Seminar: Coming to grips with fire—through five decades of resource conservation efforts at Lake Tahoe

Abstract:

After many years of effort to manage natural resources in the Tahoe Basin, located in the Sierra Nevada on the California-Nevada state line, the damaging Angora Fire (2007) accelerated a significant shift in forest management and defense of the wildland-urban interface. The presentation will include an overview of Tahoe Basin regulatory programs and the bi-state Tahoe Regional Planning Compact, adopted in 1969 and amended in 1980. The presentation will then describe the Angora fire, which burned over 3,000 acres in Lake Tahoe’s watershed and destroyed 242 homes and 67 commercial structures. As a result of the Angora fire, a wide array of federal, state, regional, and local agencies and other stakeholders modified forest management practices and land use regulations in the Basin to mitigate the effects of future fires. These changes are credited with helping to control the large Caldor fire (2021), which travelled up the west slope of the Sierra Nevada and entered the Tahoe Basin at its southwest corner.

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