By By Julie Cart | CalMatters
Gary Gerren, the affable fire chief in the community of Fallen Leaf Lake, is serious about protecting the few hundred full-time residents and the thousands of summer daytrippers who descend on his tiny alpine enclave.
His constant concern: How will he keep them all safe from wildfires?
“I burn the place down every few months,” Gerren said, explaining that he regularly runs computerized fire simulations — constructing a virtual wildfire bearing down on his community — to solve the puzzle of how to direct people away from a fire.
The slow and bumpy 5-mile road to Fallen Leaf Lake, southwest of South Lake Tahoe, affords only one way in and one way out — a potential deathtrap.
“We have probably three or four thousand tourists a day out here (in Fallen Leaf Lake) during the summer,” Gerren said. “They come in the morning starting at eight o’clock, and they leave around 6:30 going back to South Lake Tahoe. During the day, it’s bumper-to-bumper. If that happens during a fire…that’s when people typically get hurt.”
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In June 2007, before Gerren was chief, fire experts were taken by surprise when the Angora Fire climbed over granite walls to reach homes tucked into the mountains around Fallen Leaf Lake. When the fire arrived, chaos came with it. The narrow roads clogged with residents and tourists racing to get out, while fire crews with their heavy apparatus raced in.
That glimpse into Tahoe’s fiery future was repeated in August 2021, when the Caldor Fire burned for longer than two months and incinerated more than 1,000 structures, including a ski resort. More than 50,000 residents and summer vacationers at the southern end of Lake Tahoe were evacuated, creating an unprecedented traffic jam.
“They kept telling us it’ll never go to Tahoe,” Gerren said. “And we kept saying, yes, it will.”
Fallen Leaf Lake Fire Chief Gary Gerren worries about evacuating his community’s few hundred residents and thousands of visitors during a major wildfire. Bumper-to-bumper summer traffic could create a deadly bottleneck. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters
The chief watched the inexorable march of flames toward Fallen Leaf Lake in the height of summer tourist season, and decided it was time to take stock of who was in harm’s way in his community. Dense smoke descended, so fortunately, tourists stayed away and most residents left.
The Caldor Fire didn’t reach Fallen Leaf Lake. But if it did, everyone would be literally stuck between the rocks and the water: The chief would have had to order people to scramble up into the granite Desolation Wilderness or load them onto boats in Lake Tahoe. In a community that lives and recreates around water, there are enough boats to ferry people away from the fire — although they would still breathe the toxic smoke.
“I don’t have any choice,” Gerren said. “It’s all I’ve got.”
The Tahoe basin, encircled by densely packed, highly flammable forests, is among California’s most fire-vulnerable regions. In South Lake Tahoe, according to a company that analyzes climate risks, 99% of all properties are at risk of wildfire over the next 30 years.
The state’s fire hazard map, updated last month, and a U.S. Forest Service map lay out the hazards of the Tahoe basin in blazing color codes.
Nearly all of the land around the lake, in both California and Nevada, is designated as facing a “high” or “moderate” danger of experiencing wildfires that are difficult to contain, according to the federal map. California officials, however, set the wildfire hazard potential as “high” and “very high.”
But the biggest challenge that wildfire presents in the Tahoe basin is not fighting the flames — it’s escaping them.
Evacuating the entire Tahoe basin in the height of summer could take 14 hours, according to one new analysis commissioned by environmental groups. People scrambling to get out of Lake Tahoe ahead of a wildfire would have few options as the lake is encircled by a single two-lane road often clogged with traffic.
Yet developers are continuously carving more resorts into this fire-prone, vulnerable landscape, raising the stakes around Lake Tahoe.
Planned in a high-hazard area of Placer County, a proposed condo and hotel development in Olympic Valley is especially problematic when it comes to evacuations. The Village at Palisades Tahoe project would add 850 condo and hotel units — nearly 1,500 bedrooms — to the year-round resort. The developer projects that the resort will draw 300,000 visitors a year.
During a particularly ferocious fire, it could take 11 hours for the resort’s residents and visitors to reach Highway 89, less than 3 miles away, according to a Placer County report. If traffic-choked roads leading out of the development are impassable, local fire officials say that thousands of people would need to shelter in place. Environmental groups are suing to block the project.
