LOS ANGELES: This summer’s record breaking wave of wildfires may have been caused by wholesale logging by the timber industry rather than the environmental protection rules that the Bush administration argues are responsible, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.

Quoting fire historians and forest ecologists the report said that the government’s position on the West’s wildfire epidemic runs counter to the record of the last half century, when large forest fires erupted on the heels of the heaviest logging ever conducted by the US Forest Service.

Government spokesmen have repeatedly blamed the fires on limits on logging which allow the buildup of young trees and brush that fuel wildfires during dry seasons. But the report accused the administration of skewing the facts in order to pass legislation that would allow the timber industry almost unfettered access to old growth trees.

Experts said that by removing the largest and most fire-resistant trees and replacing them with dense young growth, conventional logging and tree planting practices helped create the conditions that stoke wildfires.

The report said that the Forest Service’s own statistics show that the modern era of big burns began not in the 1990s, during a period of declining logging, but in the 1980s, when logging was at its peak.

In 1950, when about three billion board-feet were logged, 100,000 hectares of federal forests burned. Nearly six times that amount went up in flames in 1988, when the harvest had climbed to nearly 12 billion board-feet.

Though the removal of brush and young fire-prone trees would lessen the risk of wildfire, the regulations advocated by the government would prompt lumber companies to move the largest and most fire resistant trees. The provisions would also fail to make sure that lumber companies remove the biggest fire hazard — the slash debris that remains after trees are logged and which acts as kindling for forest fires.—dpa