Posted on 11/17/2018 10:28:23 AM PST by bray
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Galatians 5:1
Oregon is used to two to five hundred square mile forest fires with their blast furnace heat, but it has never had one race through a community like the Paradise CA fire. Oregon is the American Outback where there are only four million people living in over a hundred thousand square miles. Most of the state except the western one third is barely populated so forest fires only destroy forests not people and houses.
When the Paradise fire is fully revealed there is likely to be between 500-1000 or more people burned to death and nearly 9,000 homes destroyed. It has made over 35,000 people homeless as it burned an entire town full of people to the ground. The roads leaving the town were clogged as they were one lane windy roads leading out of the community with only a couple leading out.
Many of the people were elderly and either had no knowledge of the fire or if they did were to slow to escape. Some of the more rural areas of the town had no path out and there are going to be hundreds found in their cars incinerated. Emergency responders are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best which can go up to perhaps 2-3,000 killed making this one of the deadliest natural disaster in America and certainly the deadliest fire in modern times.
The entire town of 35,000 has been destroyed in a matter of hours as a small fire fed by strong winds turned it into a deadly fire storm creating fire tornadoes which swept through the forested canyons. These fires are no longer the cleansing fires you would find in the pre-spotted owl fires, these are fourteen hundred degree blast furnaces that melt metal and houses explode from the heat. These fires are hot enough to melt lead as they travel at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour leapfrogging in front of itself looking for more abundant fuel these forests are filled with.
This town is devastated both physically and mentally. There is no place for them to live as tens of thousands who were living in their houses two weeks ago are now living in tents as the winter closes in around them. There is nowhere for them to live as the apartments have been taken in the surrounding hundred miles so people are camping out in any yard or garage they can find to take shelter. Unlike a hurricane, there is nothing to go back to, it is all burned.
This would have never happened thirty years ago when the forests were properly managed and cared for. Now the forests are churches to worship in and not to manage. The dirt worshipers have taken over the forests and now they are dead and dying as a result leaving nothing more than a devastating fire waiting to happen. The deer, elk and wildlife are all dead now thanks to the Sierra Club and their partner groups who have made the forests off limits to real forestry management.
Prior to 1965 and the Endangered Species Act which was passed to destroy the lumber industry and did, the forests were producing bountiful amounts of lumber and was the healthiest they ever had been. The forests were rotated and healthy as the new growth was thinned and trimmed to make for the healthiest trees possible while the wildlife thrived. The waters and soils were clean as the trees held the water and filtered it with a sustainable yield as the main goal of the forest service. Fire damage has grown every year since the Act was passed.
Forest fires were maintained as there were fire breaks as well as tree spacing so if a fire did go through it could be stopped or slowed while the trees were spaced to not give the fires a chance to slow and be fought. The undergrowth and down trees were removed to prevent what we have now which is downed logs creating fuel for the fire making a monstrous campfire. The forest service now has an oil field spilling on the ground waiting for a match.
When they took the forest industry out of the forests they eliminated the only entity with the power to properly manage such a large area. There is no way to thin and manage millions of square miles without the heavy machinery to remove dead and dying trees to keep the healthy ones growing. Now you cannot walk through the forest do to dense growth and fallen trees lying everywhere, becoming fuel for the next fire. At this rate the forests will be gone in twenty years.
The answer to this problem is to get rid of the Endangered Species Act which is nothing more than a political tool to promote a Marxist country and sell the land. There is no reason for the Federal Gummit to own over fifty percent of the West. This is just another example like the VA, Medicare, Obamacare and every other DC central planned boondoggle only worse. The gummit is the problem and private ownership is the solution.
If people could come in and take care of their corner of the forest the way it should be managed the forests would be healthier than ever within ten years. Selling large tracks to the forest industry would not only clean up these forests of the dead trees on the ground and begin rotating forests it would bring badly needed revenues to the schools and roads in the rural areas. These forests could provide building products for not only America but worldwide as these are the best construction woods in the world. The forests are an oil field which is not allowed to be drilled due to the worship of the forests. Not only is it an oil field it is an oil reserve that refills every twenty to thirty years. During the heaviest harvesting prior to the Spotted Owl fraud Oregon was on a 500 year sustainability cycle and now we have better forest science than we did then.
If America had proper forest management these fires would never happen. The fires would be the lower heat variety, which are not devastating and easier to extinguish. There would be fire blocks around cities and towns and would be fuel management inside those communities. Now the REOs require more trees not less and it takes an act of Congress to remove one thanks to the tree huggers which complicated the Paradise fire.
If the Fed was serious about the Western fires they would be turning these forests over to the states to be sold or given to people to manage them properly. The ownership would lend itself to immediate improvement and the forests would be on the path to better health. The states would begin receiving revenues on land they are forced to spend resources on with no return. This would turn the revenue streams from outgoing to incoming and giving hundreds of thousands of people jobs and lifestyles they only dreamed of.
