Redwood Reader

8. Officials Fearful of Catastrophic Wildfire
State and Federal officials are gearing up for a potentially dangerous fiire season in California again. Two main causes for concern are fuel loading from a five year drought in Southern Cal. where last years fires only destroyed about 5% of beetle killed trees. Sudden oak death in the Bay region has killed thousands of tanoaks in haevily forested and urban interface lands. The little funding needed to reduce fuels has not been appropriated, and fuel reduction projects are a tiny fraction of what needs to be done.
'Still, state and national officials say the trend in recent years of extremely destructive wildfires in California and throughout the West is likely to continue this season.
A lack of precipitation is a major culprit: Most of the American Southwest -- which includes Southern California -- is in the fifth year of a drought."
What we are actually seeing is continued decline in the soil moisture-root zone. One source said old growth forest stores 3 to 5 years rain , indeed it is the mechanism by which natural systems defend against drought. Repeated insults and changes in drainage combined with lack of understanding about biological preparation of watershed activity n the root zones and forests have left many areas much drier than they would be naturally. Without this soil moisture trees stress and fare poorly and become susceptible to infestation, which many trees defend against with sap, a product of the water table. So we see a viscious circle in which removal and disturbance lead to a smaller below ground reserve of moisture, leading to disease, and then fire again, more drainage changes from fire fighting, larger and larger areas at risk as watersheds shrink. Accelerate forest cover removal, pave and roof a good percentage of it, drain runoff into rivers as fast as possible so no subsoil biological use occurs, watch it create slides when too much water is in the wrong swale or overloads the soils ability to handle it-which doesn't happen without people disturbing it.
We cannot emphasize enough the importance of understanding the contributions of fungi in protecting our wildlands and watersheds. It takes hundreds of years to create the soil moisture zones in a forest. It is likely trees do not even really begin producing large amounts of glomalin until the trees are big enough to harvest as "second-growth". So short rotation logging is as much a problem as removing old growth. In either case select cutting is much preferred, preserving the subsoil already conditioned and minimizing runoff. Once forestry offficials and other land managers see these issues through this perspective we will begin to see improvement in California conditions. (See Our Shrinking Watershed). It would be interesting to know how much CO2 is released by our current firefighting methods, as land disturbance releases CO2 into the air in a much bigger quantity than previously realized.


Conditions ripe for bad fire season
Trees killed by oak fungus a hazard to the Bay Area

Glen Martin, Chronicle Environment Writer
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/06/MNGVA6G9G420.DTL