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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

#151

Post by s1artibartfast »

joe_the_user wrote: post #145

The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses…

This is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that fires were suppressed for nearly 200 years and now turn into raging infernos. Fires were suppressed first for economic reasons, and then later for misguided Environmental reasons

Forest fires of a historically typical magnitude would pose much less Danger to communities adjacent to wildlands. This is further complicated by the fact that any of these communities and dwellings were not designed for fire resistance because public policy at the time was no fires ever.

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

#152

Post by bsder »

joe_the_user wrote: post #145

The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses…

This is true, but even where it's not, the biggest issue in doing controlled burns is simply funding.

Controlled burns aren't just "light it up". You may need to create a firebreak. You may need to cull some trees as too many areas have lots of spindly, unhealthy trees that are going to make a controlled burn much harder to control. etc.

All of this costs manpower which translates to money.

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

#153

Post by pvaldes »

oatmeal1 wrote: post #129

If only there were some good samaritans who would toss lit cigarettes out of their cars in the spring...

...then we would have a case of environmental terrorism.

Terrorists like Gary Maynard, Alexandra Souverneva, Viola Liu...

800 wildfires in California in 2022 were arsons.

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

#154

Post by runtime_blues »

joe_the_user wrote: post #145

The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses…

That's how development always happened in much of the US. Cities expanding into forestland or grassland. The problem isn't that the homes are all of sudden luxurious, or that we somehow do less planning than in the 1880s or 1960s. It's that a mix of well-intentioned environmental policies and activism mean there's no fuel reduction happening at all. Controlled burns are one way, but logging is another.

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

#155

Post by cbsmith »

ummonk wrote: post #74
cbsmith wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely accurate. The case for letting covid spread hinges on whether you have the medical infrastructure to manage the pandemic. If you can handle a "more than flu season" chunk of your population needing medical care then there's no real pandemic threat. Unfortunately, many countries in the developed world reduced the size of their medical infrastructure because they could rely on flu vaccines to minimi…

> The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve. You can do challenge trials. Especially if you're going to let the virus spread through the population anyway.

Isn't a challenge trial really just another way of doing a phase 2 trial?

Whether you let it run through the population anyway really doesn't matter though. If you push the untested vaccine out to the population, you might turn a manageable problem into an unmanageable problem.

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

#157

Post by DannyBee »

prvc wrote: post #156

Did not the current wildfires in Alberta, Canada start with an attempted "controlled burn" gone awry?

So? Just because a process sometimes fails does not mean the solution is to change the process, and if you do, it doesn't mean the result will end up better overall.

Expected value and all that.

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

#158

Post by DannyBee »

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...

Yes, and this is (at least today) unsolvable.

It's still got a much higher expected value to do prescribed burns have some of them turn uncontrolled than do nothing, or do what is happening now (pretend we can control for every variable).

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

#159

Post by h2odragon »

kibwen wrote: post #136
h2odragon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Source for obsctruction from the BLM? As far as I can tell, they carry out controlled burns all the time (what they call "prescribed burning"): https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/blm/documents/BLMFi...

Thanks for the update, I was near some of the early lawsuits against the BLM to allow controlled burns back in the 90s; and haven't kept up with it much since then.

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

#160

Post by squidsoup »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #102
anonporridge wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see resistance to nuclear fission. Environmentalists have inadvertently shot civilization in the foot and served the interests of the fossil fuel industry by blocking expansion of carbon free nuclear. In exchange, we've spent the last several decades dumping drastically more carbon in the atmosphere than was necessary.

I'm a little annoyed we're 40 years behind on fusion, because a vocal group spent 40 years crying about fission. Chernobyl was a disaster, that was made possible by the Soviet gov, it was far more a knock on communism than it was nuclear energy. And yet... Here we are with Harvard grads arguing for the former and against the latter.

The Fukushima disaster has the same rating as Chernobyl on the Internation Nuclear Event Scale, and occurred in a highly regulated developed capitalist nation.
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