Name: An 800-mile firebreak once protected California’s forests from flames. What happened?
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An 800-mile firebreak once protected California’s forests from flames. What happened?

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The world’s biggest firebreak, a nearly 800-mile line cut into the western slope of the Sierra Nevada during the Great Depression, once protected California’s forests from the state’s ceaseless infernos.Built in three years, the Ponderosa Way snaked from the Pit River in the Cascade Mountains down to the Kern River near Bakersfield. Thousands of unemployed men joined Civilian Conservation Corps camps up and down the state, grading steep ravines, erecting steel bridges and stacking stones to create culverts.One fire historian called it the “Great Wall of California.” Another the “Mother of all firebreaks.” But now the dirt road has been lost to history and largely reclaimed by Mother Nature.Left: A historic photo of a section of the 800-mile Ponderosa Way firebreak as it was being constructed in the 1930s. Right: A 1933 article in The San Francisco Chronicle. During the record-breaking fire seasons of recent years, a well-maintained Ponderosa Way might have given firefighters a spot to take a stand, while offering residents in some communities an escape route. But the massive project that passed through Paradise — the town destroyed in the deadly Camp Fire of 2018 — was neglected almost from the beginning and never lived up to its billing.It stands as an early lesson that wildfire prevention across California’s vast forests is complicated, expensive and, often, unsuccessful.“Whether the Ponderosa Way could have saved Paradise or offered an evacuation route for its fleeing residents may never be known,” said Gray Brechin, a visiting scholar in UC Berkeley’s geography department who has written about the history of the Ponderosa Way.The idea behind the project still resonates. Firebreaks remain part of wildland defense — California, in fact, embarked on a expansion of its network after the Camp Fire — but their role has changed. Where the Ponderosa Way was built at huge expense to protect timber, today’s lines are smaller and less ambitious, aimed at helping to keep fires from leaping into vulnerable communities.Explaining firebreaks and backfiresSome residents have fought to resuscitate the old Ponderosa Way, pleading with officials to retrofit it for the benefit of communities that now butt up against both sides of the line.Experts, though, give mixed reviews for the potential value of a large firebreak, which may be compromised by a warming climate, neglected vegetation, questionable housing and other factors creating damaging blazes.They might make us feel safe and provide politicians cover, these experts say, but ultimately get overrun by today’s megafires that spew embers miles ahead, lighting spot fires that no amount of cleared-out line can prevent.Fire historian Stephen Pyne, in his book “California: A Fire Survey,” wrote about the idea of firebreaks: “Those walls are, in the end, the lines of negotiation between a nature that doesn’t care and a society that doesn’t want to worry.”A truck drives down Ponderosa Way, which was once used as a firebreak. “This is a public road,” Doug Laurie repeatedly whispered from the driver’s seat as his Subaru Outback bounded along the pockmarked old firebreak, during a three-hour tour of the Ponderosa Way’s remains that zigzag through Cohasset, a small community of almost 1,000 residents north of Chico. “This is taxpayer funded.”Laurie, who is 69 and lives in Chico, has spent decades pushing for a government agency, any government agency, to take control of the orphaned passageway. He worries for the survival of Cohasset, comparing it to a mountain town also in Butte County that was recently ruined by the North Complex Fire. Sixteen people“Cohasset is a sitting duck,” Laurie said. “It is the next one to go.”Residents in the dusty town have one way out — Cohasset Road. If fire chokes off that two-lane thoroughfare, the old Ponderosa Way could provide an alternative, Laurie argues. However, the dirt road is nearly impassable with deep ruts and pits the locals call “bathtubs.” And the logging roads that lead out to to paved Highway 32, which runs parallel, are blocked by gates locked by logging company Sierra Pacific Industries.“It’s politics. It’s turf battles. It’s environmental issues. It’s public safety,” Laurie said. “It would improve public access, it would improve emergency response, it would improve law enforcement.”Doug Laurie, a Butte County resident who has long been lobbying to revitalize the roads to use as firebreaks, gives a tour of Ponderosa Way. Laurie remembers riding with members of his family in their 1953 Chrysler New Yorker along a well-maintained Ponderosa Way out to Deer Creek to trout fish. Around the mid-1980s and ’90s, the locked gates began going up.