America has to choose if they want to continue to worship the forests or do they want to manage them. Do they want to be good stewards of God’s creation or are they going to continue to worship it. America is now worshiping the forests since it is part of Mother Earth and people and wildlife are dying from their worship. Which is it America walking deeper into the darkness or turn back to the Light?
Pray for America
enough brayin
www.ForestsforOregon.net
Furthermore CalFire was putting out fires early in the dry season instead of setting fires in areas with dangerous buildup. They learned nothing from the Napa Valley tragedy. They also banned private burning in Butte county in early June while it was still safe to do so.
The blood is on their hands, mainly CARB and the county AQ board. They decided that a little smoke for a few weeks was too high a price to pay for the needed removal of brush, much of which grew in the 2015-2016 rainy season. Instead they burned scores of people alive. I think the current estimate of over 1000 missing is an overestimate. I am hoping anyway.
Go to that website and you will see a forester say those prescribed burns are the worst thing you can do.
The treehuggers wanted their forests that way, they got them. Tough noogies.
I think you (and Trump) hit the nail on the head. Bad forest management and government regs at the behest of groups like the Sierra Club are the problem and not the solution. Couple that with bad state Governors and it’s a recipe for this type of disaster. More will come if these things are not corrected. California in particular is a cesspool of leftist management. They rarely do anything right and when they do; it’s usually by accident.
I also agree the private sector would do a much better job because they would have skin in the game. Government only knows how to spend money. It has no clue on how to generate incoming revenue.
The mid east is strewn with the ruins of erthquake destroyed cities
Paradise is no different. It should be bulldozed and forgotten, a casualty of being in California
Remember that controlled fire also means letting natural fires burn when it is safe instead of putting out fires until it is unsafe. Note that the regulations, which apply to federal lands, also apply to natural starts, not just prescribed burns. The federal government has figured out, more or less, that low intensity fire is a big benefit to forests, including to spotted owls and all the rest of the wildlife.
California believes that clean air is more important than healthy forests, wildlife, and rural residents. Their regulations against burning when it is safe means more high intensity fire when it is unsafe.
I agree with the foresters that forestry and private ownership is the best solution by far. But until we have that, we need to let low intensity fire do its job.
http://www.pushback.com/Wattenburg/articles/NowTheyHaveBurnedLosAlamos.html
For me this is the definitive writing on managing forest fires. Dr. Wattenberg had let night radio show from the bay area. He worked at Lawrence Livermore Lans and was called the smartest man you can talk to for free (on the radio).
The state of Cal ignored him on gasoline additives and clearing underbrush from forests, He died 3 months ago, but his work is on the internet.
Agree with your essay except for giving the National Forest to the States to manage.
Kooky environmentalists in Oregon and California legislatures will be worse at managing than the Feds. Sell or lease them to private logging industries to manage.
Our state, Oregon, and Kate Brown cannot be trusted with our precious forrests.
There is a Constitutional Act called the Enabling Act which requires the state to sell it to the people. It is how every state was sold prior to the Civil War.
The only way DiFi would vote to privatized these badly mismanaged Federal lands is if the sales could be limited to only the Chinese companies her husband gets his money from.
There are three things that are never satisfied,
four that never say, ‘Enough!’:
the grave, the barren womb,
land, which is never satisfied with water,
and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’
Proverbs 30
The best one is gone. He explained how they had a sanctuary forest set with the latest burn methods and the fire went right through it and stopped in his managed forest.
ping
There’s not much you can do when it doesn’t rain at all for eight months
I always joke here in CA that you can go anywhere on the east coast with a blowtorch and nothing will happen
It’s so dense and green you can’t even walk through it
Fire is simply a part of life in the west
The trees actually love fire
It rained like crazy a year ago.
Would be interesting to know how many trees survived in the burned forest. Forests that are burned often enough have fireproof trees for the most part.
Here in Virginia I only have five acres and I have to do mechanical clearing. I have to take out underbrush by hand (or hire someone with various machines), then pile it up and burn it. Or I have chipped it, all of it, even large cedar, with a giant rented chipper.
Any thinking person can easily understand and respect the vast difference between the “natural fires” of a hundred years ago and the all-consuming forest fires of today. When our forests were in fire equilibrium, frequent forest-cleansing ground fires (usually caused by lightening) reduced the combustible fuel load on the forest floor. Native Americans often torched brushy areas that Nature did not clean up in time. These natural fires periodically burned the brush, debris, and excessive numbers of small trees. This was mother nature’s way of cleaning house—without burning down the house. Anyone who walks through an old-growth forest can see the burn marks on the lower trunks of many big trees as evidence that the natural fires of long ago seldom reached the lower limbs of big trees which would cause them to ignite and in turn create a fire storm that incinerates everything else in the forest. Unfortunately, a fire storm is what usually happens today in forest fires during summertime.
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