Lake fire's rapid advance fans fears that much of the San Bernardino National Forest could be wiped out all at once
Richard Minnich spent six summers in the 1960s as a teenager volunteering at a Boy Scout camp in the San Bernardino National Forest.
Minnich said he used to lead groups on miniature forest-thinning exercises during those days, chopping down small trees that were crowding larger ones. "Some of the kids were offended by it," he recalled. But he told them the towering pines left behind would become stronger, with less competition for water, and that their efforts would reduce the chance of fire burning the camp.
Now an outspoken scientist at UC Riverside, Minnich has long maintained the forest is overgrown and desperately in need of a robust thinning campaign – more aggressive than the one the U.S. Forest Service is pursuing around towns.
And there is a wildfire burning in the Barton Flats area where he used to spend his summers – where, he said, little thinning has taken place, except in the vicinity of the various camps.
The Lake Fire raged out of control Thursday in stands of Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees that Minnich said haven't burned in a century and a half. The flames are threatening to fan his worst fears into reality at a time when drought has sucked much of the moisture out of the forest vegetation.
"The forests are extremely dense and we needed to take care of matters, and now it's too late," he said in a telephone interview. "If the weather turns bad, we could have a nuke."
By that, Minnich, a fire ecologist and professor of geography, said he meant a conflagration incinerating much of the eastern San Bernardino Mountains. "Literally, you turn the forest into toothpicks."
But while there is potential for catastrophe, Minnich said, there is also opportunity. He said if the Lake Fire doesn't exact too high a toll on trees, it would cleanse the forest of overgrown vegetation and make it healthier.
"The hope is that this will stay under the trees and, if so, this will be a beneficial event," he said.
However, it didn't look Thursday like anything was going to stop the fire.
"This one's going to head to the desert on the other side," Minnich said.
OVERSTOCKED FOREST
Not everyone agrees with Minnich's contention that more trees and shrubs should have been removed in anticipation of such a fire. Chad Hanson, director and ecologist for the John Muir Project in Big Bear City, suggested it wouldn't have helped anyway.
"When fires are weather driven – and this is definitely a weather-driven fire – whether an area has been thinned or not thinned is largely irrelevant," Hanson said.
And it's not like the Forest Service has been doing nothing. Since 2003, the federal agency has hired contractors to cut down trees, thin brush and haul out dead wood in more than 70,000 acres of the San Bernardino National Forest, according to statistics provided by the forest office.
Glenn Barley, Cal Fire Southern Region resource manager, said the San Bernardino forest is in better shape as a result of those efforts than it was a decade ago."We generally have an unhealthy, overstocked forest," Barley said.
But, he said, "There has been a fair amount of work that has been done, particularly in and around communities."
Minnich insists more should have been done.
He said the Barton Flats area last burned about 1870. Part of the 59,000-acre San Gorgonio Wilderness to the south hasn't burned since 1869. Another part hasn't been exposed to flame since 1899, he said. And an area east of the wilderness area's namesake peak was last torched in 1913.
It all means that areas in the path of the fire are choked too many trees and thick shrubbery compared to the more open, more natural, forest of the past, largely because of a century of firefighting policy sought to put out every spark, Minnich said.
"This area should burn about every 50 years, plus or minus about 10 or 20," in order to reduce the chance that a single massive inferno could wipe the forest out all at once, Minnich said.
"Believe me, if this would have been in a Santa Ana wind, the whole place would have been nuked," he said.
FIRE DOESN'T DESTROY
While Hanson sharply disagrees that there is a need to thin the forest, he agrees that fire can be beneficial. Indeed, Hanson said fire is always good for the forest.
"Fire doesn't exclusively burn at high density. And it doesn't destroy the forest," Hanson said. "Whether it becomes a 5,000-acre fire or a fire that burns tens of thousands of acres, it will not wipe out the forest, it will not damage the forest. The forest is adapted to this. It's a good thing for the forest."
Hanson said fires, for example, leave behind dead trees, or "snags," that woodpeckers build homes in.
And he said those woodpeckers abandon the cavities they drill every year in favor of new ones, leaving the old ones for dozens of species of birds and small mammals – such as the bluebird and flying squirrel – that can't carve their own.
Then there are the bark beetles that devour snags.
"The woodpeckers have food because of the dead trees," he said.
Still, despite the many benefits, Minnich contends too much fire is unhealthy. And he said a pair of recent examples underscore that point.Minnich cited a September 2007 fire that charred more than 14,000 acres northwest of Big Bear Lake in the area of Butler Peak.
"That whole area was just annihilated," he said.
DELAYED RECOVERY
Minnich also called attention to the monster Cedar Fire of 2003 that torched 270,000 acres in San Diego County – including almost all of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.
Park Ranger Andrew Ferreira said the fire torched more than 90 percent of the park's pine forest.
"It burned pine cones and the seed. It burned up everything down to the mineral soil," Ferreira said.
So for the past five years, the park has embarked on a campaign to replant Jeffrey pines. It will take another five years or so, Ferreira said, just to restore about 20 percent of the old forest. And then hopefully, he said, the seed from those trees will spread further.
So far it appears to be working. "Most of the trees are surviving," he said.
They're not growing fast. And the tallest ones are 3 feet.
"But most of them are alive and doing well," Ferreira said.
He said the park had to resort to a major restoration campaign because the pines are not coming back on their own.
That, Minnich said, is what he is afraid could happen to part of the San Bernardino forest if the Lake fire becomes a monster of its own.
Yes, plants tend to come back after fire. Chaparral – the shrubbery plants that grow in parts of the forest and at lower altitudes – tend to come back right after fire and regrow fast. But the conifers don't, Minnich said.
"When you destroy a whole forest, it's going to be an incredibly delayed recovery – centuries, not decades," he said.Read my blog at http://eclecticarcania.blogspot.com/
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