The window to protect Big Bear from wildfire is shrinking
Christina Barba is on a mission to set more forest fires. The good kind. The intentional kind. The kind that prevents the next wildfire from becomi...
Christina Barba is on a mission to set more forest fires. The good kind. The intentional kind. The kind that prevents the next wildfire from becoming a mega-fire. On a dry afternoon last spring, she drove through stands of towering ponderosa and Jeffrey pines in San Bernardino County, just outside the mountain town of Big Bear Lake. Parking her U.S. Forest Service pickup at the top of a ridge, she pointed across a wide valley at a hillside thriving with shrubs and dotted with burnt tree trunks. In 2007, the Butler 2 and Slide fires torched the hillside and more than 300 homes and businesses between here and Lake Arrowhead.