Dave, Nevada is not California. Outside of Vegas and Reno, Nevada has a tiny population. It's has no where near the homes, the population, or annual Santa Ana winds, mixed with low humidity etc.
There are homes and small towns scattered all over thousands of square miles, filled with brush, that when hit with fire, can travel at 50 miles per hour, throwing hot embers miles ahead of the actual fire, hop scotching all over the place. I know some here would like to manage all of this, and I wish it were possible.
Other than stopping building, sprawl, restricting where they can build, there is little that can be done, outside of using fire retardant building materials, green belts, clearing brush etc...which most have already done...But even then, there is no guarantee in these types of wind blown fire storms.
Yeah, and NV has nowhere near the amount of enviro-wackos that CA does.
When the South Tahoe Fire started this summer, it was the CA side that got burnt while the NV side stayed unburnt.
I point out to you that the NV residents of Tahoe were fined for not clearing their properties of low-lying fuel and scheduling tree removal, while at the same time a CA-side resident of the lake was hit with multiple felony counts for having three trees on his property felled without an impossible-to-get permit.
Also, the CA side of the lake is required to actually place pine needles down on their property to allegedly 'prevent erosion in order to preserve the clarity of the lake'.
If I'm lying, I'm dying.
It is true we don’t have the population outside Vegas/Washoe/Carson that you have there. That’s one of the excuses that the environmentalists use when they shrug off culpability for burning 100’s of thousands of acres. True, that might not have been people’s homes, but it was the economic base for ranchers and our tourism trade during hunting season. Once burned, the range won’t recover for a decade. You guys get more moisture, so your recovery is quicker - as you point out, you can have brush grow back in a few years.
Second, we actually have lower humidity than you do most of the time. This summer, during July, we had days when we had 40MPG winds and 3% relative humidity (no, I’m not exaggerating — 3%). If we’d had a firebug lighting off the range, it would have burned thousands of acres per hour. The winds aren’t as strong as what you’re seeing in SoCal right now, but we have week after week of 20 to 30MPG winds every day from the second week of June to the second week of August. That’s how these rangeland fires burn 100’s of thousands of acres in a week. It takes the BLM five days just to get their thumbs outta their posteriors on some of these larger fires.
Lastly, we don’t have your embers — true. I’ve seen those. What we do have are the flaming balls of gas that you see sometimes in your coastal fires in the groves of eucalyptus trees. When I’d see those in SoCal, they were *most* impressive.
You see the same sort of thing over the top of sagebrush and pinyon pine — just not quite as large and they don’t rise quite as high into the sky. They will leapfrog forward by a 1/4 mile or so when the fires really get hot and volatilize the oils in the brush.
The brush in those canyons can be controlled. It is possible to do it, and it would benefit Californians to rise up on their hind legs and *demand* that the brush be controlled within 1 mile of urban areas to prevent wildland fires from becoming urban property fires, as is happening now. The public in northeast Nevada is starting to make a public issue about environmentalists, and it is starting to have an effect when we call out environmentalists by name, not just an organization.
Substitute “MPH” for “MPG” — brain fart of the first order.