They Know How To Prevent Megafires, Why Won’t Anybody Listen? (San Mateo: city hall, homes)

[Mr5150]

Originally Posted by wannabeNC

Sounds like a choice between planned burning and unplanned burning - going to burn one way or another due to massive fuel load. Is there a 3rd alternative?

Mastication and thinning. Slower, but it doesn’t involve burning. It is common in my area. Mastication grinds up brush and small trees. Thinning is the removal of a % of trees per acre.

[Ultrarunner]

Even AG burns are getting hard to conduct...

Diseased trees are to be incinerated onsite and not transported off site... but do a burn as prescribed and read the complaints in the news.

[Ceece]

I read similar articles after the Tubbs Fire and Camp Fire. My dad was a firefighter and talked about this kind of stuff in prior decades, whenever forest fire sprung up. It's true, we KNOW what to do but too many special interests and bad policies have tied CA into a knot. Nothing can ever happen due to the over regulation we love to impose on ourselves.


I also remember when Trump suggested we be proactive about this stuff. People chose to ignore that good advise in favor of mocking him over the words he used to describe it, ie: "rake the forest", which any imbecile could interpret to thinning, mastication and controlled burns. That's California in a nutshell.

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by Ceece

I read similar articles after the Tubbs Fire and Camp Fire. My dad was a firefighter and talked about this kind of stuff in prior decades, whenever forest fire sprung up. It's true, we KNOW what to do but too many special interests and bad policies have tied CA into a knot. Nothing can ever happen due to the over regulation we love to impose on ourselves.


I also remember when Trump suggested we be proactive about this stuff. People chose to ignore that good advise in favor of mocking him over the words he used to describe it, ie: "rake the forest", which any imbecile could interpret to thinning, mastication and controlled burns. That's California in a nutshell.

Uh no. Trump’s an idiot. What he said was not connected to any reality. The quote came as he attributed forest fire mitigation comments he interpreted from the president of Finland ... the the Finnish president said nothing about “raking” ... nor framed their success in controlling wildfires as a result of forest “cleaning” even.

Read below and the part in bold especially:

During his trip to view the damage from California's wildfires, President Donald Trump said Finland's President Sauli Niinisto told him that his country doesn't have the same problem with fires because it spends "a lot of time on raking and cleaning."

And then all Helsinki broke loose with social media memes mocking Trump under #RakeAmericaGreatAgain and #RakeNews hashtags.

On Sunday, Niinisto said he did speak briefly with Trump about forest management on Nov. 11, when the two leaders were in Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. But he didn't recall saying anything about raking the forests.

Finland does have an impressive record of limiting wildfires. The Finnish Forest Association says the country's "diversity of species and habitats suffers from too few fires."


The Scandinavian country occasionally does controlled burns to clear underbrush, but the Finnish Forest Association primarily attributes the low number of wildfires to the country's large network of roads, as well as its numerous lakes, rivers and wetlands, which help slow the fires' spread.

Trump said nothing about “roads, lakes, and rivers”. He said “raking”.

And just in the past week or so he’s returned to that bs, once again blaming California for not cleaning its forests ... which are mostly under national management.

Dork.

[CCbaxter]

Originally Posted by Tulemutt

One of the things that really stuck out, for me, was the comparison of how many (millions) of acres of California forest that typically burned annually in pre-history times - compared to the relatively few acres allowed to burn now.

Wow.

But you have to keep in mind that in prehistoric times the hills around LA could burn and no one cared. Also, I bet the largest single use of land in CA is agriculture. Who’s farms and groves should we burn?

Fact is terrain and weather make controlled burns in the mountains, where many fires are burning now, nearly impossible. Likewise a controlled burn in a place like paradise was impossible because so many structures were spread out among the trees. If any branch of the government had gone in to thin them out by logging, the people would have gone crazy.

Most likely the number one contributor to these fires is rising temps and drought.

But we can’t talk about that.

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by CCbaxter

But you have to keep in mind that in prehistoric times the hills around LA could burn and no one cared. Also, I bet the largest single use of land in CA is agriculture. Who’s farms and groves should we burn?

Fact is terrain and weather make controlled burns in the mountains, where many fires are burning now, nearly impossible. Likewise a controlled burn in a place like paradise was impossible because so many structures were spread out among the trees. If any branch of the government had gone in to thin them out by logging, the people would have gone crazy.

Most likely the number one contributor to these fires is rising temps and drought.

But we can’t talk about that.

Heh. Did I say we should do controlled burns? I haven’t advocated anything. I just posted an interesting article. And I remarked on how nature burned in prehistoric times.

[CCbaxter]

Originally Posted by Tulemutt

Heh. Did I say we should do controlled burns? I haven’t advocated anything. I just posted an interesting article. And I remarked on how nature burned in prehistoric times.

Why so sensitive? All I did was to say how that level of burn would no longer be possible because of land use.
So while interesting, no longer relevant.

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by CCbaxter

Why so sensitive? All I did was to say how that level of burn would no longer be possible because of land use.
So while interesting, no longer relevant.

Sensitive? Not really. Clarifying. Just as I did earlier when Bill suggested I agreed with Trump on forest management (and immigration). Your post opened with the sentence: “you have to remember” ... which is a didactic phrase ... and you went on to clearly suggest I advocated actions I didn’t. In fact, I previously agreed with Bill’s observations about air quality ... as I do with yours about the ‘thread a needle’ challenge of burns given settlements.

The only position I have on this topic is: it’s a fascinating conundrum.

[RMESMH]

Originally Posted by CA4Now

Very sobering article. Thanks for posting it.

^^^^^ I agree.

[CA4Now]

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, now known as CAL FIRE, estimates that of 33 million acres of forest in the state, 8 to10 million acres need urgent mechanical thinning and burning to prevent disasters similar to 2019. CAL FIRE and the U.S. Forest Service, which by itself controls 47 percent of the state’s forests, aim to treat a million acres a year this way by 2025.

Many think that’s overly ambitious. Under an Emergency Proclamation by Governor Gavin Newsom, CAL FIRE is starting to fund 35 priority fire management projects on some 90,000 acres. During the next five years, the department will also spend a billion dollars from the state’s cap-and-trade climate fund. That will go for restoration, reforestation, fuel reduction, proscribed fire, biomass utilization, and new research. The goal is to make forests more resilient to continued climate change and wildfire. It’s what author and conservationist Aldo Leopold called “intelligent tinkering.”

A billion dollars might seem a significant commitment until compared to the cost of not taking action. The Camp Fire—the world’s costliest natural disaster in 2018—caused $16.5 billion in damages.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/s...ire-disasters/