Latvia’s Forests Devastated by Fires : Disaster: Damage to country’s only natural resource could cripple its efforts to build post-Soviet economy.

Numbly, Uldis Kalnietis stared out of the helicopter at the smoldering remains of Latvia’s most prized national treasure, the vast Sliteres wilderness reservation along the Baltic seacoast.

Voracious 12-foot flames had blazed through the pristine reservation, devouring about 300,000 trees, charring almost 4,000 acres of rich peat bog and driving out the scores of species that had lived in the carefully preserved park.

“When I looked down from the helicopter, I knew there should be a green forest, but the only colors I could see were black and red,” said Kalnietis, a forest preservation specialist with the Latvian government. “It was an awful sensation. For Latvia, this is a nightmare.”

After six weeks of dry weather, hundreds of forest fires raged through this small nation of 2.6 million people last week, destroying $4.6 million worth of pine and fir trees--a sum equal to roughly one-third of Latvia’s budget for the second half of 1992.

Already, the unremitting drought has severely stunted crop growth, raising fears of a famine this winter. Now, the fires have devastated Latvia’s only natural resource, the forests that cover 42% of the country’s territory.

The fires’ quirky paths left lone patches of green even in the hardest-hit areas, daubs of bright color that seemed startlingly inappropriate amid the acres of charred earth and scorched, blackened trees.

Alarming reports that the fires were raging near army facilities housing nuclear weapons proved unfounded, although the blazes did destroy nearly 1,500 acres of forest on a training camp used by the Russian army. That camp, located about 20 miles outside Riga, and the Sliteres reservation, a tract so valued that entrance requires special government permission, suffered the most damage.

“Riga used to be considered a green zone,” said Rudolfs Kalliss, a regional administrator whose territory includes the Russian army base. “People used to come here to collect berries and mushrooms, and now it looks like this,” he added sadly, pointing to a hilltop covered with ash and brittle moss.

Although no one was injured and no homes were destroyed, the unprecedented ecological destruction wrought by the fires could cripple Latvia’s efforts to throw off the shackles of Soviet communism and build a healthy economy, government officials say.

Export of timber and wood products is among the most lucrative of the private enterprises that have emerged since Latvia gained independence last year, and the government receives more than 10% of its total income from taxing companies that cut down trees, according to the Finance Ministry.

Although much of the burnt wood can still be used for fuel or export this year, replacing the dead trees will require a massive replanting effort and a 70-year wait.

“We don’t yet know how much money Latvia has lost--whether the final sum will be enormous or simply huge,” said Ilmars Bruneneks, a member of the government’s permanent committee on disasters.

“We have no gold, no oil and no industry on our land,” he added grimly. “So wood is our wealth.”

Thousands of Latvians volunteered to help fight the fires, which began July 9 and 10 as localized blazes and quickly spread across the parched land. Traveling up to 100 miles to reach threatened areas, the amateur firefighters beat at the flames with the only equipment available: green branches stripped from surrounding trees.

“It was awful--we were standing right in front of the fire and we couldn’t do anything,” said Alexander Smirnov, 48, who spent 10-hour days battling the flames on the Russian army base near his farm. “The fire was moving so fast that we could barely outrun it.

“Now, there is nothing alive here at all,” he added, watching as a colony of ants ventured onto the singed ground, which still smelled heavily of smoke, and then quickly retreated.

While untrained citizens fought the blazes with primitive equipment--”like Neanderthals,” one observer commented--official efforts encountered a series of snafus.

Firetrucks could not reach the flames because of bad or nonexistent roads, monitors could not plot the fires’ paths because they had no maps and airborne scouts could not relay information about new fires because their two-way radios jammed, according to firefighters.

And, lacking firefighting helicopters, Latvia had to request equipment from Finland, Sweden and Norway.

After 10 days of round-the-clock efforts, including as many as 6,000 firefighters at peak, most of the blazes were finally extinguished just a few days ago.

Environmentalists quickly blamed the government for failing to protect Latvia’s most valuable resource.

“The government needs to put more money into preventing fires and buying good equipment to fight them,” said Kalnietis, the forest specialist. “Only then can we say that the forest is Latvia’s wealth.”