Posted on 01/08/2025 7:28:31 PM PST by grundle
“The wake-up call has already happened.”
The acrid smell of charred wood still permeates the air as Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, and I walk along a dirt path up through the middle of a canyon in the Bouverie nature preserve in Sonoma Valley.
On the left side, the earth is black as tar, and scorch marks as tall as a person scar the trunks of the mature oak trees scattered throughout the field.
But on the right side, the ground is tan and brown, and you have to look hard at the still-green oaks to see any evidence of the fire that raged through here just a few weeks before.
It’s no mystery to Berleman why the fire behaved so differently on the two sides of the trail at Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Bouverie Preserve.
When flames hit the field on the left of the path, they met a dense wall of thigh-high grass that hadn’t been mowed, grazed or burned for 20 years. The flames must have been 5 or 6 feet tall.
On the right side, however, Berleman had set a prescribed burn just this spring. So when the October wildfire hit, patches of fire blazed, but with so little fuel, the flames remained only inches high.
(Excerpt) Read more at motherjones.com ...
James Woods on Fox -great interview.
The root cause.
Not because of a Century of ‘Rat politicians?
[Reagan excepted]
The far-left Mother Jones caught onto this years ago. Of course, now the lefties blame Trump, instead.
No sympathy for California
It burns one way or another. Best to control it.
I’m more than happy to visit Calif.
I lived there in the 70s for a short while.
Physically a Great Place still.
I’m just never going to be financially/politically connected ever again.
Ones mileage may vary...
But boy they sure kept Trump from winning CA. You have no home but boy you SHOWED Trump. IDIOTS. Trump has been talking abt this for years.
Ping for later. Mother Jones is to the left of the left, but they are not entirely useless.
“On the right side, however, Berleman had set a prescribed burn just this spring.”
You cannot prescribe burn all of the state every year. There is just no way to do that. How much of the land area can be prescribe burned each year? 5%? 10%? 25%?
Doing a prescribed burn every few years doesn’t do anything. The weeds are annuals and grow like...you know what.
And the wild weeds and grasses grow to 4 to 5 feet tall every year by late May. Weed growth is stopped after a prescribed burn in late spring, so the grasses will be a lot smaller in October. But the following year they will be 4-5 feet tall again in May as if you had done nothing the year before.
I’m not saying don’t do prescribed burns. But I wonder just how effective this strategy is.
When the first settlers arrived in the West, they noticed that if the normal droughts and lightening storms didn’t strike fires, Indians would light them in the hills every year. It rousted lots of game and cleared the brush.
Exactly. It’s basic science. I live in New England and we occasionally have small forest fires in spring and fall that are usually handled by the local FD and a few mutual aid companies for a ATV, tankers, personnel, etc. Keep in mind we don’t have large county level FDs like LAFD which has 140 engines and 40+ trucks. You have say cites like Hartford with 11 engines and 5 ladders and each surrounding town which may have 2-3 engines and one ladder, etc.
Most fires will maybe burn only a few acres at most. This past fall was dry and we did have some “CA style” fires that burned hundreds or thousands of acres and burned for weeks. The difference is here larger lots and some sort of forest management, even just homeowners chopping down trees on the edge of their lots.
Clear a fair swath around the abode.
Close up ALL of the openings about the abode.
Set up up a sprinkler system with a reservoir on the premises.
Evacuate with pets, hard drives and all ski equipment.
Hope for the best outcome.
Almost all of the common grasses in southern California are non-native species from Europe and the Mediterranean, including wild oats, bromes, and ryegrasses. In general, native grasses were perennial species that lived through the dry summers. Unlike native perennials, non-native annual grasses germinate in the winter and complete their life cycle before summer. Their dried tissues can provide fuel throughout the summer and fall fire season. Mature grass seeds that fall to the ground in early summer will escape damage from high fire temperatures.
From AP / KTLA TV (Los Angeles)...
‘Little Arson Grasses’: Non-Native Species Making California Wildfires More Frequent, Study Finds
Nov 4, 2019For much of the United States, invasive grass species are making wildfires more frequent, especially in fire-prone California, a new study finds. Twelve non-native species act as “little arsonist grasses,” said study co-author Bethany Bradley, a University of Massachusetts professor of environmental conservation.
Wherever the common Mediterranean grass invades, including California’s southern desert, fires flare up three times more often. And cheatgrass , which covers about one-third of the Intermountain West, is a big-time fire promoter, Bradley said. “I would not be surprised at all if invasive grasses are playing a role in the current fires but I don’t think we can attribute to them directly,” Bradley said. University of Utah fire expert Phil Dennison, who wasn’t part of the study but says it makes sense, said, “In a lot of ways, California was ground zero for invasive grasses. Much of California’s native perennial grassland was replaced by Mediterranean annual grasses over a century ago. This study doesn’t look at invasive grasses in the areas that are burning in California, but invasive grasses are contributing to the fires there.”
Experts say the areas burning now in California are more shrubs and grasses than forests, despite what President Donald Trump tweeted over the weekend.
“This is a global problem,” said University of Alberta fire expert Mike Flannigan, who wasn’t part of the study but said it makes sense. “I think with climate change and human assistance we are moving to a grass world. One region they should have mentioned is Hawaii where wildfires are increasing in large part due to invasive grasses.”
Invasive species are spreading more because of climate change as warmer weather moves into new areas, said study lead author Emily Fusco, also of the University of Massachusetts. New England and the Mid-Atlantic are seeing new invasive and more flammable grasses, Bradley said.
The study in Monday’s journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at the connections between a dozen species of invasive grasses and fires nationwide, finding fires occur more often in places with the non-native grasses. But the study did not find a link between invasive grasses and the size of the fires.
Four of these species, including cheatgrass and common Mediterranean grass, are in California. These grasses get dry and then watch out, Fusco said.
Flanagan noted that invasive plants that are not grasses also feed the wildfire problem.
While most outside experts said the study was important, wildfire expert LeRoy Westerling at the University of California, Merced said that with wildfires the size is key so this study is less valuable because it measures frequency.
No, but proper timber management does.
Yes. The key is to make sure the openings are closed and you are WELL insulated and have no exposed combustible material. That keeps the interior of the house below the self-ignition point as the fire passes by your house.
Make sure your siding is THICK stucco with x-rated sheetrock underneath. Do not have eaves which catch heat. Make sure the underside of your wood structures (overhanging decks) are covered in stucco.
The problem is these are not timber fires in SoCal. These are grassland fires (highly combustible non-native annual grasses) and chaparral fires (Mediterranean shrubs, often quite oily).
Northern Idaho does a great job keeping the forest floors clean. This time of year you see lots of piles of slash that the crews have cut and piled. Prescribed burns start soon.
Set up the place to keep the fire on the ground.
Crown Fire is the wurst.
Thin Timber as required.
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