Federal permits to harvest dead and dying trees take about a year to get approved on federal ground. The California State permits I file as a professional forester to harvest dead and dying trees on private land here in California take 4-6 weeks to get approved. Why is this important?
After the trees dies, insects begin to eat through the wood and rot/decay begins to break down the fiber. What that means is that six months after a pine tree dies, the log is borderline merchantable to a sawmill, after eight months the sawmills will not buy it. The firs last about a year before they become unmarketable.
Most private landowners try to salvage fire kill timber immediately, so they can use the money from selling the logs to reforest the property. When I tell them I cant get them a permit for almost two months they are astounded.
Fires burn in the fall here - lets use the Carr Fire that burned up Redding last year on July 25. Us foresters were not allowed in untill a month later - around September 1. Two months to get a permit puts us around November 1. The “winter period” begins November 15. This restricts logging operations to dry rainless periods. Usually around mid December it becomes to wet to log.
The ground dries out in early April - eight months after the fire. The pine is now borderline worthless. See how this works? No money from selling the logs equals no money to replant the forest. Many get disgusted and sell their property. The land reverts to a brush field with dead trees sticking up out of it. It usually burns ten years later in another 100,000 acre conflagration.
It has gotten worse over the last 20 years, but this actually started in 1988 on the federal level, and 1990 at the State level.
Accurate reporting on this is virtually non-existant. Almost every article on forests that I read is propaganda.
Thanks for your input. I learned quite a few things here which I didn’t know. It sounds as if environmental restrictions and the realities of the timber and logging businesses, are contributing to what we see with these conflagrations.
No, parts of the equation were fully established when I moved to California in 1980.
They had already built over many of the required agricultural belts and were rapidly gobbling up most of those which remained.
You cannot stop a fire from spreading in seventy mile an hour or better winds without plowing a three to five mile wide firebreak. And once you build houses and shopping centers on the pastures and fields which were originally planned as your fire breaks you aren’t plowing them any more.
When I moved to California, I was appalled.
Amazing! Thank you for your insights. When we look back 10, 100, or thousand years from now we will see that Government meddling in private markets was the root cause of most of the existential problems in what was the United States of America.