Visits by Hungry Bears Fire Up a Sierra Dispute : Animals: Some say the marauding beasts should be shot. Others argue that it’s all the fault of man. An emergency bear law is considered.

Marauding black bears have roamed the streets of this old Gold Rush hamlet the past two months, pawing through garbage cans, breaking windows and doors to get into homes in search of food and raiding outdoor freezers.

A pack of eight bears brazenly waddled down the main street of Sierra City, population 250, late one recent night, swatting at garbage cans and getting into dumpsters.

One dumpster, jarred loose when a bear hopped in, rolled down a steep hill for a block before the bear jumped out. Sixteen bears were counted at the town’s dump on another night.

So far only one person has been injured by the burly beasts, which weigh as much as 650 pounds. Tal Johnson, 16, had a face-to-face encounter with a bear when he returned home with his mother from a basketball game at Downieville High School.

“We drove into the driveway and Tal went up to the porch to turn on the yard lights to make sure there weren’t any bears hanging around,” recalled Sherri Johnson, the youth’s mother, who is a secretary in the district attorney’s office.

She said she heard a commotion and the sound of a pile of firewood toppling on the porch. “I got out of the car and Tal yelled, ‘Mom, get back in the car. There’s a bear up here. Get back in the car.’ He was afraid it would run down the stairs and hurt me.”

The bear bolted and knocked the youth into the side of his house, tearing tendons in his left leg. “I’m afraid to think what might have happened if it had been an older person or a child on the porch,” sighed Sherri Johnson.

Nevada (Babe) Lewis, 64, a Sierra County supervisor who lives in Sierra City, blames the problem on the statewide ban this year on hunting bears. In July, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge canceled this year’s bear hunting season because, he ruled, the state Fish and Game Department had not made appropriate environmental impact studies.

“The marauding bears should be annihilated. I live in fear something awful is going to happen,” Lewis lamented at a board meeting. “There is a potential of someone getting killed.”

The Sierra County supervisors have met three times on the bear problem, and another meeting is scheduled at Downieville today, at which state fish and game authorities will appear and a new emergency bear ordinance will be considered.

Sierra County, located in the Sierra Nevada 75 miles north of Sacramento, is the second-least-populated county in the state, with only 3,200 residents.

There are two factions in Sierra City--one group urging that a few bears be killed to frighten others away, the other insisting that the bears not be killed but that garbage cans, dumpsters and the town dump be made bear-proof.

Liz Fisher, 40, managing editor of the 136-year-old weekly Downieville Mountain Messenger--”California’s Oldest Weekly Newspaper,” proclaims the masthead--wrote an editorial headlined, “Do We Really Need to Shoot Bears?” In it she insisted:

“We are the problem. We have to clean up our garbage, pick up our apples. We treasure our life style and the wilderness. Most of us understand the implications of living in a rural mountain community. It is not right for a small group of people whipping each other into a frenzy of fear to decide these bears must be shot.”

There are several apple orchards on the outskirts of Sierra City, and the bears have had a field day eating the apples both on the ground and in the trees.

“I looked out the window and saw a baby bear up a tree knocking apples off the branches to a mother bear below on the ground,” said Katy Nourse, 16, a high school student.

Dennis Messa, 35, the resident state fish and game warden for the county, has investigated every bear complaint. He is working with county counsel William Pangman, 35, to draft an emergency bear ordinance.

Pangman contacted Juneau, Alaska, officials, who had a similar problem of bears coming out of the mountains to roam the streets of the Alaskan capital. “Sixteen of the marauding bears were killed in Juneau last year and a tough garbage-proof ordinance was adopted,” Pangman reported to the Board of Supervisors. “This year there are no bears in Juneau,” he added.

“We hope we can adopt a similar . . . ordinance that will keep the bears out of town by not having any food readily available for them,” said Messa, who noted that 21 bears were killed in Sierra County last year by hunters.

The dump, a mile above town on the slopes of the mountain overlooking Sierra City, contains large metal bins for refuse that are later transported to a landfill in another part of the county.

The county is erecting a 15-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire to enclose the Sierra City dump. The proposed ordinance calls for all garbage cans, dumpsters and other receptacles in the community left outside to be sealed and secured so bears cannot get to the contents.

If the bears are not enticed by the smell of food they will not come to town, insists Messa. There have been bears at the town dump in years past, but this is the first time they have ventured into the hamlet.

One of the problems, according to Messa, Sheriff Lee Adams, 33, and others, is that many residents and outsiders have been feeding the bears at the dump. “The dump site has been the best show in town,” said the sheriff. “People go up there to see the bears and bring marshmallows and other food with them. One woman even baked a berry pie for the bears.”

Fisher, the newspaper editor, printed and personally distributed pleas to people at the dump to stop feeding the bears. Her flyers read: “The bears are becoming so accustomed to interacting with people they are going into town looking for food. It is dangerous for the bears and dangerous for people. Some are saying we ought to shoot the bears.”

Some bears have entered homes. Lee Proud, a deputy sheriff, came home to find his kitchen window broken and fur caught in the window frame, paw prints on the floor, claw marks on a cabinet and all the food in the pantry devoured.

At Dorothy Hunt’s Sardine Lake Resort, bears broke into a freezer and ate 12 pounds of strip steak, 20 pounds of top sirloin and 10 pounds of spareribs. “I was lying on the couch one night watching TV when I looked up and saw I wasn’t alone. A bear was outside the window watching with me,” said Hunt.

Hunters with dogs but no guns chased the bears out of town and up the mountain a few days before Christmas. Since then it has been relatively quiet. “But we expect all hell to break loose again at any time,” sighed Supervisor Lewis.

Audrey Browning, 80, said she isn’t taking any chances. She sleeps with a shotgun in her bed “for self-defense if it comes to that.”