Rereading the comment it also seems more like Apache is starting something that can become root somehow, I really don't think it is implied Apache is running as root.
Apache usually starts up as root so it can do setup that requires root, and then drops privileges to a user/group specified in Apache configuration. Most commonly the required setup is just binding to privileged ports, but one of the supported setup steps is opening log pipes. See the security note here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_log_config.html...