“All of a sudden the public was being blocked out of public lands by a timber company,” said Laurie, now holding a cardboard box he’d labeled “Ponderosa Way” in black Sharpie.Two three-ring binders neatly displayed a decade of letters to politicians, transcripts of conversations with forest officials, articles on Butte County fires and warnings of fire danger, plus maps of his proposed route improvements. He lost the other half of his research and documents when his Paradise rental house burned up in the Camp Fire.Over the years, federal, state and county officials sought to push maintenance of Ponderosa Way on to each other. In 2007, the federal Bureau of Land Management tried to get another agency to take it over, said Brechin, the visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. In response, state and county officials told the bureau that what remained of the road might be useful for public access, but that they did not consider it vital for fire protection.“No public agency much wanted the orphaned firebreak or remembered the purpose for which it had been so painstakingly built,” , a project scholar for the Living New Deal, which chronicles the history of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous public works package. “When the Camp Fire swept over and virtually erased Paradise, few knew that the lengthy firebreak transected the town.”In 1933, 1 out of every 4 Americans was unemployed. Roosevelt and his New Deal created the Civilian Conservation Corps, a huge workforce able to take on giant projects.Dams, bridges, tunnels — all were made possible by the abundance of CCC labor. In the Great Plains, 220 million trees would be planted, stretching 18,600 miles, to create the Shelterbelt, a windbreak to help prevent the severe dust storms that created the Dust Bowl.California saw a reverse image: Chop down trees and brush in an attempt to halt fires from burning up valuable forests.“You had hundreds of thousands of enrollees and suddenly it’s possible,” said Pyne, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University who used to work as a wildland firefighter. “CCC was looking for large projects requiring a lot of labor.”California had always burned. A 1934 article in American Forests magazine described the Depression-era fire threat in the state in terms familiar with today’s residents.A locked gate off Ponderosa Way, which was once used as a firebreak. “From May until November it is a tinderbox wherein even a spark from the shod hoof of a horse has been known to start a fire which burned 20,000 acres by nightfall,” the article read.The same piece related the hopes that forestry and state officials pinned on the Ponderosa Way.“It is not expected that the Ponderosa Way will stop fires automatically,” the author wrote. “In the usual case it will be necessary to get men quickly onto the threatened portion of the line to backfire and to catch spot fires.”Eight thousand men began the work in winter 1932, with pay ranging from 55 cents to $1.10 an hour, depending on a laborer’s skills.They carved the dirt belt between the valuable trees — particularly Ponderosa pines, hence the name — and the brush and chaparral of the foothills. Fires prefer to travel upslope, so the break, 50 to 200 feet wide, provided a buffer and firefighting access for lower-elevation conflagrations. Crews built the line wide enough for firefighting trucks, while constructing lookout towers and telephone lines to hasten alerts.But then came the squabbles and the decay of time. The immense labor force needed to maintain the firebreak dried up with World War II. And the conflict thrust the route into a new role, providing a secret highway for U.S. military tanks in the event of a Japanese attack.By 1949, the federal government ceded the break to the California Department of Forestry, which had little interest in paying for the maintenance, Brechin said. With state and county agencies uninterested in paying for a federal road, it was quickly and soundly forgotten.Left: A 1934 letter from an assistant fire chief to the U.S. Forest Service detailing how the Ponderosa Way firebreak fared during that fire season. Right: A historic map of the Ponderosa Way firebreak. Before there was even a Forest Service, there were firebreaks in California. And before that, California Indians burned wildlands to keep them from becoming dangerously overgrown. Still, Pyne said, the efficacy of removing fuels along a strip of land is debatable.