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Forest Service officials close all California national forests

latimes.com

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Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#131

Post by nradov »

s5300 wrote: post #94
pokstad wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t belong to a tribe, but I can still appreciate how horribly run California is.

Huh, I could've sworn it was by all meaningful metrics, one of the most productive states in the USA. Are you attempting to say it could be doing even better than it already is and make the bottom half of productive states look even worse than they already are? I guess I could perhaps agree with that.

In terms of productivity, California has the 4th highest GDP per capita. But despite that, there has been a significant net migration out of California to other states because the quality of life has deteriorated so much. People are voting with their feet.

https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-stalled-population-gro...

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#132

Post by carom »

bamboozled wrote: post #65
charles_f wrote: post #49

Sad but probably efficient. I'm in bc where we've been devastated by forest fires, with cities burning and thousands evacuated. And yet, every other time I get out into the forest I see idiots smoking their freaking joints. The soil is half buried in super dry pine needles, but people still want their kick.

Do you think that smokin' a joint is really enough to set off something like this? Because it's clearly a combination of things that are required to create a fire of this magnitude. Sure a joint could "start a fire" but a lot of other things could too. Maybe we just don't like to admit it but climate change is here and it's here for real.

Driving back from camping last weekend I saw some dry median grass on fire, presumably from a flicked cigarette. So yes, a joint could start a fire.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#133

Post by Karunamon »

mistrial9 wrote: post #119
gorwell wrote: post #111

Can anyone explain this? "So early on, Newsom identified some key wildfire prevention projects, and that includes things like forest thinning and prescribed burns, and they were meant to protect some of the most vulnerable communities in California. And he claimed 90,000 acres were treated, but we found that's not true. The state's own data shows that, in reality, it was less than 12,000 acres, so just a fraction of…

"we also found that the state's fire prevention work overall dropped by half last year" that is utterly not true by any stretch of the words .. it is literally political theater hit piece. see for yourselves... https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/04/13/governor-newsom-signs-land... https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/press-publications/ the claim is that a particular State of Calif, Dept of Forestry perhaps, program was supposed to thi…

Care to share what's false specifically? Mere denial is pretty weak as far as discussion goes.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#134

Post by kaycebasques »

Johnny555 wrote: post #7

And they just evacuated the entire town of South Lake Tahoe. I hope the town survives. https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/more-evacuation-order... https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/lake-tahoe-residents-... https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/article/Caldor-F...

My family has a cabin up there. Grandpa bought the land in the 50s and finally built on it in the 70s. Always imagined it would be there. Will be very strange if that's suddenly not true. Of course it's the way of all things but it's different when it's firsthand.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#135

Post by pbuzbee »

SwankyDanky wrote: post #129
pbuzbee wrote: post #117

I saw this map of roughly the last major fire in California: https://projects.capradio.org/california-fire-history/#6/38.... Looks like it's missing after 2019, but what sticks out to me is the difference in scale of past fires and current fires. If you imagine where the Dixie fire or last year's August Complex would fit in, they take up relatively huge amounts of the map. I'm sure at some point in the next 10-20 yea…

Is it really? We got into this mess because we'd initially assumed that wildfires were "bad" and that we needed to stop ALL of them. However, we later found out just how beneficial small fires can be for the long-term health of a forest. If we can actually allocate funds and people towards this, it won't be an issue anymore.

I see it as a concern because (1) a large portion of wild lands are burning within a short span of time. I would guess (no evidence, just a hunch) that burning was more dispersed in time before modern fire prevention. I also feel that (2) climate change makes these fires much worse, and forests will have a much harder time rebounding.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#136

Post by Johnny555 »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #113
dav wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moat won’t work as well as you probably think. A lot of the problem comes from the sky raining down embers on flammable roofs and such...

A moat is not a horrid idea. When Paradise was burning I was thinking if I lived in a fire prone envionment; I would have sprinklers on roof of my home. It would be a simple 1/2" copper pipe feeding a few sprinkler heads on the roof. Maybe a few mercury switches placed around the property, or remotely controlled through the phone line, wifi, or sat phone enabled? Nothing too elaborate. It wouldn't protect everyone. I…

A small residential fire sprinkler head outputs around 15gpm of water. While keeping a roof wet is different than wetting down a room on fire, a roof is big and you need to be sure it stays wet, so let's say you want to keep it wet with 30gpm.

