Posted on 09/13/2020 11:00:32 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The U.S. Forest Service estimates that dead stands in the Creek fire contain 2,000 tons of fuel per acre.
As of Saturday, the fire had charred more than 196,000 acres, destroyed 365 structures and was threatening 14,000 more in the vicinity of Big Creek, Huntington Lake and Shaver Lake. Firefighters don’t expect to contain it until mid-October.
For those who have studied the potential fire effects of the vast beetle kill, the Creek fire is a harbinger.
One of hundreds of major blazes to erupt in this record-breaking fire season in California, the Creek fire has underscored the urgency of reducing that monster fuel load.
The only way to do that on the broad, landscape level needed, many experts say, is with fire of a different sort.
“All of us on the paper were suggesting that if you are going to try to reduce that mass fire problem in the future, you really need to start putting prescribed fire into these stands to start whittling away at those bigger fuels,” said Forest Service research ecologist Malcolm North...
While thinning — cutting down the dead timber and hauling it away — can play a role, especially around mountain communities, North said a majority of the beetle-killed stands are in wilderness or in areas that are too remote and too steep to be logged.
Moreover, the dead trees have lost most of their commercial value and are of little interest to the remaining sawmills in California.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Let us log!
This is criminal negligence on the part of Governors Brown (former) and Newsom. Any lawyers here who could help me understand how to prosecute them?
The Rats seem to have forgotten God’s first command to the first humans.
Key word - Remaining.
The environmentalists drove most lumber industry out of business. There are no people to do the job now.
There’s a call for lightning this coming week in the west. It’s going to get even worse.
“Some California forests have more than 1,000 trees per acre when 40 to 60 trees per acre would be ideal. These overcrowded forests are filled with dead trees, piles of logs, and thickets of small trees.” This is from a 2018 SF Chronicle article. https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Why-California-burns-its-forests-have-too-13385872.php
This is a result of 40 years of stopping people from cutting down trees. Where I am, it’s even difficult to cut trees on your own property. You’re allowed two a year regardless of how large your property is - and if you want to cut certain types of trees, you need an arborist’s report. I know someone who recently bought a 10-acre parcel that hasn’t been maintained for the past 50 years. He’s cleared out probably close to a hundred truckloads of poison oak, fallen branches, dead shrubs, etc. Just yesterday, with 3 friends with trucks helping, they probably removed 20 truckloads. But cut a tree and neighbors complain. If you have a quarter-acre lot you can cut two trees; if you have a 10-acre lot, you can cut two trees (without going through a lot of governmental rigamarole).
Yaking on Hannity is a waste of time... preaching to the choir.
Be warned, in the Midwest we have had all the ash trees die in the past two years. Could be a large fire problem if we have a dry fall.
We stopped Harvesting Timber and Clearing dead wood over 30 years ago, we save the Spotted Owl, we Saved Millions of Trees from being turned into Baseball Bats and Houses.
The Vast Majority of all the Negligence has been a result of a Multitude of Lawsuits by the SIERRA CLUB, Out of those cam Crazy One Sided Settlement Agreements with elected officials and EnviroNazi’s, and court judgements by EnviroNazi Judges.
Shouldn’t these ENVIRONAZI Groups and their Members be held Financially Responsible for the Damage they Created??
Hug a logger. You'll never go back to trees!
I have visited Cali with dirt bikes. I’ve ridden in the Yuba river area, down by Mojave CA, Bishop, Yosemite.
What I’ve seen is active management of the land. It’s common for me to cross fire crews thinning out forests etc. Something we don’t have here in Washington State. The forests in Cali tend to have bigger trees, spaced out, with huge rocks and quite a bit of sand in the ground.
In Washington, we have massive amounts of underbrush...rain forest. And since 2009 we have seen unusually long dry summers. This has made massive amounts of kindling, just ready to burn.
I see that lightning is forecasted here in the Central Cascades from Southern Oregon to Northern Washington State on Thursday and Friday. That is going to be very, very bad.
Too bad no one's listening...
Enjoy the bed you’ve made you environmental idiots
“ This is criminal negligence on the part of Governors Brown (former) and Newsom. Any lawyers here who could help me understand how to prosecute them?“
How much of this dead wood is in national forests?
Quite a bit. I thought the States cleared the brush though.
The fuel loads in the Inland Northwest in remote forests are even higher than that due to the beetle kill and overgrown forests with stressed trees competing for water.
This paper is correct and prescribed burns are the best answer to fix this, but thinning the forests by logging and fields by grazing are also very helpful and it makes the trees much healthier and fires less violent.
Collectively, government(s) at all levels are doing a horrible job of managing the forests and one of the consequences are catastrophic fires.
Here is a good 14 minute explanation from a PhD from the Forest Service that corroborates the obvious. He lives in an area that burns every year and he has 100 year old pictures to compare to what it looks like today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas
He has another presentation that is over an hour that shows how the lack of diversity in our forests and on public lands have contributed to “mega-fires.”
how about people setting fires are causing this like the guy who is big into BLM, antifa and set a fire.
Fires will happen no matter what.... lightning, accidental causes like power lines or vehicle started fires, and, yes, some arson.
The key is to mitigate the severity of the fires by proper management and promoting a diverse forest like he talks about in the video I linked above.
Horrible news. I’m hundreds of miles from any fire and there;s so much smoke in the air I can’t go out, even with goggles and N-95 masks. The air quality chart, which goes to 500 (Hazardous) , doesn’;t go far enough. I have good air filter machines running in living room and bedroom nonstop. I’m 150+ miles from any fire, but the winds bring the smoke. Even in my stage of lock down, I still smell it and the air is so brown it looks like sunset. My cat is freaking out...cannot believe the daylight didn’t come today. Or yesterday, either.
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