 170 homes in the worst fire the Tahoe Basin has seen in recorded history. The fire began just west of Meyers in Angora Lakes on Sunday at around 2pm. By 5pm Sunday, a massive plume of smoke towering more than 1000′ was clearly visible against the crisp, blue sky. Winds topped 50 mph through the evening, sending embers “hop-scotching” through the century-old growth, sparking fires between Angora and the “Y”, dangerously close to the urban center in South Lake Tahoe.
Officials and residents, alike, anticipated this fire season would be a dangerous one, and such a massive fire so early in the season has proved this fear a reality. The annual May 1 snow survey recorded only 29% of the normal snowpack, the lowest since 1988, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The dry conditions coupled with dense forest growth in the Tahoe Basin provide a highly-flammable fuel source, that need only be ignited by a spark to spread into a raging inferno in minutes. There is little homeowners can do in a fire of this magnitude, when treetops are being ignited and the fire is spreading right above them. The sad truth is that we have allowed regulators to run amuck, inhibiting what firefighters and foresters have known to be a disastrous episode, such as the Angora fire, waiting to happen.
TRPA’s website states “TRPA has been working to attack the threat of catastrophic wildfire in the Tahoe Basin for more than 10 years. beginning in 2002, the Agency also entered into agreements with fire protection agencies to streamline the permitting of defensible space work on private properties.” They go on to say they have “never prohibited tree removal”, just requiring permitting. These statements are not true. TRPA will impose enormous fines if you cut a tree down on your own property, and it is very difficult to get a permit to cut.
First of all, any agreements TRPA made beginning in 2002, only 5 years ago, were drawn out tooth and nail. TRPA DOES regulated tree removal, and does outright prohibit removal of most trees around existing structures. TRPA encourages the use of pine needles used as erosion control around homes, and requires many BMP’s that fly in the face of fire protection. The basis of this backwards regulatory policy is to protect the clarity and water quality of Lake Tahoe. Now that nearly 4 square miles of forest have been burned along a major tributary to Lake Tahoe, massive amounts of deforested land will now be susceptible to erosion into the crystal blue waters of Lake Tahoe. If TRPA had not inhibited the efforts of fire officials and forestry regulators for over a decade, the good practices of reducing the undergrowth and thinning dense forested land would have lessened the current forest fire threat we face today. Homeowners would have been able to cut trees around their homes and allowed to protect their life’s investment, not to mention their own lives. Now, we are facing a huge threat to water clarity as this flume of carbon and charred vegetation will erode into the lake in the next significant rain event.
TRPA is a widespread source of frustration not only among homeowners, but for those who come to Tahoe to enjoy boating and recreating around the lake. By outright prohibiting breakwaters, they have allowed Tahoe’s notoriously windy and rough conditions to cause turmoil in launching areas such as Incline Village’s Ski Beach. A breakwater would provide safe harbor for boaters caught out in conditions which typically arise quickly, and prevent the sinking of many boats each year on their moorings, potentially releasing gasoline and oil into our beautiful lake waters. This is just one example of how TRPA wastes funds creating frivolous regulatory policies, and backing them up with outrageous fees to lawyers and policymakers, rather than working on practical solutions to foster the protection of Lake Tahoe, and the protection and enjoyment of the lake by homeowners and visitors, alike.
I hope the response to this disasterous fire is a huge outcry of public support for “smart” environmental policies, that allow homeowners to regulate their land, cut trees to prevent uncontrolled spreading of forest fires, foster green growth in their backyards instead of the dry tinder TRPA would have us amass in the form of pine needles. Massive amounts of funding is wasted by TRPA fighting homeowners who have tried to implement their own best management practices, and it is a sorry waste of money, a huge loss for both the quality of the lake and quality of life at Lake Tahoe. Changes need to be made, and the TRPA policies need to be revisited.