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Legislator Asks Feds For Help With Bark Beetles

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Sep 7, 2008 4:32 pm US/Mountain

Legislator Asks Feds For Help With Bark Beetles

Reporting
Terry Jessup
KEYSTONE, Colo. (CBS4/AP) ― The buzz before the Democratic National Convention in Denver was that Western issues would be getting a lot of attention, but nobody talked about illegal immigration and there was nothing mentioned about Colorado's dying forests either.

In Summit County, the federal government owns about 75 percent of the dying forest, and now State Rep. Christine Scanlan is headed to Washington, D.C., this week to meet with members of Congress and the U.S. Forest Service about getting more help to battle the state's bark beetle epidemic.

The Democrat from Dillon is vice chairwoman of the state interim committee on wildfires. Forest and community officials fear the huge swaths of trees killed by the beetles pose a big wildfire risk.

Next to the Keystone Ski Resort is a major power line surrounded by dead or dying trees. Thomas Davidson, a Summit County commissioner, says the threat because of the pine-beetle infestation is two-fold.

"It's blowdown from dead trees that are alongside the grid, and two, it is a fire that would basically melt the towers that hold the lines," Davidson said.

The beetles, which burrow under the trees' bark, have already killed about 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pines in the mountains in central Colorado. The infestation has moved to lower elevations where it threatens ponderosa pine forests as well.

The Forest Service wants $200 million over three years, half of it to lessen the threat from falling or burning trees along the power grid.

"The enormous blackout that happened on the East Coast a couple of years back was traced back to one tree in Ohio that blew down in a windstorm and knocked out the entire East Coast. We have 100,000 of those trees," Scanlan said.

The trees are weakened and ready to fall because of the insect that is so hardy, no one has been able to eradicate or even contain it.

"This is a huge issue for our entire western United States," Scanlan said.

It's an issue state Sen. Dan Gibbs knows well; he is also a volunteer firefighter.

"What I see here are lodgepole pines that are extremely dense and you see the needles intact with a lot of the trees here," Gibbs said. "That's when the fire hazard increases dramatically. All it takes is a lightning strike and there's a fire."

Scanlan will meet with Colorado's Congressional delegation and the U.S. Forest Service.

State lawmakers say the epidemic is also impacting public safety at campgrounds. At least 38 campgrounds have been closed statewide because of danger from weakened or falling trees due to the pine beetle.

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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