You obviously are another that hasn't a clue here. Ya see, California, it's topography, large population, and Santa Ana winds aren't Nevada, and it has little to do with environmentalist in events such as wind blown wild brush fires that can spread and jump around for miles in different directions.
I know you'd like to blame California here, and the environmentalist, but please read below.
California has more acreage of steep, super rugged geography than many states have land. Many of these areas are totally inaccessible for most equipment, even for those on foot, add in very strong winds, with embers that can travel at 60 plus miles per hour, for *miles* into neighborhoods and other areas, that are far from the fires...
Would you suggest sending in several hundred thousand people every summer to be airlifted into hundreds of square miles, into all these super rugged steep areas to cut the brush?
Many of those hills used to be grazed and burned regularly, but the same people who never paid the owners for fuel management killed them with regulations.
The problem is chaparral, the brush that grows naturally on southern California hillsides. It rains there every February. The chaparral grows fast, blooms, then dries out. By midsummer, it's tinder dry, but the humid marine westerlies prevent it from burning. Every October, when the hot dry wind comes in from the desert, the chaparral catches even if you just think about oxidation.
This winter when it rains again, all the burned-over areas are going to turn into mud and wash away, carrying the unburned remainder of the houses into the Pacific. Real estate developers and fresh chaparral take root in the mud as soon as the rain stops, and the cycle begins again.
First, I used to live in SoCal. I’ve seen the terrain, I’ve hiked the terrain, I used to volunteer for the USFS in the Angeles NF.
So yes, I’ve got a clue. Been there, seen that.
Second: we’ve got plenty of steep terrain here in Nevada. Everyone thinks that Nevada looks like what they see in the low desert around Vegas. That terrain holds true only up to US-6, which runs east/west across the state. North of that, we have a basin/range topology, with plenty of steep, heavily wooded terrain.
So we’ve got much of the same terrain in the northern part of the state as you’re dealing with there in SoCal.
What do I suggest? They should be doing urban interface projects, the way we’ve had to ram through courts and the IBLA out here in Nevada. You don’t have to clean up all the wooded terrain, but you should be thinning the urban/wildland interfaces. You should be spraying to kill the bark beetles. Where the bark beetles have killed significant stands of trees, they should be logged out.
And yes, this is going to require moving lots of people to and fro. You can do it while it is fuel, or you can do it when it is alight. Your choice.