A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames

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.

Mother Jones has published an Anti-Green environmental essay?

Wow. Who saw this coming? Not me.

Maybe the world really can be saved?

By the way...

Western and Pacific Canada have adopted the same suicidal forest management as California.

Here in Seattle, we have been breathing Canadian smoke from smoldering summer forest fires for the last decade.

Canada, of course, blames CO2 and Global Warming.

So...

A.you’re not a Christian, very obviously

B. You dont care about all of the people that have voted for sanity but were slapped down.

C. you had no sympathy for all of us losers who voted for Trump in 2020, KNOW he won and yet did nothing.

Can’t have one without the others :)

Consider that most Calif tribes consisted of around 60 individuals. Then consider how the 20 or so grown men of that tribe would be able to control-burn a fire set in forests or heavy brush in steep terrain without the use of water, chainsaws or heavy equipment. More recently, a Forest Service project of controlled or ‘cultural burn’ on Yuruk tribal land of over 1/2 million acres only managed to burn 80 acres over 5 days. Burning the undergrowth of a 1/2 million acre forest every 5 years would be impossible to accomplish without uncontrolled burns or a huge workforce.

When George McClellan led a survey party following an indian trial through the Northern Cascades for a Pacific Railroad route, his party found ““Most of the way led through a burnt forest” (Cooper1853) or, “These mountains have been burned over, so their appearance is bald and barren”. Indians burned millions of acres, destroying trees and the topsoil their roots held; trees replaced by wild strawberries, grass or blackberry vines that could grow in poor soil but did little to control errosion and mudslides.

By burning all the seedlings and young trees off, there were no new trees to replace older, diseased trees which were more likely to burn. Tribes would start forest fires to chase game out, but the same game relied on brush for camoflauge of their young and on lichens, buds and tender new growth essential to their winter and early sprint diets. By burning grasses which game such as buffalo, deer and birds needed for food, they allowed weeds and low-nutrition grasses to grow. A park-like but sterile environment. Tribes also used fire to burn out their enemies or to clear an area for their village, burning a new area each time they exhausted the resources and needed to move. Overall, tribal conservation efforts seemed to be more in line with preserving berry growing grounds and promoting oak over other tree species than the health of the forests and fauna around them.

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).

We have grasslands and shrubbery here in central Texas. Fire breaks work, and so do bulldozers. I know the Santa Ana winds can blow 80-100 mph, but central Texas winds are often 60 mph. The problem they seem to have is they are just not prepared to deal with fires.

I have a 160 acre timber farm here in the East Texas timber belt, and it gets awfully hot and dry here over the summer. We had a fire start here two years ago, and it took the local fire dept about five minutes to get here, and they brought their own water trucks. The forest service was here with bulldozers about five minutes behind them. The dry pine needle and dry grass floor in those pine forests burns like crazy. But, after they fought the fire for about five hours, I only lost about 15 acres of trees.

Wow, lost only 15 acres. That is fantastic. You must have been sweating bullets while the fire was burning. Your ecosystem sounds like it has a lot of parallels.

In California, the canyons where these fires started are infested with homeless “campers” and numerous campfires, open fires, and stoves. This problem has grown over the past two decades but there’s no political will to move those people out of there. These fires don’t start along the main roads so probably not a cigarette tossed out of a car. There has been no lightening. So it’s either arson, the homeless or homeless arsonists.

Here on the San Francisco Peninsula, you see firebreaks cut by dozers all over the place. They are maybe 20 to 30 feet wide and do stop the flames in calm or low-wind days, but they are easily jumped with high winds. They do work as you say.

The lack of water storage and diversion of money away from water and fire suppression projects is criminal. Given the huge fires all across the west the past decade, it seems that wild-land and forest fire budgets should be up 5X to 10X, not being cut. But there are homeless and illegals to spend money on and they can get ballots which can be harvested to get Democrats into office.

What I really don’t understand is why UAVs are not on patrol 24x7 and conducting infrared surveillance when the Santa Ana winds blow. The phenomena of high offshore desert winds creating fire conditions has been know for a couple hundred years.

Are the winds are too high for UAVs to fly? Or could they could be put on-station at higher altitudes to avoid the worst ground-level winds. Then, as soon as hotspots are identified, pre-positioned ground crews and aerial attack could be on scene in minutes (as you point out).

How much would it cost to run such a strategy and system per year? $50 million? $100 million? That’s cheap compared to the loss of property in a big fire. The money could come from the California homeless budgets ($4.5 billion PER YEAR) or the $3 billion PER YEAR that illegals cost us. There’s a pool of almost $8 billion that could be used to prevent and attack these fires.

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