In this region — as in many across the state — people are willing to accept the tradeoff of living in a beautiful yet flammable landscape.
“It’s a risk we live with, and we’ve made choices to live with that risk,” said Julie Regan, executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the California-Nevada authority that oversees the region’s development and environmental work. Regan was evacuated from her home for weeks during the Caldor Fire.
To South Lake Tahoe Councilman Scott Robbins, the prospect of a catastrophic wildfire in a crowded, forested basin with limited escape routes is chilling. The scenario for South Lake Tahoe “would be a nightmare,” he said.
On a busy holiday weekend, tourists can outnumber locals 10 to one, Robbins said. Perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people at any one time would be vulnerable if evacuations are ordered.
“If a fire breaks out quickly on a high wind advisory day, in a worst-case scenario, you can’t evacuate,” Robbins said. And when the lake and its environs are crowded with people, it would “take two days to evacuate everybody. And if you have a catastrophic fire, like the Paradise Fire, the reality is it will not be survivable.’’
Lake Tahoe: a ring of fire
There is little that’s constant about modern wildfires, except their feral unpredictability. Still, California fire scientists — world-weary and seen-it-all — sometimes state this certainty: Unless you happen to live in the middle of a parking lot, your home is at some risk from wildfire.
Fire experts look at the world through different eyes than other people. They gaze at the dappled hillsides of the Eldorado and Tahoe National Forests and see fuels — not charming mountain cabins but indefensible ignition points. And the scenic narrow highways that ring the lake are potentially deadly evacuation routes.
In other words, they see Lake Tahoe — California’s beloved playground — as a potential calamity.
A guide to Tahoe basin homeowners pulls no punches, noting that the surrounding forests are much more dense than they have historically been, with four times more understory trees, the most vulnerable to fire.
“Despite our best prevention efforts, the Lake Tahoe Basin has one of the highest wildfire ignition rates in the Sierra Nevada,” the guide warns.
Fire professionals talk in terms of “resource protection,” generally referring to their obligation to save, in order: people, buildings and resources such as watersheds and timber. Lake Tahoe presents all three, in abundance.
Christina Restaino, director of the Living With Fire program at University of Nevada, Reno, said the sheer density of homes among trees puts residents and firefighters at risk.
“It is pretty astounding how much of the built environment is in forested land,” she said. “We don’t want a fire in the Tahoe basin. We live in a very fire-prone landscape, as we all know. We are working very hard to prepare.”
It’s not just the built environment that presents a problem. It’s how it’s built. Mixed in with newer homes and buildings constructed with fire-wise methods and materials are wooden cabins from the 1940s and ‘50s with highly combustible shake roofs and wood decks.
Residents have surely heard fire-safe messages, but the region is heavy with part-timers — visitors who may not be familiar with wildfires or evacuation protocols, and second homeowners who aren’t keen to spend weekends at the cabin raking and trimming trees.
“Messages take a long time to be received and understood,” said Martin Goldberg, captain of the Lake Valley Fire Protection District. “The science is pointing to embers and the need to protect homes from embers. But also things like fences. Fires carry along fences like a wick.”
Getting people out of Tahoe
The Lake Tahoe Regional Evacuation Plan, released last September, was developed by the region’s fire, law enforcement and emergency management agencies. It’s not a specific evacuation plan — more of a primer on which agency has particular authority and the myriad considerations that will drive evacuation decisions.
A detailed evacuation plan can’t really be devised until a specific fire presents itself, each with its own particular set of problems. Nonetheless, some factors are common to any evacuation strategy, chief among them how will people flee the fire and where will they go.
Addressing those critical questions is a conundrum in Lake Tahoe, where on summer days evacuation routes are already constrained by people parking on roadsides.
Local wags in the Tahoe region wryly simplify the options: Go to the end of your driveway and turn right or turn left. In other words, there are few choices when a circular roadway is the main route in and out of the basin.
It’s a glib response to the reality of the basin’s fundamental vulnerability. The two-lane road system is here to stay and the few roads that connect to a wider network outside the bowl of Lake Tahoe are tenuous at best, and also subject to closure during a fire.
Residents are acutely aware of the danger. “If there’s a fire on Highway 89, east side going towards Truckee, who are they going to get out? Where will they go?” said Kristina Hill, a resident of Incline Village, a northside community.
