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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

#91

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

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.

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

#92

Post by ROTMetro »

lazide wrote: post #57
anonporridge wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this does hit something. There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a decade while California can't even roll out a single line in the same time. China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly useful for getting things done, but the big problem of succession makes tha…

1) it’s all good until you’re one of the ‘little people’ 2) succession/plan B is always the problem with dictators/dictatorships. If you’re lucky, the interests of those in power are genuinely aligned with your best interests and they’re competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but nothing lasts forever.

Don't forget in China these little people have way higher attachment to their homes. They are often ancestral homes. The people that would be happy to be 'forced to move' have already moved to the city in most cases, with only those with high connections to their home remaining. In the USA we don't really have the same sort of attachment to ancestral homes and would be more receptive to paid relocation and view it way differently. Those that celebrate China's way and say the relocated people are happy to be moved from their ancestral homes and communities to concrete block apartments don't understand Chinese culture and provide cover to how soul crushing relocation is for those impacted.

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

#93

Post by jonnycomputer »

exabrial wrote: post #24

They also destroy invasive species: plants, animals, bugs. Native species evolved long ago to deal with fire. Research has also shown its net carbon negative.

Why wouldn't non-native species also be adapted for fire?

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

#94

Post by Filligree »

ROTMetro wrote: post #84
riskable wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good idea but it doesn't address the pollution problem. If a prescribed burn will increase pollution beyond the EPA's acceptable limits then the burn will be against the law. We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susc…

Being the devil's advocate, when my mother was dying of cancer there were forest fires here. She had to leave the area and stay at a hotel far away at great cost/physical discomfort (at that point she had a hospital bed at home). There are people who physically can't handle the higher particulate amount, what do you propose we do with them? Let them suffer/die?

But the burn will happen anyway. It'll just happen at a different time, when it hasn't been prepared for, with less control and more particulates as well as destruction of communities.

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

#95

Post by paulorlando »

The US Forest Service was started in 1905 in part to reduce forest fires. The result of that policy was forests with a much higher tree density than naturally occurred otherwise.

Other changes include that around 1900 settlers of the western US introduced livestock that ate grass, which in turn removed potential fuel for smaller fires, and enabled smaller trees to grow.

After a hundred years of fire prevention, you end up with very different forest density. As the fire manager of Santa Fe National Forest noted: “On this forest, it’s averaging about 900 trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40.” The result is a much bigger fire risk than previously. https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/

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

#96

Post by toast0 »

dllthomas wrote: post #77
derefr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out? Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every possible burn site all the time.

Under the prepare the firebreaks ahead of time doctrine, you'd still be on the hook for mustering resources in response to an unscheduled fire as is the case today, but if the firebreaks are already in place and appropriate for the conditions at the time, the response would be watch and wait, and if all goes well, let it burn out without much additional effort.

If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat?

(Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)

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

#97

Post by anonymouskimmer »

goatlover wrote: post #69
ummonk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't been through phase 2 trials wasn't.

Was preventing the spread of covid throughout the population possible once China failed to contain the virus? Can you name one country that managed to do that? Even China eventually gave up.

Yes, it was possible, but like all collective action problems it involves people organizing for the general good at a cost to themselves.

Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.

But it's not going to happen because a significant fraction of the population: 1) don't care (either from the get go or after a period of time), 2) think spreading the disease is a positive ('builds immunity'), or 3) make 'statistical decisions' that fail at points.

Edit to add: I hope the downvotes are because I forgot to add the "for two months" to paragraph two. This could all have been over and done with between April and June of 2020 (or maybe a few months later to give time to ramp up mask production). Oh well, at least big Pharma made big bucks.

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

#98

Post by slaw »

gotoeleven wrote: post #42
ummonk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't been through phase 2 trials wasn't.

[flagged]

Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

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

#99

Post by undersuit »

goda90 wrote: post #32
porkbeer wrote: post #2

Many plants also need fires to repopulate. Its a huge issue.

Or they need fire to kill off trees that shade them out.

Ahh but replacing old growth forest with burnt out scrub land is not what we necessarily want. Old trees dying and falling naturally creates openings in the canopy to permit new growth without resetting the forest to a grassland like a forest fire would do.

A prescribed burn should burn out annual plant growth and leaf litter not perennial plant trunks.

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

#100

Post by wswope »

ncallaway wrote: post #47
anonporridge wrote: post #17

This 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…

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 the state’s history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.

“Only” a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if the federal government were to burn down your home, livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility and fail to have any modicum of transparency or accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there’s been little trace of accountability when it comes to the policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of miles away and suffering none of the impact.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-wildfire-prescribed-...

https://www.fs.usda.gov/news/releases/statement-chief-randy-...

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