[Fhios]

Yes, I know this. It’s a good thing. Perhaps there are some good regulations that keep us aware of ‘controlled burns’ being necessary?

I know from the recent past that a lot of forest fires of high intensity are due to overgrowth not being controlled with methods such as ‘controlled burns’.

Fire breaks are important too.

[bray]

Last summer we had a lightning strike in Central Oregon which started a small fire which could have been put out with a couple of firefighters. The Forest Service and BLM in DC decided to let it burn until it was 35,000 acres and took 4 weeks to put out when the rains started.

Is that the controlled burns you are talking about?

[palmer]

There's a lot of finger pointing about California fires. But the fact is that fires have been part of California for 1000's of years, known by digging in the dirt and finding layers of charcoal (everything burned). Some years literally everything burned.

Now for 100 years or so we have had artificial fire suppression. The question of whether controlled burns are good is valid: yes they are good in some cases. But the idea that controlled burns, logging or anything else can prevent giant wildfires in California is mistaken. It is simply not true. For example a single season of brush growth was enough to feed the northern CA fires. Those areas can't be logged and controlled burns would have had limited effectiveness.