My house in California (my only house - I haven’t achieved dual home ownership yet!) is in Placerville, about an hour’s drive from South Lake Tahoe. The area that is burning is one that we’d visit at least a couple of times each summer, with towering pines and that wonderful cool mountain air. It’s also an area that was ripe for a tragedy like this.

Standing dead trees have long been a problem in the area and a source of contention between environmentalists and government.

Since the drought, about 30 percent of the trees in Tahoe Basin’s 200,000 acres of forest are dead, according to the Forest Service …. along with a century-long buildup of downed trees and brush on the forest floor. Fire experts say that amount of fuel is the setting for a catastrophe of rare magnitude, with the entire region vulnerable to a lightning strike, discarded cigarette or wayward equipment spark.

I don’t condone clear cutting, but I’m all for the the careful harvest of standing dead trees. It serves two purposes: creating usable lumber and eliminating fuel for a fire.

When a salvage logging program was recently denied, Guy Pence, Carson District ranger, stood up and told the Douglas County Board of Supervisors: “I want to make sure everybody understands, it will burn.”

The two previous passages were excerpted from an article that was published in 1995, warning of just such a fire (the entire article is posted at SF Gate). It even predicted the location. I have to agree with this blogger: Why didn’t anybody listen?