I'm really interested in hearing from someone that knows much more than me about this question:
Don't we generally know that we need to do more prescribed fire burning? Isn't this generally highjacked by the timber industry to protect valuable "product?"
If that's true, will this federal bill address that? It seems like it allocates money but doesn't talk about the other 53% of the lands that are not federally managed. And, it doesn't talk about whether the 47% lands are the problem or not. In Oregon where I live, the massive fires were ten miles from me in largely residentially adjacent lands. Are those going to be helped?
I love that this bill offers jobs to formerly incarcerated people that have been fighting fires.
If I'm wrong about my first assumption, would really like to know.
Also, I saw a statistic that said California needs to do prescribed burns of about a million acres a year to manage wildfire risk. They are currently doing only 40,000. But these massive fires over the last month are approaching that million acre number: does anyone know if next year we will be safer because of those fires?
"Don't we generally know that we need to do more prescribed fire burning?"
Yes.
"Isn't this generally highjacked by the timber industry to protect valuable "product?""
No, I don't believe that to be the case. Broadly speaking, prescribed burns are thwarted by a mix of local objections to smoke, noise and traffic ... and environmental objections relating to specific watersheds, protected species and (literally) individual birds that are witnessed in the burn area.[1] Remember: this is California - these people didn't move here to not have their very, very specific voice, and preferences, heard and respected. (I kid because I love)
"But these massive fires over the last month are approaching that million acre number: does anyone know if next year we will be safer because of those fires?"
I can't speak to "safer" but, absolutely there will be less fuel to burn next year. Almost the entire land area of Napa County has burned this year. I suspect they can skate for many decades on this (rapid, violent) fuels reduction.
Personally, as the owner of 25-ish acres of wooded land in this area (Marin County), I am not waiting. We are simulating fire by dramatically reducing fuel loads on our lands. I am assuming these forests will burn and trying to reduce the speed and intensity of that eventual fire.
Firefighter here. Parent is correct. Prescribed burns do not damage big trees; they deprive the forest floor of fuel buildup that -- if it accumulates and burns out of control -- does destroy large trees.
Didn't California just pass legislation that calls for cutting down trees in forests to make them more "spread out"?
This is where they lose me. The reason why wildfires exist in the first place is because of climate change; deforestation is the opposite of fighting climate change.
Very strange California taking a cue out of Trump's climate change denying book.
> deforestation is the opposite of fighting climate change.
Yes and no. One of the features of climate change is that some wet areas become deserts while some currently-dry areas become wet. Planting trees in an area becoming desert (like California) will only encourage the inevitable disastrous burn.
Planting trees in an area becoming wetter would do a great deal of good. Those trees are likely to survive to scrub CO2.
> Personally, as the owner of 25-ish acres of wooded land in this area (Marin County), I am not waiting. We are simulating fire by dramatically reducing fuel loads on our lands.
As a lifelong sonoma county resident, curious why were you not managing fuels already? It's a duty to your neighbors. CalFire is very aggressive up here in certain areas, and will red tag your property if it gets past a point.
> "No, I don't believe that to be the case. Broadly speaking, prescribed burns are thwarted by a mix of local objections to smoke, noise and traffic"
Can confirm this for Sonoma County, CA. They used to burn a lot when I was young. Not much anymore, mostly because of the $$$ moving up here and they have no understanding of the need for it. Well, this is the alternative.
Nothing in their comment says they weren't managing fuels already. They may have decided to go beyond the standard requirements after seeing the increasing fire risk in recent years.
Vital missed point from the bottom of the article-
Jack Cohen is a retired U.S. Forest Service Research fire scientist who has spent years determining how structures ignite during extreme wildfires. In a September 21, 2020 article he wrote for Wildfire Today with Dave Strohmaier, they addressed how homes ignite during extreme wildfires.
