By John Driscoll
Eureka Times Standard (California)
Copyright 2006 Times - Standard
All Rights Reserved

MYERS FLAT, Calif. — If you can't beat it, burn it.

Forestry experts on Tuesday were trying to wipe out an infestations of a persistent disease that has killed thousands of acres of California's magnificent oaks to the south by cooking it to death. The experiment aims to find out if sudden oak death can be eradicated or at least checked from becoming an epidemic in Humboldt County.

Last year, workers cut hundreds of California bay laurel and tan oak trees — primary hosts in the area — from a 50-acre stand in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Twenty-five of those acres were to be burned on Tuesday and Wednesday to see if the pathogen, Phytopthera ramorum, crops up like it did after being mechanically treated.

"We're curious to know if adding fire will make a difference," said Yana Valachovic, University of California Cooperative Extension forest advisor.

Firefighters with the California Department of Forestry used torches and flares to get the fire going. Weather and strategic lighting allowed the fire to burn from a small prairie off Jay Smith Road down into an infested area.

Interestingly, the thinned out forest butting up against the prairie used to be grassland within the last century. For decades, Douglas fir trees have slowly shouldered their way into the prairie, as well as prairies around Southern Humboldt County. Humboldt Redwoods hopes to burn Look Prairie farther north this year in an effort to regain some of those lost grasslands.

But the Jay Smith Road project had priority for burning.

"This was either now or never," said Jay Harris, senior ecologist with the park, "at least for this season."

Trees in this area — even young tan oaks sprouting from cut trees — were already cankered with sudden oak death. That's especially true where they are shaded by bay trees, which drop spores onto the oaks.

This is a relatively isolated hot spot. There are some stands in the county where 50 percent of the oaks are dead, Valachovic said. It's precisely that isolation that made this a good spot to fight sudden oak death, and Valachovic said there's been worldwide interest in the experiment.

The effort is to find a treatment that is effective, socially acceptable and economically viable, she said.

It was also a good opportunity to train CDF and California Department of Corrections inmate firefighters in an environment that's more controlled than a wildfire, said CDF Weott Battalion Chief Terrie Ridenhour. They get to watch fire behavior, she said, but their adrenaline isn't pumping like it might be during a wild land fire.

"They learn from this," Ridenhour said.

Over the next few years, experts can watch to see if the fire fully consumed leaf litter and infected trees, and with it eliminated the disease from the soil. It's also part of reintroducing fire into an area with a long history of wildfires and the American Indian practice of burning, which has been replaced by a policy of suppressing fires for decades.