The Moonlight fire was the U.S. Forest Service's worst nightmare.
For two weeks in September 2007 it raged like a fire-breathing dragon across 65,000 acres in Plumas and Lassen counties, devouring everything in its path, including 46,000 acres of lush national forest.
But there is an additional troubling dimension to this catastrophe, one that, like the fire itself, still haunts the Forest Service. From the start, there was a recognition of potential legal complications if it became known that a Forest Service patrol officer claimed another agency employee may have been smoking marijuana while he manned the lookout tower closest to the site where the fire started.
That fear has now been realized. A timber company being sued for causing the fire has filed documents in court that reveal the government tried to cover up the claim, causing dissension within the Forest Service.
Long before the devastating wildfire was contained, federal and state investigators were satisfied that a bulldozer belonging to a company harvesting timber for Sierra Pacific Industries hit a rock and a spark flew into dry duff on private property.
Sierra Pacific and the logger, Howell's Forest Harvesting, strongly dispute that.
The final report on the fire, publicly released on June 30, 2009, included no mention of suspected marijuana use by the Red Rock lookout the day the fire started.
In court papers, Sierra Pacific lawyers describe the report as "completely sanitized."
Yet, their cooperation and that of two federal judges was enlisted by assistant U.S. attorneys in sealing and redacting court records regarding the marijuana claim, despite the fact that once they were part of the court file they were public by law.
The Bee went to court in January to thwart the government's latest maneuver to hide the records. As a result, 544 pages of material, plus redactions, were placed on the public docket by Sierra Pacific lawyers.
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The accusations at the core of the imbroglio came from patrol officer Karen Juska, who reported that when she went to the Red Rock lookout station that day to pick up a radio in need of repair, Lief's "hand and the radio had a heavy odor of marijuana." She also reported seeing a small glass pipe in the tower's cabin.
As she and Lief stood by her truck shortly thereafter, Juska said in a written report, she spotted smoke and pointed it out to Lief. The fire was 10 miles from the tower, which had a direct line of sight to the location.
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If Lief had spotted the Moonlight fire as soon as it became visible from the Red Rock lookout, the fire would have been contained and extinguished before it could reach" national forest land, SPI lawyers argue in court papers.
They further argue that the Forest Service "suppressed evidence of this misconduct in an effort to protect its position" in a tangle of litigation.
U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner said in a prepared statement: "We dispute the allegations regarding the USFS employee at the Red Rock lookout, but in any event, we consider those allegations to be merely an effort to distract from the central issue of the case" – that is, whether Sierra Pacific and others are responsible for starting the fire.