“Surprisingly, research has shown that home ignitions during extreme wildfires result from conditions local to a home. A home’s ignition vulnerabilities in relation to nearby burning materials within 100 feet principally determine home ignitions. This area of a home and its immediate surroundings is called the home ignition zone (HIZ). Typically, lofted burning embers initiate ignitions within the HIZ – to homes directly and nearby flammables leading to homes. Although an intense wildfire can loft firebrands more than one-half mile to start fires, the minuscule local conditions where the burning embers land and accumulate determine ignitions. Importantly, most home destruction during extreme wildfires occurs hours after the wildfire has ceased intense burning near the community; the residential fuels – homes, other structures, and vegetation – continue fire spread within the community.
“Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable, however, by reducing home ignition potential within the HIZ we can create ignition resistant homes and communities. Thus, community wildfire risk should be defined as a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem.”
Unfortunately it's not as clear that fire risk is lowered by a one off burn. There are then many dead trees that are tinder in the coming seasons. Prescribed burns work when they are regular and done in a less damaging season like spring where they burn slower due to plant moisture content etc, and hopefully kill fewer trees.
No, I don't believe that to be the case. Broadly speaking, prescribed burns are thwarted by a mix of local objections to smoke, noise and traffic ... and environmental objections relating to specific watersheds, protected species and (literally) individual birds that are witnessed in the burn area
And much of the later "environmental objections" are hijacked by the former Nimby forces, while the right wing uses this phony environmentalism to point the rural folks at the left instead of real estate and development interests that drive all this.
A cousin of mine spent about 10 years as a Hotshot[0], and now runs an engine in Plumas County, CA.
A few things that have stuck with me over the years of discussing his work:
* Much like floods, he returns the same burn areas year after year (ex. Paradise, CA and surrounding area). Some of that is recent encroachment into wilderness boundary areas, but much is also historically-inhabited land whose climate has changed drastically.
* Prescribed burns quickly run up against environmental regulations (esp. those intended to reduce smog), property rights concerns, and coordinating the patchwork of agencies and individuals who own and manage this land - BLM, USFS, CalFire, Sierra Pacific Industries, &c.
* To hear him tell it, CalFire is woefully incompetent and fiscally irresponsible, leaving much of the work to over-burdened and under-funded federal agencies. I live in a CalFire "State Responsibility Area" (i.e. any fire in my area would be served by CalFire), and I've seen very little actual evidence to contradict him.
To be fair so much of the overall land prone to fire is under control of the feds - literally 47% according to the article. Having grown up in northern CA there’s just vast swathes of land to cover, and I doubt they’re spending nearly enough on controlled burns for the current climate. It’s 100% true that the land just wants to burn, pine needles 1-2” thick across an area half the size of New York State.
I’m sick and tired of this ego protection through projection. These attitudes go nowhere. The CA fires are “wildfires” right? They start in those beautiful golden Californian grassy hills. Imagine if the state leadership took care of that land they own through back-burning to avoid forest destruction. What can the state control today; better land management. Let’s start there and see how far it gets us. Global warming isn’t an overnight fix but land management might.
> Don't we generally know that we need to do more prescribed fire burning?
Yes, everyone generally agrees we need to do more prescribed burns, but it's easier said than done. The three main impediments (at least in CA) seem to be: [0]
1. tight environmental regulations
2. limited resources
3. concerns about negative public opinion.
I think the biggest problem is there is a patchwork of air quality regulations in CA plus federal regulations like the Clean Air Act which makes it very difficult to do prescribed burns.[1] So this bill might help with the federal regulations but I'm not sure how it would impact local regs.
We absolutely need more prescribed burns. This needs to be combined with selective cutting and brush clearance. The selective cutting can pay for itself much of the time with timber sales. On forest service land, timber cruisers select trees to cut based on scientific concerns, and then private companies (often smaller ones) come in to remove the trees.
It's worth noting that whenever you see big clearcuts, its almost always private land (aka, "tree farms"). That is where most of the wood comes from these days. I'm really not sure about the regulations on those lands, considering they can pose a hazard for neighboring areas if improperly managed.
The total amount of burned area in California is very small compared to the area that is susceptible to severe fires, so unfortunately this year didn't move the needle much. Worse, really hot fires kill everything, and actually make it easier for dense brush and stunted trees to pop up again.
What you really want in drier areas is an open forest with few, large trees.
