California Forests Primed For Disaster

  

July 31 - KGO (KGO) -- A revolutionary change in the way the National Forest Service manages California forests is in the works. The new plan recognizes that fire is necessary to keep the forest healthy, and research is in full swing to figure out how to make it work without getting out of control. Both environmentalists and the forest service like the concept, but the devil is in the details.

It's hot, it's dry and California forests are primed for disaster.

Jeff Brown, Sagehen Creek Field Station: "These forests are sick. They are in trouble and we need to do something soon to change them or they are gonna continue to die off and to burn up catastrophically."

Jeff Brown runs the Sagehen Field Station in the Tahoe National Forest -- ground zero in a new strategy on how to handle forest fires.

U.C. Berkeley researchers are spending hundreds of hours measuring every tree and counting every twig on scientifically chosen plots of land.

Gary Roller, U.C. Berkeley researcher: "Take all that data and you can put it in a computer and you can ultimately calculate how many tones per acre is on the ground of dead fuel."

Once they know how much fuel there is, they'll use a three-dimensional laser map to figure out how fire will behave on different types of terrain.

Gary Roller: "Just like speed bumps in a parking lot, you are slowing your car or altering your car's behavior. It's the same thing in the forest, we want to slow the fire down."

The old method of slowing fires was a fire break -- but no more.

Warren Alford, Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign: "The traditional idea that you need to have this big bare area of ground to stop a fire has essentially been debunked."

Firefighters have discovered that simply clearing a strip of land doesn't work that well, especially when the flames get into the tops of the trees.

Jeff Brown: "The fire gets wind. You know it's got its own weather, the embers are going over, they jump the little strip."

So instead of fire breaks that are bare strips of cleared ground, the new fire strategy calls for "splats" -- that stands for "strategically placed area treatments."

Splats are areas of the forest where small trees are taken out, the ground fuel is burned away in a controlled fire, and the big trees remain.

Researcher Gary Roller took us to an area that's already been thinned to resemble a splat.

Gary Roller: "There are hardly any under-story trees, no seedlings or sapling of any size. There is nice spacing here between the trees, and the crowns are not overlapping."

Researchers believe this thinned out forest is what the Sierra used to look like, not this densely packed forest we're more used to seeing now.

Jeff Brown: "When you read the stories of people who came through here on wagon trains, they could drive wagons through the Sierrra forest easily. You can't. If you look around here now, you can't do that."

Environmentalists say humans interrupted the forest's delicate balance. They put out naturally occurring fires and cut too many trees.

Warren Alford: "We've got a hundred years of really bad management where we've cut the big trees that are naturally fire resistant and we've left the slash which is the branches and tops of the trees."

The National Forest Service may eventually put splats on 20 to 30 percent of its Sierra land. The U.C. research going on now will determine where those splats will be most effective. But whatever the data shows, there's almost certain to be a battle over just how many trees are cut and how much fire is allowed to do the job nature intended.

Warren Alford: "The Sierra Nevada evolved over time with fire as a dominant process. It's as much a part of the landscape as rainwater."

The U.C. researchers hope to have their splat design ready by spring. Then there will be time for public review and comment. The earliest any tree cutting or burning is expected to begin on a splat is 2008.

For more information on the splat research project, click here.

Written and produced by Jennifer Olney.

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