“It’s very expensive and labor intensive,” Pyne said. “They go up and then they erode and they fail and then you build them again.”As the Ponderosa Way was built, Assistant Regional Forester J.H. Price with the U.S. Forest Service asked the various units along the firebreak if it had been successful that season. The answers were a mixed bag, according to records kept by the California State Archives. Some divisions fought fires nowhere near the firebreak. Others successfully used the break, while others said blazes jumped the line.In one 1934 report, a camp supervisor described how the Ponderosa Way helped crews extinguish the Marker Fire, which was about 200 yards wide.“The fire reached Ponderosa Way at the same time the fire crew reached it with the fire truck. The fire spotted over in 20 places, but the crew was able to stop it, with the aid of the truck,” he wrote. “Another thousand acres would have been lost had it not been for the truck trail along Ponderosa Way.”But in the end, Pyne said, the break was abandoned, which suggests “that it wasn’t so valuable.” And as the planet warmed and California faced more intense fire behavior, such lines became less and less effective, Pyne said.“They wouldn’t stop a fire with major wind behind it,” he said. “Under extreme conditions, the fuel breaks will fail.”As expensive as they are, they are temporary.“It’s a political gesture, and I don’t mean that facetiously, and then they go away,” Pyne said. “Fuel breaks seem comforting. When you try and impose your will on it, you have got to expect nature to fight back.”Businesses burn as the Camp Fire destroys a large portion of  the Butte County community of Paradise in November 2018. After the Camp Fire killed 85 people — more than any other California wildfire — Gov. Gavin Newsom announced $30 million in funding for 35 emergency firebreaks surrounding 200 at-risk communities. Completed in a year, the projects cleared 90,000 acres of dead trees and vegetation, focusing on evacuation routes and critical infrastructure like hospitals.This fiscal year, Newsom pegged another $200 million for firebreaks and forest health. Across the state, Cal Fire performed over more than 27,000 acres and reduced fuels over more than 31,000 acres on state lands.Christine McMorrow, a Cal Fire spokeswoman, said the effectiveness of breaks depends on many factors. But even with today’s more erratic fire behavior, she said, the lines can aid both firefighters and fleeing residents.Firefighters battling the Creek Fire near Fresno, which roared so fiercely over Labor Day weekend that helicopters had to fly in and used five new breaks. Some of those buffers were 200 feet wide, after crews removed dead trees, McMorrow said.A firefighter douses flames pushing toward homes in unincorporated Madera County during the Creek Fire in September. “In some instances, they disrupted the fire behavior enough to allow firefighters a chance to get ahead of it,” McMorrow said.In other areas, firefighters used the breaks as anchor points for backfiring operations, in which they preemptively set fires to strip away fuel, or as launch points for bulldozers as they created new buffers.One of the state’s new firebreaks includes a stretch of the old Ponderosa Way. The Ponderosa West Fuelbreak Project is a north-south line that transects Highway 20 and protects Grass Valley, said Cal Fire Division Chief Jim Mathias.“They had already done a bunch of research for fuel breaks,” Mathias said of selecting the historic buffer. “The permissions were in place, the science was good, it was a shovel-ready project.”UC Berkeley’s Brechin understands that much of the rest of the Ponderosa Way will probably remain a relic. But he hopes a workforce similar to the CCC will be established in his lifetime to fight climate change. Perhaps, instead of one herculean firebreak, crews could create smaller, more strategic ones, while better managing and thinning forests.“That can only be done successfully with a large labor force, combined with machinery, which will be expensive,” he said, “but a pittance compared with what we are losing now for not doing it.”Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Twitter:

The world’s biggest firebreak, a nearly 800-mile line cut into the western slope of the Sierra Nevada during the Great Depression, once protected California’s forests from the state’s ceaseless infernos.Built in three years, the Ponderosa Way snaked from the Pit River in the Cascade Mountains down to the Kern River near Bakersfield. Thousands of unemployed men joined Civilian Conservation Corps camps up and down the state, grading steep ravines, erecting steel bridges and stacking stones to create culverts.One fire historian called it the “Great Wall of California.” Another the “Mother of...

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Matthias Gafni

The San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco.

An 800-mile firebreak once protected California’s forests from flames. What happened?

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