> Isn't this generally highjacked by the timber industry to protect valuable "product?"
At least in some cases, the main restriction is environmental protections laws and liability concerns. You want to start a controlled burn? What's the risk? What species live in the area? Are any endangered? Are you sure? Will anyone be hurt during this blaze? Have you filed the environmental impact statement, risk mitigation plan, incident management documents, and obtained approval from all relevant agencies? How much smoke will it generate? What's going to be IN the smoke? What do you mean you don't know the exact contents of the smoke; how can you get a permit for emitting smoke without knowing what in it? Etc.
In California in particular, controlled burns need approval from the local Air District, and they have to give approval on the day. It's not unheard of for a planned, approved burn to be shut down at the last minute because the day is a bit too smoggy already. There's always someone willing to pop up and argue against the controlled burn; local residents worried about safety, or even the American Lung Association worried about smoke inhalation. Also, the people in charge of starting burns can be held liable if they go wrong, but will not be held liable if they opt not to start a burn, and then disaster ensues.
It's possible the timber industry is somewhere behind that, but we seem quite capable of hamstringing ourselves "honestly" too, so I'm not sure.
In any case, yes. California burns around 20k acres per year, but needs to be burning more like 1m acres per year, AND needs to burn a 20m acre backlog. Everyone is in agreement that this needs to happen, but (just like so many other Californian problems) there's no obvious path forward. The system is setup at every level to stop this, and it has enormous inertia. Experts hope than in a few years, they might be able to get up to as high as 40k acres per year...which won't even be a noticeable improvement. There's no single villain causing an otherwise functioning system to fail; the system is the problem.
Living in Idaho, loggers are not against controlled burns. Fires can destroy timberland. A controlled burns the small brush and dead trees on the ground, not timber. Also logging done with proper clean up also can help reduce the severity of fires as there is less trees in a logged area. This can limit how fast a fire can spread.
No - it’s not the timber industry. Fires are bad fire them. Environmental interests are the main issue. There is always some “compelling” interest that manages to block a planned burn, no matter how niche or how much it might actually help their concern long term.
Keep in mind that "environmental interests" is a cover worn by numerous other interests as cover for their actions. It is simultaneously strongly sympathetic and a convenient scapegoat, whilst masking true motives or dynamics.
Here, fire is strongly related with farmers and also with crime activities.
For example is known that narcos expecting to land a cargo of drugs typically start wildfires at several Km of the landing point. They use that to trick the police to concentrate in the opposite extreme of the map.
"In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."
Cost estimates I'm seeing say the cost/acre for prescribed burns is ~$100/acre. A very large works project but So maybe more achievable than it sounds, and it could be spread over a decade.
Naïve calculation thus puts the cost at 2 billion dollars, or about 1/3rd of the final cost of the east span of the Bay Bridge. :)
Prescribed burning is resisted by folks for environmental reasons. The alternative is going in and cutting down trees and mulching brush which runs into the "we are damaging a natural environment" groups.
An interesting counterpoint is to look at a managed forest in the northwest to get a feel for what companies that harvest wood do to manage fire risk.
I have heard those arguments as well. One wonders what we could go with a "Civilian Conservation Corps" which provided employment for the unemployed and addressed both forestry issues as well as infrastructure issues facing the nation.
Of course that was one of FDR's most successful programs, and one which I feel could be applied here as well. The country needs both tradespeople and infrastructure maintenance in a big way and doing that by funding large engineering firms is extremely inefficient.
For some people just getting the experience of going to a job (as well as a resume line) would really help them, and... we need some stuff done for sure in the US.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results
There was humid areas with lakes and lots of animals in what is now the Prehistoric Sahara, burnt for pastures until desert
There was lots of extinct species in what is now Australia, and it was more humid in the past. Arid, subdesert, desert again.
Brazil has a huge stupidity problem, some new deserts ordered and in the way
Indonesia idem,
Russia has extensive wildfires in 2019, happily running towards the same path
We don't even understand well the dynamics and ecology of soil, and all that we can parrot again and again is lets burn more, lets burn more, that will solve it all... we are not burning enough fast.
