Posted on 10/03/2020 5:36:37 PM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
Did you actually read the article. I have followed western fires for a few years and this is a well written piece. Good info. So, either you do not or are incapable of comprehending or simply did not read this “clickbait.” Well, it could also be you are a......
I found the article enlightening on how the science behind fighting fires developed and how the bombing of Dresden figures into today’s fire science.
Since I live here in Butte County where Paradise disappeared off the face of the Earth and this summer the community of Berry Creek the same—I have a bit of an insight into local fires around this neck of the woods. I read the whole article and have shared it among our rural community members for their files. Your mileage may vary...
I agree- It had very little to do with Climate Change—nor environmentalism. Fires are fought immediately because thats the way its been done since 1905...The solution is simple, but very difficult to implement...As it is, we have not seen the sun since August 17th....
You and humblegunner deserve to be in spa together.
Pulling each others back hairs out with tweezers.
Exactly. Are you reading this Mr. Climate Change Gov. Newsome?
The Orcs are in he government here
We had a rental house in Paradise and sold it a couple of years before the fire. Brother-in-law had a house there and it is gone.
About a week ago we watched the movie “Rebuilding Paradise” -made by Ron Howard. That had a lot of scary recordings of that fire. The movie is pay per view on Amazon - Hallmark channel.
Gary Burghoff (Radar-”Mash”)was living there.
Siberia has more and bigger forest fires. Every year. Also started by people. #TheWorldIsMyAshtray
“Californians voted into office those politicians to create the conditions that led to and exacerbated it.”
People should get the government they vote for. And they should get it good and hard.
L
>>”That could and should have been prevented’’,<<. Yup. You got it. This is what happens when the Left takes control and tells you trees are more important than people.
Where ever and what ever the Left comes in contact with leads to ruin and death.
And I put the FUN in dysfunction.
And of course there’s always the occasional earthquake.
Holy BLEEP.
Compelling article. Extremely informative. It sounds like our future in the west is devastating and there is no changing that fact.
One more reason to move away from California. As if I needed another reason.
That reminds me. I need to clean up my little 14 acre forest. I cleared the perimeter to fence it in and left a lot of branches laying around, plus there's a lot of standing dead wood and existing floor dead wood and many years of leaf litter. It's also a crowded little forest from having been logged of most everything in the 1800s when they were mining iron ore and needed fuel for smelters. Prior to that, they logged oak for railroad ties and building wood.
A young forest has a lot of standing dead wood because it's still self thinning as the trees fight for sun. I have 50 tall thin trees where 10 healthy trees should be and 5-10 of the 50 are standing or recently fallen dead wood.
They should be collecting forest deadwood and using it in large ‘green’ power plants. Dispose of the resulting ash periodically back in same forests as fertilizer. Sure those power plants would have dirty emissions, but they’d be better what the forest fires otherwise would emit. They probably wouldn’t be as efficient or cost effective as as gas, nuclear or even coal, but they’d likely be better and more dependable than wind or sun. Start doing it with state forests. Once the infrastructure is built they could take excessive federal or private forest fuel for a disposal fee. If a portion of the deadwood is economically useful as timber that could be separated and sold as such. What are multiple recycling streams to Californians?
I concur that worthy article excerpts should at least be 300 words (or perhaps less than 10% of the whole), while this one does have much to offer, Such as,
It is hard for us moderns to accept—conditioned, as we are, by Smokey Bear—but fire is every bit as natural and inevitable in the American West as flooding in the Mississippi River Basin and hurricanes in Florida. Fire is not only guaranteed by climate and ecology; it is vital to the health of many ecosystems. The 20th century, in fact, during which large wildfires were far less common in the West than they are today, should properly be seen as the unnatural outlier. Prior to that, and especially before Anglo-American conquest, wildfire burned an estimated 6 million to 13 million acres each year in California, according to one study, far more than even the current record-setting season....
The Forest Service, which currently controls about 20 million acres of California, put a well-meaning end to this kind of land management almost from the founding of the agency in 1905.... The wrongheadedness of this approach became obvious to the agency itself by the 1940s, when its researchers began to catch on to the fact that the longer a forest goes without fire, the more fuel will pile up and the worse the blaze will be....
CalFire’s straightforward mandate, for which it spends upward of $2 billion a year and operates more than 700 fire engines and 75 aircraft, is to extinguish every blaze, fast—a job it does extraordinarily well on about 6,400 wildland fires annually. CalFire chief Brian Estes, who commands firefighting operations for just three of California’s 58 counties, says, “We’re running 400 to 500 fires a year. In the heat of summer, five or six a day—and most you’ll never see. Anytime I have a 911 dispatch to a vegetation fire”—a grass fire, say, on somebody’s lawn—“you’re going to get seven engines, a battalion chief, two bulldozers, two air tankers, an air attack, and two hand crews. They’re going to roll out the barn. But if you do that for a hundred years, and you don’t allow people to do prescribed fire, the fuel just gets more and more dense.”...
The Dresden firestorm famously produced hurricane-force winds powerful enough to uproot giant trees and snap them in half, suck up roof gables and furniture, and send countless humans flying like fallen leaves into the whirling fire tornado. Before it was done, that firestorm wholly incinerated several square miles of city.
Finney also unearthed a stack of obscure research reports, published during the Cold War, that analyzed the Dresden firestorm and a similar one above Hiroshima after the detonation of the atomic bomb (yet again, roughly 30 minutes after)....Yet another of these reports, titled Mass Fire and Fire Behavior and published by the Forest Service in 1964, looked at what might happen if a national forest got hit by a nuclear weapon....
“I realized, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re creating the conditions for mass fires,’” he says. “These fires aren’t just big because of, say, climate change or some accident. They’re big because we have a landscape full of long-burning heavy fuels, just like cities.”...
The collapse of commercial logging, meanwhile, mostly due to environmental regulation, has combined with our collective intolerance for prescribed burns (nobody likes smoky air) to let forests grow unnaturally dense with young trees.
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