A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames

Drop Dead Fred

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The reason that California's forest fires are so bad is because the people in charge have deliberately allowed large amounts of fuel to build up.

The details in this paragraph explain the very different results of proper forest management vs allowing large amounts of fuel to build up.

California is either run by idiots who don't understand proper forest management, or it's run by evil people who are deliberately making the fires worse.


A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames​


The acrid smell of charred wood still permeates the air as Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, and I walk along a dirt path up through the middle of a canyon in the Bouverie nature preserve in Sonoma Valley. On the left side, the earth is black as tar, and scorch marks as tall as a person scar the trunks of the mature oak trees scattered throughout the field. But on the right side, the ground is tan and brown, and you have to look hard at the still-green oaks to see any evidence of the fire that raged through here just a few weeks before. It’s no mystery to Berleman why the fire behaved so differently on the two sides of the trail at Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Bouverie Preserve. When flames hit the field on the left of the path, they met a dense wall of thigh-high grass that hadn’t been mowed, grazed or burned for 20 years. The flames must have been 5 or 6 feet tall. On the right side, however, Berleman had set a prescribed burn just this spring. So when the October wildfire hit, patches of fire blazed, but with so little fuel, the flames remained only inches high.
 
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The reason that California's forest fires are so bad is because the people in charge have deliberately allowed large amounts of fuel to build up.

The details in this paragraph explain the very different results of proper forest management vs allowing large amounts of fuel to build up.

California is either run by idiots who don't understand proper forest management, or it's run by evil people who are deliberately making the fires worse.


A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames​


The acrid smell of charred wood still permeates the air as Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, and I walk along a dirt path up through the middle of a canyon in the Bouverie nature preserve in Sonoma Valley. On the left side, the earth is black as tar, and scorch marks as tall as a person scar the trunks of the mature oak trees scattered throughout the field. But on the right side, the ground is tan and brown, and you have to look hard at the still-green oaks to see any evidence of the fire that raged through here just a few weeks before. It’s no mystery to Berleman why the fire behaved so differently on the two sides of the trail at Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Bouverie Preserve. When flames hit the field on the left of the path, they met a dense wall of thigh-high grass that hadn’t been mowed, grazed or burned for 20 years. The flames must have been 5 or 6 feet tall. On the right side, however, Berleman had set a prescribed burn just this spring. So when the October wildfire hit, patches of fire blazed, but with so little fuel, the flames remained only inches high.
Impossible; humans don't have any effect on anything
 
Don't be absurd. FIre suppression was the policy over the whole freakin' USA.
Right. And, of course, it couldn't be the severe temperatures or the severe droughts. Because hey, we have already politicized the topic of climate change, no need to tread old ground. Time to sprinkle some partisan stupidity on fire control.
 
There were fires after 9/11. I thought the number of fires may have been caused by other terror cells. I don't trust fate when too many fires manifest into human tragedies. Hopefully I was wrong.
 
One big reason why the Western U.S. has more wildfires:

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1200px-Map_of_all_U.S._Federal_Land.jpg
 
That's correlation, not causation.

The Feds own half the forestland in California ... half the fires start on federal forestland ... that's not correlation, that's "clear-cut" cause-and-effect ...

There's a few species of trees that grow in California that require their cones to be burnt in order to release the seeds inside ... it's an evolutionary advantage to keep seeds safe and contained until fire rolls through and opens up the canopy ... now that's some pretty strong evidence that wildfires are normal and natural in California, and have been since before man-kind arrived ... upon this insidious arrival, and after many thousands of years, man-kind has managed to upset this balance ... first by converting forestlands into grasslands (aka cropland) ... and then suppressing forestfires allowing fuel loads to increase ... so with triple the flammables, we see triple the fires ... for the cause of poor forest management on the part of the US Dep't of the Interior, we have the effect of more and hotter wildfires ... even the ones started by natural causes ...

Yet another factor is how these forests are replanted after harvest ... the intent is not for the forest to grow back in it's natural form, rather for the forest to be harvested again ... just as the Indiana corn farmer is dismayed when he harvests in Spring, so too are we dismayed leaving harvestible timber standing ... "Either log 'em or watch 'em burn" ...

"Will the Northwest Forest Plan Come undone" -- High Country News -- April 7th, 2015 ...

A bit dated, so the 2019 finish date never happened ... otherwise a fair and even handed piece IMEIO ...
 
The reason that California's forest fires are so bad is because the people in charge have deliberately allowed large amounts of fuel to build up.

The details in this paragraph explain the very different results of proper forest management vs allowing large amounts of fuel to build up.

California is either run by idiots who don't understand proper forest management, or it's run by evil people who are deliberately making the fires worse.


A Century of Fire Suppression Is Why California Is in Flames​


The acrid smell of charred wood still permeates the air as Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist, and I walk along a dirt path up through the middle of a canyon in the Bouverie nature preserve in Sonoma Valley. On the left side, the earth is black as tar, and scorch marks as tall as a person scar the trunks of the mature oak trees scattered throughout the field. But on the right side, the ground is tan and brown, and you have to look hard at the still-green oaks to see any evidence of the fire that raged through here just a few weeks before. It’s no mystery to Berleman why the fire behaved so differently on the two sides of the trail at Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Bouverie Preserve. When flames hit the field on the left of the path, they met a dense wall of thigh-high grass that hadn’t been mowed, grazed or burned for 20 years. The flames must have been 5 or 6 feet tall. On the right side, however, Berleman had set a prescribed burn just this spring. So when the October wildfire hit, patches of fire blazed, but with so little fuel, the flames remained only inches high.
What the hell has California to do with Federally ran forests? And when have "Conservatives", or even conservatives, advocated for giving the Forest Service the money for the manpower to adequately manage our forests? When are idiots like you going to actually going to research the problem before flapping your ignorant yaps? Yes, the forests have needed better management. But that takes money, something the Forest Service has always been shorted on at the federal level by the politicians.
 
No, no, no!

The reason why California is in flames is because demoncrats run it.

Hell is their home after all.
Another dumb fuck. Almost all the land burned is Forest Service land. And even when I worked for the Forest Service, over 40 years ago, they had inadequate funding for the proper management. And they paid substandard wages, most people working for the Forest Service did that simply because it allowed them to live in wonderful places.
 

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