From your KQED article:
"We have to protect public health; that's our mandate,” says Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the California Air Resources Board. “But we also recognize that we need burning in the forest, and a lot of those trade-offs have to happen in real time because the decisions have to be made—do we want to potentially impact the air basin, or do we want to burn.”
To me that sounds about right in the real world.
Is it possible that air quality restrictions prevented a prescribed burn somewhere in the footprint of the Camp Fire? I suppose, but I haven’t seen any evidence.
Even if they did, given that Cal Fire averages 13k acres of prescribed burns statewide each year and this fire is currently over 150k acres the impact would be minor.
Air quality is one of several factors considered when doing burns, as documented in your links, but your overwrought claims of ‘blood on their hands’ for CARB and Butte County AQ seem simplistic and unsupported by the facts.
That's my whole point. Instead up to 100's of thousands of acres they only burn 13k on average. Too small since the 2015-16 El Nino growth season. Some years (mainly 2017) there needs to be a lot more burning. Keep in mind the average burn before settlement (1800) was 4,000,000 a year, natural and set by indians.
In the Santa Rosa fire last year the houses were close together and created a high intesity fire that burned just about everything. But in Paradise the houses and stores were spread out and caught fire from the ember storm. The proof is the many intact trees. Look at the "After" photos,. There was no high intensity fire there, just many, probably hundreds, of simulataneous house fires
The fact that there was a high intensity fire on non-federal lands, high enough to create an ember storm downwind, means there was a lack of low intensity fire or equivalent clearing in those locations.
As for blood on their hands, yes, absolutely. Allowing just 6,000 acres of burning out of a million acres is criminally stupid. They should be put on trial.