State declares emergency

State declares emergency in three beetle-ravaged California counties

The Associated Press - (Published March 7, 2003)

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Gov. Gray Davis declared an emergency Friday in three Southern California counties whose forests have been left prone to fire by the ravages of beetles preying on drought-weakened trees.

The move smooths the way for residents in Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties to clear trees lost to the bark beetle epidemic, Davis said. Normally, residents face permit requirements as well as limits in clearing dead, dying or diseased trees.

"My action cuts the red tape and provides landowners with the regulatory relief necessary to quickly remove dead and dying trees from their property," David said. The state is also seeking $3.3 million in federal aid for the region.

A handful of species of bark beetle have killed millions of trees in the San Bernardino and Cleveland national forests alone.

More trees continue to die, leaving tens of thousands of acres of forest laden with deadwood as fire season approaches. Much of that forest has not burned in more than a century.

"Fire is of huge concern to us because of all the huge amounts of dead wood out there," U.S. Forest Service entomologist Laura Merrill said.

Bark beetles are native to California. They typically drill into trees seeking the moist inner bark they feast upon. In healthy pines, the trees flood the holes with resin, drowning and expelling the beetles.

However, drought-stressed trees are unable to repel the 1/8-inch pests and quickly succumb to their advances. Once attacked by bark beetles, trees left starved of water and nutrients can die in days or weeks.

Across the Southwest, a protracted drought has left huge swaths of forest vulnerable to the beetles. They have made steady inroads in recent months.

"We're watching it grow with growing horror," Forest Service spokesman Matt Mathes said.

In a healthy forest, about one in a 100 trees is dead. Across 114,000 acres of the 670,000-acre San Bernardino National Forest, 10 percent of the trees are dead, Merrill said, citing recent surveys.

In the 430,000-acre Cleveland National Forest, the situation is less extensive but just as grim: about 15 percent of the trees are dead in an 8,000-acre area, she said.

Three species of bark beetle are particularly aggressive in Southern California at present. The largest, in sheer numbers, is the western pine beetle, which attacks Coulter and ponderosa pines.

Also on Friday, the South Coast Air Quality Management District approved the burning of an estimated 500,000 tons of wood from trees killed by the drought and beetle infestation.

The move will allow the Forest Service to burn waste wood not trucked to sawmills, composted or sold as firewood. The wood will be burned in special incinerators to reduce the danger of wildfires.

The agency is the air pollution control agency for much of the greater Los Angeles region, including much of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It normally prohibits most open burning. The Forest Service is considering logging beetle-ravaged trees to thin out afflicted forests across Southern California.

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