We know that fallen trees are essential for many species of invertebrates and vertebrates, Not allowed anymore it seems. We must clean the area and turn nature into a cartoon.
Being an arsonist is not only the perfect crime, it seems that is even the fastest way to became a local hero. We are even justifying and giving reasons to them
1) As I said before, fire is just a chapter in a bigger history
The problem is that we can't survive just with this technique anymore, because we desperately need more forests in a "safety level of rainforest" or close to it, to have any chance to heal the climate. Unless we create a CO2 extracting machine, trees, plants and algae are still our best bet.
This rhetoric of "lets manage ecosystems as they did in the roman empire", maybe could work 200 years ago but now we are in a different situation.
4) Places became arid in part because there is not topsoil anymore, so nobody can grow here enough fast, so there is not water storing creatures anymore. This happens often by past fires followed by rains that first mineralize the soil, then turn it into dust and then wash it down the streams in a mud flood.
Removing mechanically the dry weeds, would have the same effects but without the counterparts.
Fires are not a major cause of erosion. I'm not sure why you would think that - fires do not obliterate the organic material that binds soils together. You are conflating human land clearing with forest fires.
Any loss of plant life due to a forest fire is quickly replaced as new growth is able to take advantage of new light/water/nutrient resources.
There's a reservoir near where I live (SW US) that was nearly filled in from erosion after severe fires. They had to go in and clean it out with equipment. You can see the large scale erosion on the hillsides. This was 100% caused by the fire.
But, it was a massive uncontrolled fire. A lower temperature controlled burn may (probably?) not have caused that. Also if it had not occurred on such steep slopes maybe erosion wouldn't have been such a problem.
Other then impacting the human made reservoir (and roads and other structures) I don't know that it was a real problem at all (for the natural world), you may have a point.
The erosion was quite heavy though as the fires were followed by very heavy (and unusual) torrential rains. You could see the deep channels in the slopes and the roads were also covered with sediment. They had to bring in heavy machinery for that as well.
The area is recovering nicely now, it's grass with small saplings and I was up there this year and didn't really see any new erosion at all.
And we should not forget that prescribed fires kill the new sapplings, so the forest can't regenerate from this point and start decaying. We don't see it because they decay very slow, but this does not change the fact that a forest can not grow anymore in this places. Is just a logging reserve.
This conveys a lack of understanding of the lifecycle of a forest. When old and dead trees are removed, there are more resources available for new growth. Yes, available light/water/nutrients are the limiting factor on new growth in any forest ecosystem.
This conveys a lack of understanding of the lifecycle of a forest. When old and dead trees are removed, there are more resources available for new growth. Yes, available light/water/nutrients are the limiting factor on new growth in any forest ecosystem.
(...talking about lack of understanding, here comes the tunnel vision)
Hem, not. Obviously. Is several levels more complex than that. You forgot at least two really big factors here.
Trees will pop out a new batch of seeds the next year. trees will plant themselves more trees. The idea for controlled burns is to do them once a decade or so.
I agree with your point and disagree with parent. Fires are natural and are needed.
But I remember reading (somewhere) part of the reason Australia became arid is repeated mass burning by Aboriginal people. Anyone know how true that really is (or is not)?
You have no idea what you're talking about. The problem here is we've stopped the natural fires, and thus caused damage; what's being discussed is returning to something closer to natural.
Misguided, fact-free views like yours cost lives and damage the planet.
1) the lumber industry obviously prefers clearcutting in the short-term, but generally follows selection laws if they get access to more forests and the logging equipment fits, but that means logging roads.
2) It's needed to harvest fallen trees within about a year of a fall for lumber. By 6 years they're rotten and not economically viable, but still contribute to fires - this was a problem in 2020.
3) Generally scheduled, controlled burns only quickly burn the forest floor (detritis like branches, deadfalls, etc.) and some outside bark, which trees evolved to tolerate, and not the inner core of trees, so doesn't affect logging.
When you wait too long, trees actually heat and explode, setting the canopy on fire far and wide. If you make charcoal, that's a more persistent fire.
