We Know How to Prevent Megafires • Hacker News Board

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#51

Post by dqv » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #45

Why is harvesting the trees not an option? Is the wood of such a low quality that you can't use it at all? Are the areas not reachable? I understand burning it might be faster, but it has the obvious problems that are apparently stopping them from doing it today. But why not just allow trees to be harvested?

I didn't really get a perfect answer except that if the logging operation is done incorrectly it makes the fires worse. The environmentalist view is that the trees should be burnt but not removed to return the nutrients to the ecosystem. Basically the experts are saying logging won't get us out of this.

See https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-o...

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#52

Post by umvi » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #46

umvi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I lived in the suburbs of Naples people would burn their trash in big piles whenever the garbage collectors went on strike and "nobody" was liable, even though sometimes the fire would spread and burn/damage stuff on the neighbor's property. Then again, Europeans don't have the same litigious culture/attitude that Americans have.

At least Italians don't, but you get a lot of problems stemming from the "whatever, just burn it, not my problem, I just want my garbage gone"-culture. You'd get into serious trouble doing the same further north in Germany, Denmark or Sweden.

Indeed, and I admit, even within Italy this is likely uniquely a Naples problem.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#53

Post by brudgers » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

murgindrag wrote: post #44

jefftk wrote: post #29

It'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 ar…

One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped. Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know. I'd like to have a retrospective. How much da…

CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute fire response times throughout.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#54

Post by vosper » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

murgindrag wrote: post #44

jefftk wrote: post #29

It'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 ar…

One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped. Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know. I'd like to have a retrospective. How much da…

I guess if these kind of fires are “the new normal” for California [0] (and also probably Australia) we should expect that to carry over to how it is covered in the media, too. Reporting will become increasingly localised to the areas affected

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-wildfire-evacu...

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#55

Post by nijaru » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

murgindrag wrote: post #44

jefftk wrote: post #29

It'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 ar…

One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped. Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know. I'd like to have a retrospective. How much da…

It might not be in the headlines on major news, but there are updates from local cal fire every day. I’ve been following cal fire scu posts on twitter. Currently 375k acres and 40% contained as of yesterday. People living in the evacuation order areas are starting to be allowed to return home. Not a lot of structural damage out here as it’s mostly wilderness, but the other fire up north in the Sonoma area has burned through multiple buildings and homes afaik. I don’t have much information on that one though since I’ve been so focused on the one close to home for me.

Edit: https://twitter.com/calfireSCU

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#56

Post by Gibbon1 » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #33

opportune wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

The only way a town like Paradise can exist is with a lot of state subsidies. The state should just flatly refuse to maintain SR-191.

I read a long article on Paradise. The town was developed by a group of libertarian developers who took a lot of pride in working around California's regulations on subdivisions. California has rule that kicks in when a property is subdivided more than four times. They worked around that by subdividing the property 4 times, wait then do it again 4 times. Ended up with houses on lots that are too large for the owners to maintain. They don't have fire hydrants. And often there is only one exit.

Paradise also is a bad location that is subject to dangerous wind conditions.

One thing I noticed when looking at zoning regulations in Nevada county is they don't allow for subdivisions that are defensible. Defensible means clusters of houses on small lots. With fire hydrants. But you can't build that anymore.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#57

Post by stickfigure » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #15

There'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…

One other thing I've recently learned is that outside of cities, fire departments are mostly volunteer. Here in the Vacaville Fire Protection District (most of northwest Solano county, which burned heavily in the LNU complex) the department is 90% volunteers. And that's fairly typical.

(I recently applied)

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#58

Post by jeffbee » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

Gibbon1 wrote: post #56

jeffbee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way a town like Paradise can exist is with a lot of state subsidies. The state should just flatly refuse to maintain SR-191.

I read a long article on Paradise. The town was developed by a group of libertarian developers who took a lot of pride in working around California's regulations on subdivisions. California has rule that kicks in when a property is subdivided more than four times. They worked around that by subdividing the property 4 times, wait then do it again 4 times. Ended up with houses on lots that are too large for the owners…

There's a hell of a lot of welfare libertarians in rural norcal. See: State of Jefferson.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#59

Post by njarboe » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 8:01 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #36

njarboe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.

You don't need to, as you point out that is the current case, but I think that private ownership would do a better job of extracting economic value from land that we want to put to economic use. Motorized recreational forest and timber production could work well together, but I have not seen that. In some places selective cutting is done, but usually the biggest trees are felled. It would be much better, I think, if parts of the public forest were cut to leave the largest trees to become the beautiful and awe inspiring ones people like to be around. I don't have a deep knowledge of how the forest service does timber sales (and I'm sure it varies depending on local political and economic conditions). It would be interesting to read up on how it works in detail.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#60

Post by a1369209993 » Sun, Aug 30, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

murgindrag wrote: post #44

jefftk wrote: post #29

It'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 ar…

One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped. Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know. I'd like to have a retrospective. How much da…

> Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know.

Well, you know that San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford aren't just gone, because that would be a sensational news headline, and there's no way the rags would pass up the opprotunity the write about it. Otherwise spot on, though.