And lets say you have to keep it wet for 24 hours until the fire danger passes. That's around 40,000 gallons of water.

Where are you going to get that water? You can't count on the local utility keeping pumps running. If you're lucky you have a well, but a good residential well would yield around 10gpm, and if you and your neighbors are all pulling out water at the max rate together for hours or days, it may run dry while you wait for water to percolate in.

So you need a huge tank of water - a 50,000 gallon tank is around 35 feet in diameter and 7 feet high. Hope you have a big yard and lots of money, the tank alone will probably cost $30K. So figure around $50K to install the system. I hope you have a big back yard for it.

That bunch of firefighters you want to get rid of help protect many square miles of land, putting that $50K sprinkler system on 10,000 homes would cost $500M - that's a lot of firefighters and equipment.

I think there are better ways to keep your roof from burning, but even a metal roof is no guarantee that your house will survive a large wildfire unless you also keep the land devoid of fuel. And you could still fall victim to a piece of flying ember that happens to land on a vulnerable spot of your house.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#137

Post by yupper32 »

protomyth wrote: post #43
tdhz77 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me until the last part about the grizzlies.

Taking Yellowstone for example For all park visitors combined, the chances of being injured by a grizzly bear are approximately 1 in 2.7 million visits . So very good odds. https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/injuries.htm

Surely being in a very populated area of the park lessens the chance greatly. Which would mean 1 in 2.7 million visits isn't accurate for what they would be doing.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#138

Post by OneEyedRobot »

larkinrichards wrote: post #16

Was planning to hike the JMT starting tomorrow from cottonwood meadow and ending on the 22nd. Permits canceled at 6pm tonight. Anyone got recommendations for a last minute 20 day off grid vacation? Have car, supplies, ready to go.

Lost Coast?

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#139

Post by guyzero »

rch wrote: post #107
Johnny555 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to apply Phos-Chek from ground based units Phos Chek is not great for the environment, especially to aquatic life. So ideally there'd be some solution that doesn't use more of it. agricultural level irrigation at the ready The fires are exacerbated by California's long term drought, if there's large quanties of water laying around, then they probably wouldn't have such a bad fire season. Inhabited locations i…

Why not make it clear that people building structures in fire-prone areas are on their own, and should design appropriately?

I'm not sure there's an appropriate design for something to survive a major forest fire.

Re: Forest Service officials close all California national forests

#140

Post by jjulius »

pokstad wrote: post #93
jjulius wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote is about privately-owned land, not federally-owned land. You and the post you're responding to are both correct; the state is responsible for some areas, and the federal government is responsible for others.

You’re missing something here. Fires can start on private and state land and then spread to national forests. Also, more and more Californians are moving away from the coast into rural suburbs due to cost of living. Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns, more people are camping than ever. Fires aren’t started by climate change, they’re started by humans.

>You’re missing something here.

I'll grant that perhaps I misinterpreted your response as saying, "No". Without additional comment from you in that post (you only replied with a quote), it's hard to know exactly what you're trying to say.

>Fires can start on private and state land and then spread to national forests.

And they can also start on federal land and spread to private/state land. Hence my comment that both federal and state governments are responsible for fire mitigation/prevention.

>Also, more and more Californians are moving away from the coast into rural suburbs due to cost of living.

I am not sure what this has to do with my comment. But, moving inward towards forests may mean that you're residing on state land right next to a federally-owned forest.

>Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns, more people are camping than ever. Fires aren’t started by climate change, they’re started by humans.

Okay? I didn't say anything about climate change or cause of fires. All I said was that both federal and state governments are responsible for their own areas. Each need to be doing a better job; mitigation can be improved across the board to reduce wildfire strength on state and federal lands, cause of fires be damned.

But, for what it's worth, many fires have been triggered by storms during extra dry, hot weather and severe winds caused by climate change.

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