Blame grows amid ashes

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. — As smoke clears from fire-scarred mountaintops, an environmental agency has emerged as a favorite target for those seeking to assign blame for the wildfire that ravaged more than 200 homes and other buildings this week.

Critics say the fire was a disastrous side-effect of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s approach to preserving the lake’s clarity. Its strict policies include fining homeowners for cutting down trees on their own properties.

Such activities expose the forest floor and promote erosion that degrades the watershed and muddies the lake, the agency says. But critics say the agency has paralyzed residents from taking aggressive steps to protect their homes and left a forest littered with fuel ready to burst into flame.

“This may be a wake-up call,” said Republican state Sen. Dave Cox, whose district includes South Lake Tahoe. “When you have residents who have a concern about whether they can remove a tree … there are some things that are pretty crazy.”

The agency’s executive director, John Singlaub, said he is shocked by the public backlash. “The need to blame is apparently high,” he said.

Singlaub said the agency’s board has made fire safety a priority, including allowing homeowners to increase defensible space around homes and reduce the threat of a catastrophic fire.

Singlaub was less conciliatory during a town hall meeting Monday, when the blaze was still tearing through forests south and west of the commercial hub of South Lake Tahoe. Many in the crowd of about 1,200 shouted him down as he defended the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s policies.

With developments pushing deeper into forests, the need to assign blame has become a common post-wildfire theme.

But perhaps nowhere has that public vitriol been so clearly directed at a common target, said Malcolm North, a research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service and an associate professor of forest ecology at the University of California, Davis.

“People are probably being unfairly critical of TRPA, but it’s partly of its own doing,” North said. “They’ve been a pretty top-down, draconian agency. They have made significant improvements in recent years, but I don’t know that people have noticed.”

Instead, residents say, they were afraid even to remove pine needles from around their houses. Doing so beyond 5 feet from a home, the agency decreed, exposes too much bare soil, a prime culprit in erosion.

Anger over that rule and others intensified when residents began returning to their gutted homes.

Amid the wreckage were hints that the agency may have failed at balancing its responsibilities to protect both the lake and its residents.

“I went around my whole property and took out every single pine needle,” said Neil Cohn, 35, pointing to a blackened line where the advancing fire that destroyed eight of his neighbors’ homes stopped short of his own.