Thanks for the informative calculations of the value of the wood. There is good money in properly managed forest. If that’s what you’re talking about I’m in complete agreement.
But I’m more concerned with the cost of whatever projects were proposed to soak the forests to prevent fires. It’s not clear to me what is being proposed or where the water would come from.
Soaking sounds like a silly idea. Fires get bad when they crown, and once that happens, a moderate wind will propel the flames with relative ease. The idea that you could soak the forest enough to protect the crowns seems absurd, and the water would rapidly steam off as the fire travels. And some of the Western forests I have been in, you simply do not want the understory to be wet all the time, even if you could prevent it from percolating. The better plan is to just maintain very large amounts of forest, in the expectation that some of it will burn now and then, and then recover. Going up against Nature with a half-baked plan will not play well for anyone but Nature.
I agree with this. Soaking is not going to work out. The time of year this would be most effective is exactly the same time as there is nearly no surface water around. If we are talking about irrigating the mountains I am sure the farmers would like to have a word.
Also, wouldn’t constantly keeping the forest moist exacerbate the problem? Plants would grow more robustly and they already do, creating even more fuel if you could not keep the cycle going.
Sorry, I think my brain rejected the pretreating idea so fast it didn’t register.
I was more commenting on how with a few law/regulation changes we could accomplish a lot without costing a lot of money. The problem is that it would still take 20 years even if we could all agree and start tomorrow.
What if, instead of waiting for the fires to happen on their own, we set controlled burns during the least fire-prone time of year? That way, even if they did get out of control, they still wouldn’t be as bad as an uncontrolled burn at the height of dry season.
Of course, it wouldn’t happen, because unlike an accidental fire, the lawyers would have someone to point at if anything did go wrong, and nobody wants the potential liability. So everyone agrees to the greater danger, as long as they won’t get blamed for it.
Long term, one effect of droughts is to mitigate fire problems by reducing the total amount of biomass added as fuel.
My great-great-great-great aunt and her family most likely died in the 3rd(? you can’t sort on body count and not all have deaths listed) of those. It wasn’t as huge in area as some though, it just happened to blow through a town. And by “just happened to” I mean that it was a lumber town and a contributing factor was the practice of leaving all bark and branches behind which meant clear cut areas in the region would burn like tinder.
And I write most likely because records aren’t exactly perfect after a fire burns up all records and a significant portion of the inhabitants of a region.
Southern California Edison also does this. It’s called a Public Safety Power Shutoff. So far, it’s been little more than tornado repellent in that it’s nearly impossible to say whether or not it’s actually prevented any fires. The bad part with a PSPS is that they can remotely cut power immediately but they have to visually inspect every line before re-energizing them to be sure no lines have been damaged, a process that can take days.
Maybe, Xema, but that’s for a long term measured in centuries. Trees will stand for a very long time.
Nope.
The important part is to correctly manage your forests, so they do not become deathtraps.
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Forest fires are a natural part of life. Raging wildfires devastating hundreds of thousands of acres are not.
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The difference is correct forest management.
Sheer nonsense. There is no way to “properly manage” the entirety of the forested area in the West. One could, at best, nibble at the edges. Much of what makes these fires so difficult to control is that they are occurring in territory that is nearly impossible to gain access to. That’s especially true of the mountains near the coast of California.
Ignoring the effect of global warming in the increase in frequency and severity of wildfires is simply another example of ostrich behavior.
It isn’t just forests. There is a lot of grassland, and it catches fire.
Most of these fires don’t start in forests, either. The ones nearest to me last year, around Napa, wasn’t burning mismanaged forests. It burned bushes, grass, houses, hotels, stores, a hospital- everything flammable in its path.
The conditions, as posted above, are-
long droughts
warm temperatures
fast, dry winds (called Santa Ana winds in SoCal)
any spark
My personal opinion is that forest management (logging, thinning, and burning) does not count as “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” and should be exempt from the NEPA process. But that ship has sailed. So now we either change the law or come up with some type of categorical exclusion that most people can agree on.
Wouldn’t letting it burn periodically due to natural causes be a great start? It will take a little time until the excess fuel is burned off, but it will happen. The other big management tactic would be to no allow houses to be built in areas that burn with regular and predictable frequency.
Also, to enforce strict building codes that enforce best practices for building a fire-resistant house. I know there is no way to make a home fire-proof, but in seeing some of the photos and video coming out of the fire up by Chico, the trees are still green around leveled properties. There is one where someone’s shed was all that was left. This was a fast-moving, wind-blown fire - some structures were able to withstand the event a lot better than others. We need to learn from that and when rebuilding occurs - make the structures better. Like what they do in hurricane country. It’s not likely we can prevent the next fire storm, but maybe we can build in this areas smarter.
