I’m hoping that this can stay a GQ, despite the thread title.
The impression I have is that there are regions that are basically tinderboxes. Due to inadequate rainfall and high heat, and the types of vegetation present, everything is highly flammable. Continuing heat and high winds have the potential to whip the smallest fire into an uncontrollable conflagration. Indeed, some ecosystems are meant to catch fire every once in a while, to clear out the old brush and make way for new growth . . . which isn’t a problem until humans decide to build houses in the middle of it.
It seems to me that it’s just a matter of time before something sparks it off.
It might be a carelessly discarded cigarette, an improperly extinguished campfire, a spark off a damaged powerline, lightning, or an arsonist. Some of those are controllable by humans, but some aren’t really, so is it worth the effort, and all the ire after the fact, to restrict human activities in hopes of avoiding the inevitable?
The above is not an attempt to put forth a debatable position. I’m just explaining my mostly uneducated impression of the situation.
I guess my GQ is: is it really realistic to think that if everyone is careful about fire, then there won’t be a wildfire? Will the rains eventually end the danger?
I’m hoping that there’s a factual answer. Maybe someone can give examples where dangerously dry conditions persisted for some time, and, since no dodo went out and lit a campfire, there wasn’t a fire.
Of course there will be wildfires no matter what we do or don’t do. If every human on the planet disappeared today there’d still be wildfires from lightning strikes and such. It is part of the natural scheme of things and is often beneficial to the environment. The forest service used to have a policy of letting naturally started wildfires to burn as they saw fit with no intervention from us. However, one fo those wildfires got huge and threatened large portions of Yellowstone National Park awhile back so I don’t know if they still follow that non-intervention policy or not.
Wildfires will eventually burn themselves out although they might lay waste to vast portions of land before they do. Either the weather will help put it out (rain) or the wildfire may run out of things to burn or move to wetter lands that won’t burn so easily or other such things (run into a lake for instance).
For a very long time, the Park Service aggressively put out every fire they could reach, allowing a huge burden of fuel to develop. Then the Park Service went to a ‘let it burn’ strategy (as long as it didn’t threaten lives or property), with predictable results: The overload of fuel produced a spectacular series of fires, which raises an outcry in some circles. The Park Service currently allows fires to burn, as long as they don’t threaten property or life, and as long as they don’t threaten to irretrevably damage the local environment. They also conduct controlled burns to remove excess fuel, at times when fire danger is greatly lessened (such as late fall).
As for the current situation, due to the extremely dry conditions in the mountain states, a fire which ordinarily would’ve been a heathy, cleansing fire can turn into a devestating, sterilizing fire, burning so hot that it actually kills the soil. Rain and snowmelt will then cause massive errosion on the denuded slopes, further damaging the the ability of plants to regrow in the area, and silting-up watersheads, damaging fisheries and resevoirs.
In September, 1938, a major hurricane impacted New England downing untold millions of trees. At the time there was great concern that the northern New England would go up in flames as the tangled masses of deadwood dried out. The Forest Service closed hard hit areas of the forest, increased backcountry patrols and enforcement, erected additional fire towers, and created an emergency plan to put 1600 firefighters on any fire within 24 hours. Although it was relatively dry for the next few years, no major fires occured. This can be attributed to 4 things: 1) aggressive planning on the part of the Forest Service, 2) active timber harvesting in the affected areas, 3) an increased awareness and responsibility among hikers, and 4) a decrease in the number of backcountry trampers as the country prepared for war.
I’m not sure this is true. I watched a thing on the Yellowstone fire and Rangers were worried that this would be the case there as well. Studying the forest at a later time (a year or two later) they were surprised to find how well the ecosystem was recovering.
Apparently soil is a pretty good insulator so the sterilization didn’t extend too deeply into the soil. In addition, the burnt and fallen remains of the forest served to add nutrients back to the soil. Bacteria and other goodies necessary to a healthy forest setup shop again in short order. The end result was that the scientists saw no need for human help in getting the forest to recover as it seemed to be doing quite nicely on its own.
In short, mother nature has its ways and doesn’t need our help. We consider many of these fires to be bad things because they threaten our homes and businesses. As far as the ecosystem goes they aren’t that big of a deal.
Interesting question, especially given the cause of one of the smaller fires now raging in Arizona.
In my neck of the woods, we’ve had fires started this year from hot helicopter engines (the helo was destroyed, BTW) and moose-scaring firecrackers used by wildlife biologists. Last year, it was a prescribed burn by the Forest Service that got out of control.
So who’s responsible? This looks like a good time to lay it on our old pal Satan.
Maybe she was short of rent money that month, and needed some overtime. I read somewhere once that one-fourth of all forest fires were assumed (internally) to be arson: there’s lots of people who make money fighting forest fires.
What they’re saying is “We need money to put forest fires out. After it’s out, we’ll need money to plant new trees, because elsewise we won’t have any forest fires to put out.” …Basically, you can shorten it to “We need money + because + elsewise + we won’t have any.” - DougC
BTW studies of the effects of the 1938 hurricane showed that forests are not significantly harmed by even seemingly catastrophic physical disturbances (eg hurrcanes, massive forest fires). Intense physical disturbance is something the forest has had plenty of evolutionary time to deal with: a hurricane like the 1938 one is figured to ravage the E.coast every 100-200 years. Ditto with forest fires in the west. (that said, much of the central east coast has forest communities which do not ever burn and would be negitively impacted by fire if it should somehow occur, perhaps because of some kind of idiotic planet-wide climate changing carbon emission orgy.) Forest are much more readily destroyed by chemical changes such as pH change from acid rain.
I don’t believe that the forest fires out west are particularly destructive of late. although you can get spectacular fires when species that are not fire-selected move in. some will burn like torches and start incredible crown fires.
Why do we prosecute people for murder? The people they killed were going to die anyway.
This seems like an incredibly simple analogy but I think it works.
No one can stop a lightning strike or just sheer spontaneous combustion due to really dry wood. But people accept that risk when living where they do just as others accept the risk of tornados or hurricanes or earthquakes or mudslides or flooding. The list goes on.
Every single place on earth has some natural phenomenon that can destroy your home. That doesn’t give anyone the right to purposely cause your home’s destruction.
The average firefighter in a city owned fire department starts out at about $24,000 a year. We do have some of our fire fighters from Colorado Springs up there and most of them live a pretty modest life.
If I remember correctly from the 1994 Storm King Mountain fire outside of Glenwood Springs, the smoke jumpers and other forest service employees who fight fires only make about $15,000 per fire season. That may have gone up since then but given the extreme and intense work, even at $30,000 a year, that is peanuts compared to the work at hand.
I don’t think that starting a fire to gain money was her issue, it has been reported that she wanted to look like a hero for putting out a fire.
