Tahoe wildfire increases call for prevention

Big Basin State Park is closed for years to come after last year’s CZU fire. Half of Lassen National Volcanic Park has been burned by the Dixie Fire.

And now the Caldor Fire has forced thousands to flee and is threatening Lake Tahoe — one of California’s most beloved treasures.

It begs the question of when the Legislature, Congress and PG&E will get serious about allocating the resources necessary to reduce the ever-increasing threat of California wildfires.

Nearly three years to the day, then-gov. Jerry Brown branded the state’s devastating wildfire situation “the new normal” as the Northern California Carr Fire raged, eventually destroying more than 1,000 homes and killing six people.

Later that year this newspaper warned that lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., weren’t doing nearly enough to ward off the additional threat posed by climate change.

Wildfires burned 1.97 million acres in 2018, including the Pg&e-caused Camp Fire that killed 85 people in the town of Paradise in 2018. That was only a year after the Wine Country Fires devastated Napa and Sonoma counties in 2017. The 6,562 square miles burned in 2020 is the equivalent of the combined area of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and Sonoma counties.

PG&E has borne the brunt of California’s wildfire failures with good reason. PG&E is a convicted felon responsible for the deaths of 111 people in the past decade and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes. The utility said on July 19 that its equipment may have started the Dixie Fire, which is now the largest single fire in California history and has burned more than 1,250 square miles and 1,000 structures.

But the federal government is hardly blameless. Congress has been largely twiddling its thumbs despite the fact that the federal government owns 58% of California’s forests. The state owns just 3%. The remainder is owned by private individuals, companies and Native American groups.

In 2018, the same year that Brown called California’s disastrous wildfires “the new normal,” the U.S. Forest Service admitted that 99% of its forest lands nationwide were at a high risk of dangerous wildfires, but that its controlled burns to reduce the fire risk accounted for only 1% of its lands.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a July 30 meeting with governors of other Western states, asked President Biden to support a more aggressive federal response. “This is life and death, and we can’t just fight fires the way we did 20, 30, 40 years ago anymore,” Newsom said.

Meanwhile, Congress has yet to pass its infrastructure legislation that would include $3.3 billion for wildfire risk reduction efforts, including controlled burns and funding for firefighting resources. The bill also allocates $5 billion to bury power lines and another $3.5 billion for homeowners to make help fireproof their homes.

The governor and the Legislature agreed earlier this summer to restore $500 million for wildfire prevention that had been removed from the state budget, but the state’s allocation is still insufficient to meet prevention needs.

Since 2018, Californians have endured billions in property damage, the loss of almost 200 people and more than 50,000 structures from wildfires. They have also had their health damaged from breathing smoky air. Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires, but more can be done to reduce the threat to our homes, forests and our scenic treasures.