The Woolsey fire, which burned through the Santa Monica Mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean, started just a couple miles south of where I live@. The land that burned is not forest land – State or National or even local. It’s chaparral – scrub land, if you will – mostly rock and grasses, bushes, a few trees here and there#. In fact, the focus of the news articles when it started was the fact that the Santa Susana Reactor Meltdown occurred on that land; it’s been vacant and people have been haggling over clean-up issues for decades. This is not land with underbrush to manage; this is not land with ancient old growth trees that rely on fire to disperse seeds. Every community in the region is subject to municipal ordinances that require a minimum 50 yards of brush-free perimeter. Those ordinances impose fines for those who fail to comply; in theory, the cities will hire a business to clean up that perimeter and charge the non-compliant resident for the job – then fine the resident for failing to comply, as well. In practice, homeowners, landlords, and property management companies around here are generally rich enough to be able to afford to personally comply, hire a company to clear the brush, or have their regular gardener/landscaper do the work as part of their normal routine. (You have to understand, this is the land where the Mexican gardeners make good enough money to hire Korean gardeners to clean up their yards!)*
The factors, as several have noted, are increasingly long droughts, increasingly high temperatures, increasingly strong Santa Ana* winds, and sometimes a human ignitor. It’s important to realize, though, that some of these fires have ignited simply because the hot dry wind was blowing across thin dry grass on a super-hot day.
President Rump blaming the severity of these fires on poor forest management, as he did earlier this week and several weeks ago, is merely a repeat of the crap that Dispensationalist James G. Watt did under the Reagan administration; scrabbling for a weak rationale for selling off Federal forest land to the timber/lumber industry. Yes, properly$ controlled burns and removal of debris and undergrowth are excellent forest and wildfire management techniques but, as was argued, ignored, (and proven true?) in the 1980’s, the lumber industries aren’t selectively going in and clearing out fallen trees; that kind of selectivity is too costly, too slow, and doesn’t yield enough useful unblemished profitable wood.^ Instead, they’re clear-cutting swaths of forest from the edges inward, leaving formerly-shaded areas exposed to the sun so that more and more of the earth’s surface heats. This isn’t a carbon-dioxide build-up issue, but it’s still a% human-instigated cause of increasing temperatures around the globe.
And **Telemark **has part of the answer: Rich people want to get away from us 80%ers and they move to neighborhoods that are intentionally designed and build to meander through vast tracts of empty land (or as in Scripps Ranch, groves of man-planted Eucalyptus trees – the oil is great for deterring bugs and even smells nice, but it’s also excellent and abundant fuel for fires) so they can believe they’re relatively alone and isolated. The problem is that when they do that they’re surrounded by wildfire fuel and, yes, isolated and hard to defend or rescue.
Ultimately, here’s a very detailed answer for all of us:
–G!
@Fortunately for me and my wife, the Santa Ana winds were blowing the fire directly away from our neighborhood. Unfortunately for the rest of our county…well, it’s all over the news
#I don’t have a way to link you to my on-line picture storage because I don’t have one. Instead, imagine the outdoor scenes from the 1970’s Little House on the Prairie or Kung Fu or MASH TV shows. I’m serious; Little House was filmed a couple miles north of where the Woolsey fire started and Kung Fu & MASH were filmed at the Paramount Ranch in the Santa Monica mountains.
There aren’t any places that don’t burn, now. Everything is flammable if it doesn’t rain.
There are almost 40 million people living in California. The next largest state in population is Texas at 28 million. The houses you speak of are already built.
There aren’t any management tactics that will have much of any effect on a problem of this scale. The fires are far, far too large to control. It’s like saying we should be able to manage tornados or tidal waves. Global warming is here, now, today. It isn’t something that will happen maybe in the future to someone else somewhere else.
It’s interesting. Just an observation. If you view the google maps satellite photos of the area near Paradise - I was expecting to see dense forest. If you start at the town of Pulga, where the Camp Fire supposedly started, and work west/southwest - you come to what looks like a swath of treeless terrain until you get to the town of Concow. Working west, there is another swath of treeless terrain, actually looking like it was clearcut at some point (straight cut lines, dirt roads). Then the Feather River canyon, which has a lot of trees, then the town of Paradise. The thing that stands out for me is that the most dense trees appear in the communities of Concow and Paradise, not away from town in the forest. Also, east of Pulga it looks like dense forest and not a lot of recent human activity there.
I don’t know what to take from this, other than maybe there is just no way to mitigate the problem - if a wildfire can get so big so fast moving thru open, lightly forested terrain, and the towns have the most trees in the area. I dunno.
There was a thread around here recently discussing the merits of burying power lines, landing on the expense as the primary detriment - maybe there is more to that.
No, don’t believe it, because it’s not true.
This board is devoted to fighting ignorance, not making it worse.