In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots of spending, making it untenable for them to run their course, costing a lot of money to address) because some people decided to build a community in the middle of a forest that naturally would tend to burn down every few decades
We Know How to Prevent Megafires
21–30 of 110 posts
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#22There's a couple of misleading statements in here. It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. They'd all take a position in a city fire department if they were after more money. The other misleading thing is associating these current fires with bad forest management practices. It's true for Sierra Nevada forests generally, but that's not wher…
> It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. Except CDCR, which pays notably worse, but that's not really competing for firefighters. > There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding. There's not mechanism for the state to require a p…
To save some people a search:
CDF = California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as "CALFIRE"
CDCR = California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which in this context supplies convict labor to fight fires.
One issue this year is that the California State Prisons are all horrifically overrun with COVID-19, thereby incapacitating what had previously been a critical firefighting function.
The situation (mass incarceration, crowded conditions, negligent and/or derisive healthcare for inmates, climate change, lack of prescribed burns, and now inadequate resources to fight large fires) is really quite depressing to untangle.
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#23In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots…
This is the only correct response to the issue. Stop ripping up the redwoods for your driveways and power lines. Let the mountains be.
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how a private individual would deal with the liability.
Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and they would have lost everything. No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and…
California law enforcement could choose to look the other way, but it's a statistical certainty that if there's money to be made through civil suits, there will be plenty of litigation. How do you get around that?
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#25There's a couple of misleading statements in here. It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. They'd all take a position in a city fire department if they were after more money. The other misleading thing is associating these current fires with bad forest management practices. It's true for Sierra Nevada forests generally, but that's not wher…
The current biggest fires are not in the Sierra Nevada and the ones in the coastal range tend to burn more structures because there are more of them, but there are also many large fires in the Sierra Nevada at the moment. Check out this map[1] from Cal Fire. Almost no media coverage for the Sierra Nevada fires though.
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how a private individual would deal with the liability.
Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and they would have lost everything. No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and…
There’s no civil prosecution. Civil means it’s a private injury which the law can remedy. Anyone who has the standing to sue can sue, and that doesn’t make them a prosecutor.
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#27In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots…
This is the only correct response to the issue. Stop ripping up the redwoods for your driveways and power lines. Let the mountains be.
The problem is not only new construction but what to do, and what policies to have, about all the people and capital tied up in forested communities already. For example Paradise is actually a pretty decent-sized town basically in the forest; it should be obvious just looking at it on the satellite that it’s going to be affected by fires frequently. I doubt it’s politically tenable to have the policy become to just let places like that burn down or even to make them cut down the forests (which to them is the draw of living there). Just look at the Wikipedia page about what Paradise was going to do after the fire: focus on fire resistant construction and wider roads for evacuations. No measures from preventing the same thing from occurring again and again
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and they would have lost everything. No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and…
California law enforcement could choose to look the other way, but it's a statistical certainty that if there's money to be made through civil suits, there will be plenty of litigation. How do you get around that?
The police are important in civil suits too. Arguably their main function in a civilised society is that you can call them when you get in a car accident and they'll write up an official report for the insurance company. If they don't spend their time writing detailed reports on the causes of fires, that at least pushes the balance of power away from the plaintiff.
I don't know if this is realistic. But we have a pretty litigious society these days in Ireland too - behind the US, but ahead of almost everywhere else - and I can't find any evidence of a successful civil suit for starting a wildfire. I did find this which says there are practically no criminal cases:
https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-legislation-4606...
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#29It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own:
Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.
“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke.
Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires
#30What's interesting is when colonists came to North America, they often described forests of trees that felt like great rooms or halls, teaming with wildlife and human-edible plants. But this itself was not a primordial state, but a heavily managed environment, intended to create favorable environment for flora/fauna through slash & burn forest management. Basically, burning out the undergrowth and allowing human sele…
Yes that would be cool. Unfortunately almost all of the old growth forest in the US was cut down and new trees of the size of old will take hundreds of years to grow. Many of the wilderness areas set aside in the 1970 had old growth forests and some are being managed in this way.
The rest of the west forest service land is managed in an inconsistant way that changes somewhat with each administration. I think it would be really cool if somehow the US Public Forests and BLM lands were spit up into three sections. Some land sold off to allow towns and cities in the west to expand, as many people would like to live there and it is very expensive in many places now. Also sell off the land that we want used for timber production. Then some held public and managed for recreation by humans with roads and vehicles, and finally a large expansion of wilderness areas with the idea of connecting large ecosystems and managing them for high biodiversity.