Beetles adding fuel to West fire threat

LOS ANGELES, May 28 (UPI) -- The relentless bark beetle continues making inroads into the parched forests of the West this spring raising the threat of wildfire and adding an element to the debate over forest thinning that is sometimes lost in the shuffle of political rhetoric.

California Gov. Gray Davis made an aerial inspection Wednesday of the area around Lake Arrowhead, part of a three-county swath of Southern California where a state of emergency was declared in March due to the stubborn pest.

"We saw literally thousands and thousands of distressed trees," Davis lamented after alighting from a National Guard chopper at the Riverside Airport. "They've taken a double whammy from the persistent drought and the bark beetle --clearly the potential for a massive forest fire exists."

As the public debate over the controversial Bush administration plan to thin out fire-prone forests focuses on the role timber harvesting will play, parts of those same tinder-dry forests are besieged by a pest that preys on the large trees that have become the subject of a tug-of-war between environmentalists and proponents of the Bush Healthy Forest Initiative.

Bark beetles are native to the West and have thrived for centuries in forests that have become heavily overgrown in recent decades and, over the past several years, have been squeezed by a stubborn drought.

Trees have a natural defense against the beetle in the form of pitch that traps and eventually kills the bugs. The amount of pitch produced, however, rises and falls with the amount of moisture the tree has within it, so the beetle has an easier time attacking a tree during prolonged dry spells and disaster can result.

"Despite the above-average spring rains, this is an especially serious problem in our mountain areas...where literally tens of thousands of trees have died or are dying due to drought or beetle infestation," noted Tim Knowd, manager of San Diego Gas & Electric Company's Vegetation Management program. "These trees have potential to fall on transmission lines and start a large, devastating fire."

Dry brush and saplings may act as kindling when wildfires get started, but larger trees killed by the bark beetle and left to dry in the sun provide the primary fuel for catastrophic fires.

A California Department of Forestry captain in a recent San Bernardino Sun interview likened the burning of dead trees to that of newspaper tossed into a fireplace. In addition, dead trees are easily blown over and can litter an area with logs that hamper the movements of firefighters and their vehicles.

"The only known direct control method is the removal of infested trees," the U. S. Forest Service maintained in a recent report on the status of the bark beetle infestation. "A good rule to remember is, 'if the tree is brown -- cut it down; if in doubt -- cut it out.' If we leave dead trees standing we run the risk of the new generation of beetles leaving the tree and attacking more trees."

Dave Overhulser, an entomologist with the Oregon Department of Forestry, said in a release that overcrowded tracts of forest appear to be the most vulnerable to bark beetle as too many trees compete for scarce moisture, light and soil nutrients.

"We're seeing much of the mortality occurring in overstocked stands that have too many trees per acre," he said. "Stands should be thinned to remove less vigorous trees."

California has been lobbying the federal government for funds to pay for emergency thinning projects to clear out as much of the stricken forests of Riverside, San Diego and San Bernardino Counties as possible before wildfire season sets in.

The state has an estimated 415,000 acres of forestland are infested by insects, an amount that has doubled just since last October. It is estimated that it will cost another $125 million to cut down and haul away the remaining dead and dying trees.

While Gray Davis is seen as a good Democrat, he is also a good westerner and not about to butt heads with the Republican administration over the pros and cons of the Healthy Forest Initiative when it comes to wildfire prevention on the eve of what could be a long, hot summer in the mountains.

"My administration has been working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure that California state resources and the federal government work together to address this threat," Davis told reporters in Riverside, where the temperature pushed into the upper 80s. "We're all in the same boat on this one."