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Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

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Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#111

Post by foxyv »

fwungy wrote: post #33

Try cutting down trees on your forested property in California. Environmental regulations can make that really tricky. California should have regular wildfires. It's part of the ecosystem. Government regulations that prevent fires have created the tinder box we have now.

I think the most frustrating aspect of California is the capricious interpretation of laws. There isn't a clear way to ensure compliance. Louis Rossmann did a pretty good job demonstrating a similar issue with New York and the LeadsOnline reporting requirements. Often the people responsible for enforcing the laws, don't even know what the laws are and will often err on the side of fining people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok&pp=ygUjbG91aXMgc...

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#112

Post by wcarron »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #91
wcarron wrote: post #80

Here in Flagstaff and NAZ we've been getting hit hard by huge wildfires. The amount of fuel in these forests is mindblowing, and terrain is often a big challenge, too. Luckily, we had a heavy monsoon season last year and a brutal winter. So much water that roads/levees have broken and lakes that are normally dry beds were overflowing. This has abated the normally horrible winds of April/May. This wet and abnormally c…

Interestingly enough, a large water event before doesn't mean a mild fire season. In more northern areas, a lot of snow and water means a lot of grass, and that grass will dry out by August. It's not kindling, but it's the paper.

Yeah, we're all pretty concerned about that. We'll see if we get another heavy monsoon season to dampen the potential for big fires midsummer. Fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, we've got a bunch of events coming up that are going to draw big numbers of off-roaders and 'overlanders' who are, imo, some of the worst and least responsible recreators. Some of us are bracing for fires being started by them.

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#114

Post by spicymapotofu »

m00x wrote: post #55
njarboe wrote: post #13

One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...

Canada recently had a "controlled burn" that was made by an international association. They weren't trained on Canadian forests properly, now it's a huge wildfire.

Which was this? The Banff one [may 4] doesn't seem related to this, and if anything seems to defend the practice by example - 31 hectares burned, 28 of which were planned, and only three horse stables were damaged despite weather changing suddenly and spreading the fire.

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#115

Post by samtho »

wswope wrote: post #100
ncallaway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good diagnosis of some of our issues, but it’s a really hard problem. When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms. I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the individualis…

Totally agreed. I was 100% in the pro-controlled-burn camp until I happened to stumble upon the consequences of rubber hitting the road. A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they did controlled burns out where we were… and boy did I immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in t…

This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS. If anything this should highlight the importance of doing controlled burns so that there is minimal chance of these raging infernos cropping up. Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead.

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#116

Post by photochemsyn »

Sounds like this is the issue:

> "Also included in the prescription are optimal weather conditions, including a minimum temperature for burns in grass and brush of 30 degrees and a maximum of 80 degrees; relative humidity between 5% and 40%; and wind speed between 2 mph and 15 mph. Such conditions are becoming rarer."

If you broaden the acceptable range of conditions, you risk more prescribed burns going out of control, and you generate more air quality issues - and Colorado, like the California Central Valley, has some pretty bad air quality already:

https://www.cpr.org/2022/04/12/front-range-air-quality-ozone...

Note that prescribed fires aren't the only way of removing excess vegetation, there's mechanized mowing and goat herds for example.

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#117

Post by seadan83 »

anoncow wrote: post #34
motohagiography wrote: post #18

This 'controlled burn' issue is a general principle in risk management as well, where you respond to minor issues so as to not let them pile up into a tinderbox inferno. Risk aversion isn't prudent, ethical, or professional either. It's a source of false conflict whose purpose is to centralize the objector so that they can direct and manage a proposed change. This is from someone who has been working in security for…

I think the equivalent analogy here is to prevent a big issue from occurring, management creates small issues that it can control. Or do I have it wrong? If you handle small issues, it’s similar to handling small fires and not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion of the forest.

The analogy might not fully hold. The risk is that the controlled burn gets out of control. IIRC there was a case last year in Nevada where a controlled burn turned into an extremely large fire. A better analogy might be safety drills at Nuclear power plants. Done well, it helps ensure safety protocols are in place that can mitigate a big disaster, done badly, and you have Chernobyl.

> not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion of the forest

Funny enough, small fires are very healthy for many forests and even _necessary_ for some. For example, Some trees do not drop seeds until there are fires. EG: "Giant sequoias are the largest trees on Earth. They can grow for more than 3,000 years. But without fire, they cannot reproduce." [1]

Further, the clearing of underbrush can be good for animals as they can move around more easily, hunt, gather, etc.. [2] Though, what is really not good for them are the mega-fires that burn so hot that it burns trees & everything 100% up to the top of the tree (killing it) and also several feet underground.

So, perhaps another analogy is that every year is like adding gunpowder into the forests. Setting this alight every now and then is good, but let it build up too long and it becomes a bomb. Areas that have burned in the PNW tend to look really healthy 1 to 3 years later. On the other hand, areas that have "over" burned in California with mega fires are drastically impacted, as if a nuclear bomb had went off and killed everything.

At the end of the day, prescribed burns is an amazing tool to create a defensive patch work of lower-combustion areas that help prevent fires from becoming mega-fires that are super-impactful to everyone and everything.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-gro... [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/explainer-how-wildfires...

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#118

Post by hutzlibu »

anoncow wrote: post #56
thanatos519 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The small issues are minor outages causing customer inconvenience and/or lost revenue. The big issues are major pwnage and loss of everything because you were afraid of causing small issues while fixing things.

That makes a lot of sense. By allowing the teams to fix things quickly and break things, management creates an environment where people can continuously learn how to handle fires and this makes them ready to handle bigger fires and also prevent bigger fires.

There is some middle ground though.

I don't want my {critical infrastructure} to "fix things quickly and break things" at a critical moment, where I would have really needed that system.

Those things can be scheduled and announced, so I can plan ahead and expect outages at that time.

Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible

#120

Post by h2odragon »

stcroixx wrote: post #12

The only federal regulation I saw referenced in the article were clean air regulations. Otherwise, it appears states and their residents are imposing additional barriers. And public opinion is a local issue of course as well. I don't know if it's really possible to change public ignorance, particularly if the strong opinions are political, so this might be a case where it makes sense for the federal government to ste…

Most of the land West of the Mississippi is Federally owned. You wanna do fire abatement on BLM land, you got a long hard fight ahead of you, before you ever get to a written regulation you can cite. Much less laws voted on by Congress.
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