Beetles Lay Waste to Forest

Drought and a tiny pest called the bark beetle are laying siege to vast tracts of forest in the San Bernardino Mountains, felling pine trees by the thousands, triggering huge clearance costs and prompting talk of building a local lumber mill for the first time in more than a century to saw up all of the dead wood.

The magnitude of the assault by drought and the Western bark beetle will truly hit home for mountain denizens today as authorities plan to order homeowners to begin removing highly flammable trees from their lots or face liens on their property.

The notices will first be served on the north shore of Lake Arrowhead, the mountain resort community that scientists say has been hardest hit. Several hundred thousand dead pine trees, some of them 10 stories tall, are as dry as kindling -- decaying fast and threatening to fall on homes, power lines and emergency evacuation routes.

Healthy pines would simply “pitch out” beetles by drowning them in sap. But in these parched mountains, hungry beetles land on stressed trees and quickly emit an odor that attracts swarms of their brethren.

The bugs are smaller than a pencil eraser, but they bore by the thousands into the bark and feast on the moist inner core, where trees store and transport nutrients from roots to needles.

Then the beetles carve out egg galleries, where larvae hatch, mature and emerge to infect other trees. A blue-stain fungus carried in by the beetles delivers the coup de grace -- clogging a tree’s circulatory system.

Residents and businesses must pay an average of $1,000 per large tree to clear the deadwood, a cost that is really “whacking our homeowners right now,” said Carol Banner, president of the Lake Arrowhead Chamber of Commerce.

“We just had a record year in real estate, but there’s no way the boom can last, given what’s going on.”

Thousands of homeowners in resort communities elsewhere could be in similar straits within a year, authorities said, if the 4-year-old drought persists.

Since October, the overall area of dead and dying trees in San Bernardino and Riverside counties has grown from an estimated 66,000 acres to more than 150,000 acres.

If temperatures remain above normal and rainfall at a deficit, the destruction of the evergreens will continue to grow wider, experts said.

Some global climate models suggest a possible change in weather patterns within the next few weeks, which could bring relief in the form of significant rain to the region in February and March.

“But with so many insects out there, the tree mortality rate will continue into next year,” said Richard Minnich, a professor of earth sciences at UC Riverside who has been monitoring the problem.

“As it stands, the number of dead trees in the San Bernardino Mountains alone is scaling into the millions,” he said.

It’s not just Southern California. The infestation has spread through much of the Southwest. In Arizona alone, bark beetles have killed an estimated 6 million trees.

Towns that trade on their Alpine image, such as Lake Arrowhead and Idyllwild, soon may find themselves surrounded by oak forests, said Michael Dietrich, San Bernardino National Forest chief.

“We’re not aware of that happening anytime in the past 400 years, but we do know that 400-year-old trees are dying right now,” he said.

Preparing for the worst -- a catastrophic forest fire -- mountain area task forces made up of federal, state and county authorities and local community leaders and property owners are upgrading emergency communication networks and identifying evacuation routes in regions where tens of thousands of residents are served by a few two-lane mountain roads.

San Bernardino County fire authorities want to establish an experimental “staging area” within the next few months for harvesting dead trees on a 57-acre patch of bare ground behind Lake Arrowhead’s Mountains Community Hospital. It might include building a small lumber mill -- the community’s first in more than a century.

Standing on a berm overlooking the site, San Bernardino County Fire Marshal Peter Brierty said, “I’d rather not have a mill next to a hospital, but this is a good flat spot to try and find new uses for all these dead trees. The idea is turn them into pulp, chips, compost, pallets or lumber.”

A mill operation would rattle the tranquil environs of the area by introducing the sounds of screaming saws and big rigs carrying logs on narrow roads. “But there’d be a heck of a lot more chaos, dust and noise if there’s a fire,” Brierty said.

In the meantime, residents who do not remove dead and fatally infested trees within 30 days of receiving warning notices will face misdemeanor citations, which eventually could lead to liens against their properties for the cost of tree removal.

The first notices will be served on 600 locations in the vicinity of Lake Arrowhead’s north shore, where 80% of the forest has withered and died over the last six months.

Eventually, tree removal notices will be delivered to homes throughout the infestation zone in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“Over time, we’ll be citing thousands of people,” Brierty said. “We can’t wait on this matter because of the danger to homeowners and their neighbors.”

A week ago, Lake Arrowhead restaurant owner Nicole Stufkosky paid $3,200 to have 18 infested trees in her yard cut down. Still, she was not prepared for the sight of so many felled ponderosa pines.

“When I came home and saw them lying on the ground, I just sat in my car and cried,” she said. “It’s not just me. Look around, trees are being taken down all over this mountain, which is beginning to look strangely exposed.”

Insect pests like the bark beetle have always been endemic in the mountains. But years of fire suppression, coupled with increasingly dense growth and consecutive warm winters have triggered a huge beetle population explosion.

The disease is moving eastward, toward the communities of Running Springs and Big Bear Lake, where forests have remained relatively unscathed, authorities said. Without more rain, both areas are likely to be hammered.

Fearing for the health of the town’s economy and cherished forests of Jeffrey pine and cedar, Big Bear Lake City Council members recently invited a dozen fire and forestry experts to apprise them of the extent of the threat.

What they heard sounded like science fiction. In Lake Arrowhead, there are entire tracts of homes without a single living tree. In Idyllwild, 17 people were recently injured when a windstorm toppled 200 blighted trees. In Big Bear, entomologists are beginning to find alarming levels of beetles.

Experts said there is no way to stop the spread of the insects, which are simply taking advantage of overgrown, drought-stressed forests.

After the council meeting, Big Bear Lake Mayor Liz Harris shook her head and said, “It’s a challenge, but it’s the kind of thing that can bring a community together. We should take a hard look at the possibility of cloud seeding.”