Last summer, technology companies PyroAnalysis and Ladris AI, employing AI-generated scenarios, estimated evacuating Placer and Washoe counties would take 9 to 14 or more hours, depending on road conditions and the number of people.
Subsequent analysis of the rest of the basin’s communities estimated evacuation time from 4 to 11 hours.
Fire and emergency officials have criticized the findings, saying the report cherry-picked worst-case scenarios and projected unrealistic and catastrophic fire and traffic conditions.
Commissioned by TahoeCleanAir.org, the simulations are intended to illuminate what the group says are tourism development decisions that compound fire and evacuation risk.
“We are continuing to pack in more multi-level resorts, international destinations, and continue to pack more people here,” said Doug Flaherty, the group’s president and a former firefighter. “How long are we going to stuff 15 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack?”
New development in Lake Tahoe is restricted and hotly debated. Anything that brings more people and vehicles into the basin is considered for its impact on the lake’s clarity, but also — in the age of megafires — scrutinized for fire safety.
Under the region’s development plan, the Tahoe planning agency can approve up to 130 new homes in the basin every year. But many resorts are outside the planning agency’s jurisdiction, and they continue to grow.
The Village at Palisades Tahoe, the proposed new condo and hotel development in the Olympic Valley on the northwest side of the lake, is reviving the debate.
The complex would be built in a zone designated by state fire officials as a “very high” hazard. Located at the end of a dead-end road, the resort on busy days could add more than 3,000 vehicles to the region’s already clogged transportation corridors.
The project was originally approved in 2016 but environmentalists sued. In 2022 Placer County dropped its approval after an appeals court found that its environmental report was deficient in four areas, including emergency evacuation analysis.
The project is back now with a revised analysis but critics still question how thousands of residents and guests would be able to get out of the boxed-in setting during a wildfire. The issue of how to safely evacuate the resort triggered a prolonged debate at the county board of supervisors meeting last November.
Local fire officials called the focus on the resort’s potential 11-hour evacuation times “sensationalism.” If the road out proves inaccessible during a fire, plans call for thousands of guests and residents sheltering in place in paved open areas or a parking structure. Even if that is manageable, it wouldn’t protect people from toxic smoke.
One audience member, a lifelong resident, commented that funnelling fleeing motorists into a single highway encircling the lake would be dangerous. “Three thousand vehicle trips per day trying to merge onto (Highway) 89? If it wasn’t a fire risk, why did I get dropped after 28 years on my fire insurance?”
After nine hours of debate and public comment, the board approved the developer’s plan that day. But the project remains on hold, pending the outcome of another lawsuit brought by environmental groups, according to Placer County spokesman Steven Wilson.
Said Tom Mooers, executive director of the conservation group Sierra Watch, one of the parties suing, “It’s a reckless approach to the lives of the people who live and work and visit Tahoe.”
Thinning vast national forests
Nature has a way of sneaking up on the complacent.
For generations, Californians believed that mountains would save them, that wildfires would not burn over the Sierra Nevada’s austere granite peaks. The rocks would serve as a natural fire break for the communities beneath them.
The Angora Fire in June 2007 changed that. Embers from an abandoned campfire swirled aloft in high winds and climbed over the summit, finding ample kindling in the dry, overgrown forests. In hours, more than 3,000 acres burned and 254 homes and other buildings were destroyed.
“No one thought the fire would go over the wall of granite at Echo Summit,” said Regan of the regional planning agency, “but sure enough, it did.”
The basin was ready to burn. A California-Nevada commission reviewed the antecedents of the fire, putting it in context. “It was just a matter of time before a catastrophic fire torched the landscape of the Lake Tahoe Basin,” the commission wrote in 2008.
Wildfires often expose vulnerabilities and policies that need changing. The Angora Fire was one such moment. Even as the fire was raging, officials bitterly complained about conflicting policies that exacerbated the conflagration.
The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, focused on preserving lake clarity at that time, counseled homeowners to keep mulch and vegetation on the ground in steep areas to prevent sediment running into the lake and clouding it. Local fire districts preached the opposite: Maintain a defensible space around your home, clear pine straw, trees and shrubs to reduce fire risk.
