FROM OUR READERS: LOOMING DISASTER: WHY WE CAN’T LET TAHOE BURN AGAIN

The Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe has devastated the lives of hundreds of people, destroyed a large part of the forest and jeopardized the clarity of Lake Tahoe -- and it was all preventable.

Forests in the Tahoe Basin have been left to grow like weeds in an empty lot. These forests are a tangled mass of live and dead trees, big and small, intermingled with brush and a thick layer of leaves and logs cluttering the ground. All that is needed to turn them into a smoldering pile of ash is dry weather, a little wind and a chance ignition.

Historically, forests in the Tahoe Basin were open and patchy, with 50 to 70 trees per acre, unlike the hundreds of trees per acre growing there today.

Catastrophic fires were unknown in the Basin because the forest was in balance with the light fires that frequently crept through the area.

Today, scientists predict that there is an 80 percent chance that any fire which starts in the Tahoe Basin will be catastrophic, with flames leaping from treetop to treetop.

Such crown fires are the most destructive and difficult wildfires to stop.

No one can take pride in saying that a fire like the one in South Lake Tahoe was inevitable, but scientists and professionals, like me, said so many times.

There is an eerie parallel between the Lake Tahoe Basin as it is today and Southern California before the 2003 firestorm.

Authorities were warned about the fire hazard in Southern California long before fires charred three quarters of a million acres, killed 24 people and destroyed 3,700 homes. They ignored the warnings when they could have prevented the disaster by managing forests and brushlands.

Even after a small fire, it could take years for Lake Tahoe to regain its crystal blue clarity after being fertilized with nutrients that rain down on the lake from smoke and from runoff and erosion. A large fire could cause far more damage to the lake.

Few people realize that the effect of wildfires is global, not just local.

Fires like the one in South Lake Tahoe spew millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that add to global warming. Decaying trees add even more greenhouse gases after the fire is put out.

Even so, think of a family returning home to find everything they worked for turned to ash. The human side of a disaster like this is the most important concern of all. What makes it harder for fire victims is that agencies and radical groups blame them for the disaster because they chose to live in a forest.

Ask yourself: Should you be blamed for living in San Francisco because you lose everything in an earthquake?

While we can't prevent earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, we can reduce the severity of wildfires. That's the difference and that is why the Forest Service and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, and the radical groups that use lawsuits and politics to stop forest management, are responsible for the tragedies wildfires create.

Agencies and radical groups agree on building fuel breaks, or narrow blocks of forest that are stripped bare except for widely spaced telephone pole-sized trees. The hope is that they will slow fires.

Unfortunately, there is no science to show that fuel breaks work consistently. Indeed, they often fail.

What is certain is that thinning the surrounding public forests, and forests within communities, will work to reduce catastrophic fires.

Instead of working in partnership with the private sector and selling excess wood to pay the cost of thinning forests, the Forest Service and the Tahoe planning agency constantly ask taxpayers for more funds. We don't have enough money and radical groups block management anyway, so it's not surprising that our forests are still firetraps.

In addition, the Tahoe planning agency wants forests to look post-card perfect, so they make it difficult for homeowners to remove trees more than 6 inches in diameter. That makes no scientific sense because the forest is already overcrowded with trees of that size and larger.

The time has come to restore Tahoe Basin forests to their historic grandeur and the openness that made them more resistant to catastrophic wildfires.

In doing so, we also will protect our neighbors from wildfire, as well as the beauty of Lake Tahoe.

Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Ph.D., is a graduate of the University of California-Berkeley, an historian of North American forests, and the originator of "restoration forestry." He is professor emeritus of forest science at Texas A&M University, visiting scholar at California-based Forest Foundation and author of "America's Ancient Forests" (John Wiley, 2000).