What made it worse were the air heads in the Forest Service and BLM teams...the "incident commanders" who were more worried about insuring their continued budget than they were about quickly putting out the fires.
Who, in some cases, were wholly unwilling to use bulldozers to cut a 40+ ft fire line because it, "would damage the environment for 9-12 years", and their regs wouldn;t allow it (due to the air headed environmental lobbies that have gotten such attitudes, rules, regulations, and laws passed)and instead used hand trenching and literally cut 3-6 ft fire lines through the forest which the fires simply topped...and so tens and hundreds of thousands of acres burned which will take life times to come back.
When confronted with these arguements...these people would just stare at you.
Sickening...disgusting...and so wholly unnecessary.
The homes will be rebuilt with more fire resistant materials.
I'm not disputing that this isn't a catastrophe of biblical proportions. It's just that this real estate is just as valuable as it was last week.