“Fires like this, driven by the Santa Ana’s have been occurring in So. Cal for hundreds of years, long before it was settled like it is today.”
That cannot be so. I just read on FreeRepublic that these fires are the fault of liberal environmentalists.
This time there seem to be MORE locations, than I can ever remember.
No, the fires are not. The mis-management of the fuel for the fires is.
There are only three things fire needs: Air, fuel and ignition.
Absent arson, often ignition is involuntary. You can’t do anything about air. So fire management comes down to fuels management.
If you don’t manage the fuels when conditions are in your favor, you have zero chance to manage the fire in conditions that are not in your favor.
The repeated fires in pre-settlement times were often much smaller and occurred much more frequently, so the fuel load was kept relatively low.
50+ years of fire suppression, coupled with a lack of mechanical or other fuel load management, results in fuel loads that exceed historic levels and result at some point in fires that exceed historic fires in intensity and size. If we’re not going to burn off the fuels in prescribed burns (and given the lack of competence shown by land management agencies in prescribed burns recently, I can understand people’s reluctance for such burns), there is only mechanical fuel reduction possible at the edges of developed areas.
This, the environmentalists have prevented with zeal.
This fuels management issue is also why today’s forest fires burn hotter and further than ever before too.