“Our guide told us that the massive fire was caused by the annual small fires being extinguished. Now they let the fires burn naturally.”
What the moron failed to tell you was that along with extinguishing “small fires,” they also make no effort to clear dead and dying trees and undergrowth, and also fail to put in access roads and allow reasonable amounts of logging. There is nothing like a clear-cut area to stop the spread of a fire.
You’re exactly right. This elementary school level argument has been going on for a decade. The late Bill Wattenberg screamed about this for many years.
What the eco-freaks do not tell you is that CA has suffered for many years from serial infestations of bark beetles. They kill trees, on an alarming and widespread basis. In the time it takes for the trees to die, they of course shed branches and all manner of tree detritus. This piles up on the forest floor and creates a think carpet of pure fuel. Sometimes 2-3 feet thick. Experienced forest management folks have been begging for years to get these forests cleared out and incidentally, to harvest the lumber. But the eco-freaks have successfully blocked all efforts to clear out the dead wood and slash from the forest floor because they have claimed that cutting of the roads that would be required would promote logging, which of course is excess logging, an offense against Gaia. Never mind that the large lumber companies are acutely aware of forest management techniques and there are now more acres of forest standing in the US than there were before the eeeeeeevil white man showed up.
So because these dead, overgrown and overfueled forests are not maintained nor cleared, when fires break out they are intensely hot, in fact cauterizing the ground. Trees that normally drop seeds that would sprout and grow, those seeds are killed by the intense heat. So these areas that have these super intense fires stay barren for many years, then they become very prone to erosion and flooding, which washes away topsoil.
The failure to clear out the dead forests is the cause of this phenomenon.
Our hunt club is 4500 acres of mostly timber company land. They have a team to come in and burn on a regular basis in different areas. We rarely ever have anything uncontrolled burning there.
California is suffering from their own stupidity and everyone else hasta help pay for it.
Get Fedzilla to sign over the federal property to'em, cut a big fire lane along the border and let them pay for their own damn fire suppression.