Stream beds were exempt from vegetation clearing, an attempt to keep powerful winter flows from sluicing sediment into the lake. But firefighters reported that during the 2007 Angora Fire, those riparian zones carried flames.
As they say in the fire service, lessons learned. The Lake Tahoe planning agency now allows homeowners to remove larger, 14-inch diameter trees without a permit. Prior to the Angora Fire, they could cut only 6-inch trees.
Now regional planning officials, local authorities and fire districts speak with one voice, and loudly: Clear vegetation and do everything you can to make your home fire-resistant.
As with much in the Lake Tahoe basin, managing forests and homes for fire resilience is complicated. The Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, formed in 2008, brings together nearly two dozen federal, tribal, state and local conservation, land management and fire agencies to plan and carry out wildfire response.
While summers are the riskiest time for wildfires, winter is also fire season in the Tahoe basin: It’s when crews light low-intensity controlled burns to reduce the risk of future fires. It’s about the only time when a column of smoke rising out of the woods is not a danger sign.
U.S. Forest Service crews are eliminating the low branches and understory that act like ladders carrying flames into the tops of trees, spawning dangerous crown fires.
On a recent fall day, Carrie Thaler, U.S. Forest Service fire chief in the Tahoe basin, stood amid a stand of trees on the side of a road in a small housing subdivision. Thinning and cutting trees next to roads are high priorities, she said. “There’s been a big emphasis on clearing here because they are evacuation routes.”
The Trump administration has ordered nationwide staffing cuts to the federal Forest Service, but a spokesperson for the Tahoe Basin Unit would not answer questions about whether any funding or staff was cut there.
Government agencies and private groups have spent $222 million on wildfire protection and prescribed burns in the Tahoe basin since 2010, according to a CalMatters analysis. In addition, the California Tahoe Conservancy in December issued a $600,000 grant for fuels-reduction work in north Tahoe.
U.S. Forest Service crews have thinned or burned some 95,000 acres within the 154,000 acres of national forests around Lake Tahoe. The result is visible: Thousands of slash piles are scattered around the basin, the detritus from cutting and thinning projects stacked along roadways and pullouts.
Some residents complain about smoke generated by the prescribed burns, which can cause respiratory irritation and other health effects, especially for people with asthma or heart or lung disorders.
But fire officials say the value of prescribed burns and thinning vegetation near homes became clear when the basin was menaced by an unpredictable and dangerous fire.
The 2021 Caldor Fire raced toward the South Lake Tahoe neighborhood of Christmas Valley, tucked in a secluded vale. Residents were told to evacuate. Wind-borne embers landed like small bombs. On the fire front, flames reached 150 feet into the sky. There is no defending against that.
Then came what firefighters call the Christmas Valley Miracle: As the fire neared homes, it reached the edge of defensible space where trees and brush had been cleared. The fire, lacking fuel, collapsed into a manageable threat.
The height of the flames “dropped from 150 to 15 feet,” said Victor Lyon, a vegetation management officer for the Forest Service. “Those treatments allowed fire crews to go into the neighborhood and put out spot fires. It was touch and go, but we saved homes.”
‘We’re just in a bad location, at a dead end’
Gazing out his office window at Fallen Leaf Lake — a small water body southwest of Lake Tahoe — glittering in the late afternoon light, Gerren, the fire chief, sighs. The scene is both a beautiful sight and a terrifying one.
The sloping hillsides are dense with vegetation, intermixed with thousands of dead trees that are somehow still standing. Gerren said parts of the tangled forest are impassable. Some 300 homes are scattered in the woods.
“It’s hard to maneuver out here,” he said, waving to the rugged landscape that is inhospitable to roads. “We’re just in a bad location, and we’re at a dead end. With the condition of the road it’s hard to get people out of here in a timely manner. As you can see, we’re completely surrounded.”
Gerren said Fallen Leaf Lake is often overlooked when fire chiefs in the Tahoe basin are planning.
“When we have these evacuation meetings, everybody wants to talk about how bad it is in the city, and they forget about us,” Gerren said. “And I’m sitting there saying, I’ve got the worst place in this whole basin to evacuate from.
“If we had a fast-burning fire, we’re trapped. At least in the city you’ve got options and streets you can run down and find your way out.”