Blazes: Need for Preventive Measures

Your article on fire prevention efforts (“Fire Officials to Enforce Brush Clearance Codes,” Aug. 21) underlines the importance of the problem but addresses less than 1% of the brush and forest fire dangers.

Although forest fires can never be prevented, there are ways of containing such recurrent disasters, which strike the Malibu area every three or more years. The necessary steps are a grid of clear-cut 150- to 200-foot wide swaths, about one mile apart, through all forests and brush. By sacrificing less than 4% of natural growth forests, the remaining 96% will be virtually immune from spreading fires. If a road is paved in each swath, perhaps with a water line, it would greatly improve the chances of localizing all fires and saving virtually all remaining forests.

Unfortunately, the assorted conservancies and park services labor under the illusion that by some miracle all forests can be saved. Never mind a dozen heroic firefighters who sacrifice their lives every year, nor the hundreds who are injured. Never mind that untold deer become charbroiled venison and thousands of birds and critters perish miserably in every years’ fires.

The environmentalists must understand that men must cooperate with nature to protect nature and man, too. The blind opposition to any and all efforts to protect our patrimony in a sensible way must cease. A well-cared-for forest is more of a thing of beauty than a pristine soot-blackened mess--with or without burnt-out homes.

PETER D. BOGART Los Angeles