Posted on 06/27/2012 2:48:16 AM PDT by Hojczyk
Yesterday was the most horrific day since the Waldo Canyon Fire outbreak forced thousands of us out of our homes. My family is on Day 5. As I first told you over the weekend, our neighborhood is and remains on mandatory evacuation. Thanks to a compassionate CSPD officer, we were finally able to get the kids’ parakeets out of the house (it’s standing for now).
Unfortunately, one of the birds died of smoke inhalation Tuesday afternoon. The kids are crushed. But we are thankful to be alive and grateful for the extraordinary efforts of first responders, police, fire, military, non-profits, individual volunteers, private philanthropists, and corporate/civic support. There are now some 32,000 other evacuees throughout Colorado Springs.
The uplifting news: So, so many have stepped up to the plate to help. The lead story right now isn’t about what government is doing. It’s about what individuals, churches, companies, and community groups/organizations — the countless, voluntary associations and “little platoons” of civil society that Edmund Burke praised — are doing.
(Excerpt) Read more at michellemalkin.com ...
A little ddt thirty years ago would have stopped this??
Tree-killing bark beetles decimated 550,000 acres of forests in Colorado and Wyoming last year, bringing the total area ravaged by the insects in both states to 4 million acres since 1996, the U.S. Forest Service said on Sunday.
“The significance is that the trajectory is moving north and east into more visible and populated areas,” Janelle Smith, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, told Reuters.
Federal and state foresters just released their annual aerial survey of impacted lands across the two Rocky Mountain states. The main culprit is the mountain pine beetle responsible for infesting 400,000 acres in Colorado and southern Wyoming.
The burrowing insects are moving into ponderosa pine forests from lodgepole pine stands along the Continental Divide, Smith said.
The spruce beetle, more active in southern Colorado, attacked an additional 150,000 acres in 2010, the report noted.
The 4-million-acre combined tally accounts for less than a quarter of the estimated 17.5 million acres of trees attacked by bark beetles across the interior American West as a whole, including Idaho, Montana, Utah and New Mexico, since the 1990s, the Forest Service said.
Not sure if DDT works on beetles. I think it’s more an anti-mosquito compound. The big issue is logging restrictions. All these dead trees are left standing and eventually burn.
Potentially explosive situation developing.
My respect for firefighters goes up as my respect for human sense goes down.
Obama closed down most of the airplanes that used to be used to fight these fires.
Is Cave of the Winds still open?
Didn’t know Malkin had a home in Colo. Spgs.
Should be starting to get light there, to reveal the destruction overnight.
If these fires were caused by natural forces then it is as it should be. We just happen to be in harms way.
I’ve noticed that the campaigner-in-chief is nowhere to be seen - offering no federal assistance etc.
No celebrities, no contributions, no interest.
I think he is in Miami today.
No fire there.
Just campaign funds.
Of course we paid for the flight.
Dead & threatened stands of trees could have been harvested, but the gov’t said no, wasting billions of tons of lumber/pulp & leaving a massive fire hazard. Next will come flooding & landslides.
Logging this timber would have provided jobs. Federal timber receipts would have helped with the deficit. The surplus lumber would have been gobbled up by China & others in a building boom, helping our trade balance. And, much of the pollution & human tragedy would never have happened.
Conservationists & environmentalists should both be outraged.
Either you permit logging (which clears away deadwood and keeps the forest healthy) or you get fires (which is the other way that deadwood gets cleared away).
Personally, I prefer logging.
In British Columbia and Alberta the have been very aggressively harvesting this timber for 10 years. They also had devastating fires like this a few years back near Kelowna , BC. British Columbia has harvested most of this dead timber now. The remaining timber has little sawmill value and will most likely end of being chipped for pulp & paper. The BC and Alberta govts. forced the sawmills to take this dead timber to get any green timber too. They basically gave them the dead timber for free just to get it harvested.
In the US , environmental groups ALWAYS file injunctions to slow up timber sales on any state or federal lands. The idea being that this dead timber has a limited shelf life. The longer the sale can be delayed , the less value it has to the sawmills. One of the biggest problems in CO & NM is that there are only 1-2 major commercial sawmills left in this part of the country. Sierra Pacific had even proposed to build a sawmill in this area specifically to process this timber. However, it has been delayed because they were concerned the timber would be tied up in lawsuits.
We are now seeing the result of the delaying tactics of the environmental groups. They got exactly what they wanted. They would rather see it all burn , than be harvested. If your house gets burned too, tough sh*t. You should have not encroached on the wilderness.
The lumber broker.
Note that we are not hearing a peep from the enviros about all the tons of CO2, smoke, & ash entering the atmosphere from the fires. A 2x4 board, OTOH, retains its carbon for potentially hundreds of years. Duh! Enviros are as dumb as rotten wood.
IIRC, burned trees are of less value than live ones for lumber products and that might be the major sticking point.
No one is going to put out the money necessary to even come close to solving this issue.
I’ve been to Colorado/NM several times over the last few years, am aware of the problem and how widespread it is. A lot of the wood is inaccessible.
Here’s an interesting article about uses fort he dead wood:
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_5500493
Some neighborhoods in the northwest part of the Springs will be unrecognizable, charred by a raging, aggressive and unpredictable fire that has forced more than 32,000 people to vacate their homes. At least 100 homes, likely more, were burned when the Waldo Canyon fire roared into the Mountain Shadows neighborhood last night.
Burnt timber is useless. I meant harvest the trees before a fire starts.
Though some tree are inaccessible, harvesting those that are accessible would have diminished the fire danger before it started.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.