Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not Colorado's land to burn, though. Most of the issue is fuels load on federally-managed land.
This quirk of the west should really be addressed. The feds “own” far too much of the western US.
[deleted]
Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
191–200 of 241 posts
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#192The 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…
It's something even more fundamental than all that.
If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck. That's just an unlucky act of god.
Ultimately it's a trolley problem.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#193The 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…
It's something even more fundamental than all that. If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck…
Doesn't a controlled burn work by removing a swath of combustible material, so that a subsequent fire cannot cross that area? That material can be removed by other means that don't risk fire.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#194The 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…
[dead]
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#195One 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...
All of the Rangers and CalFire people I know never call them "controlled burns". Rather they call then "prescribed burns"... for exactly this reason.
In Australia (or at least, the West of it) we call them "Hazard Reduction Burns".
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead. Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures? Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.
Most reasonable people understand the difference between accident and negligence. How is it we are able to have professional engineers sign on off plans if they know they will be held personally liable for failures? This is very much a solved problem and I don’t think it’s wise to entertain FUD.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#197This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing. We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause uninte…
The medical analogy here is the DNR order. Doctors don't want to create liability by explicitly assisting in a patient's death, even of someone in a vegetative state. So instead, they avoid this liability while still "accomplishing death", by following an order to intentionally avoid explicitly reversing any sudden "act of god" event that would cause the patient to die without active intervention. Or, to put that ano…
I don't know about the US and other countries, but firebreaks are not really there to stop fire. Well, they do have that effect on some intensity fires, but the actual reason is enabling vehicle access.
A fire of any reasonable intensity can easily jump a firebreak with a decent wind. And then there's spot-fires, which are like voodoo, you can be fighting a fire in front of you and have fires suddenly 300m behind you.
All they really do is give you a point to fight a fire.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Controlled burns cost money, no doubt. But just an example, California's fire suppression complex is very well funded. California has a fleet of 747s and other huge aircraft, just for example. My guess is there's no funding where there's no people and where there are people, there's funding but the people's arrangement prevents controlled burns.
I thought CA contracted out most of the aviation and one of the big companies sold their fire fighting 747 and it was converted to a cargo plane.
Cal fire operates some small craft I think.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's something even more fundamental than all that. If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck…
Doesn't a controlled burn work by removing a swath of combustible material, so that a subsequent fire cannot cross that area? That material can be removed by other means that don't risk fire.
Yes that's exactly the idea. And yes those "other means" sometimes exist, but they tend to be much more expensive than controlled burns. The amount of person-power and time needed to remove that material manually would be cost-prohibitive.
And that's assuming other methods even exist. Much of the fuel that needs to be removed is in places where there are no roads, so the only way to remove that fuel would be hundreds or thousands of individual helicopter trips. No government is going to pay for that.
EDIT: Methods like tree thinning are manual methods and they are done routinely and they help. But they cannot take the place of controlled burns for removing large amounts of fuel and creating big fire breaks.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS
You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP:
> We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.