Source: very lucky to have grown up outside a national park, which makes one a hard-core ecologist.
A rotten trunk is spongy and soaked in water, because is rotten, so is less burnable than an alive tree. Could act in part as fire retardants
If we manage the forest as a company and monoculture of trees, then fallen trees are money and must be harvested for profit. If we manage the forest as an ecosystem, fallen trees create entire sub-ecosystems and provide necessary refuges for amphibians, mammals, birds and invertebrates. They belong to the forest, boost biodiversity, and shouldn't removed necessarily. Not unless they block a road or lie in a problematic area. Not by default.
Prescribed fire is also necessary to preserve species and habitat. Native species have long evolved to deal with natural fires, whereas invasive species have not. Like many things with nature, it's counterintuitive, but proven science.*
If populated areas are nearby, logging and subsequent mowing flat are alternatives in some circumstances (and act as a great carbon sink).
1. Source: I worked and volunteered many years in college on the Kanza Tallgrass Prairie preserve which experienced natural fires regularly through it's evolutionary history.
Rules in Victoria preventing building within x no of metres of trees or tree lines have just meant people are cutting down more trees. Which just adds to the problem of hotter, dryer conditions. The only thing that stops fires is holding moisture in the soil and in the trees.
Fire breaks are really effective for small fires in moderate weather conditions. The kind of fires we saw in Oz or Cali jump straight over them. Look at these maps from late last year from the guardian[0]. The fires were jumping 20kms or more at a stretch. If look down to the snowy mountains map, you can see where a strong change in wind sent ember attacks to every ridge line over successive days. Unless your fire break clears every ridge you can't stop these kind of fires.
Also, since all the misinformation last year in Australia in the msm about lack of back burning and arson being the major causes of fires. I can't speak to the experience in calu, but we have now found that back burning had actually increased 10 fold before the fires from the previous 10 year period, but suitable conditions for back burning had also decreased by more than a third. Lightning strikes were responsible for most bushfires, with only about 1-3% being deliberately lit. Hell, in the midst of the firestorms, the sudden updraft of smoke and ash into the atmosphere was creating it's own mini weather events including more lightning.
...you cannot build a residential building within 1km of a tree line.
I agree but this sort of jumps to heart of things. What do you do with the many, many houses already there? Not just houses but people, people with considerable political influence, along with the industries that build this sort of house and everything depending on that? I mean, this is so thorny a problem that I expect nothing with come of the sensible solution and we're just going to have "fires as far as the eye can see" here in California.
cannot build a residential building within 1km of a tree line
Absolutely. I've got somewhere an edition of Tacitus' Germania with commentary that states as a matter of fact, no explanation needed that "the forest is not part of the human sphere". Why is this so controversial that it needs to be downvoted?
It is baffling that anyone would want to live on the wrong side of the urban-wilderness interface, especially if wilderness means wildfire risk.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms... HDT
I've lived in the forest for the last ten years. Nothing better. Sure there's risks; there's risks everywhere.
I live in a forested area currently. Talking about single person choices is disingenuous. There is an industry around building houses where they shouldn't be. The entire zoning, tax and development system is broken, cities depend on building permits for income because they can't effectively tax existing lots. And basically, no one pays for the real cost of exurban sprawl till the whole thing burns up in a forest fire.
From what you describe it sounds like Tacitus was dehumanizing the Germanic people for not being as metropolitan as Romans, not talking about fires. Tacitus also wrote of the Great Fire of Rome, so it would be weird for him to argue that fires were an argument for urbanization. His perspective was not ours, in his era cities sometimes turned into infernos. Something only the quite elderly have experienced in our era.
Forests burn with regularity, and this is a normal and essential process for them. Stands to reason that if you want to build a house, it either be not in a place that burns, or be constructed in a way that it isn't significantly damaged by fire.
People have been shown to be willing to rebuild repeatedly in fire zones, with massive economic and public safety impact. Makes sense to legislate to prevent this.
Some do, some don't. California isn't the whole world.
Edit:
> Wildfires are among the most common forms of natural disaster in some regions, including Siberia, California, and Australia.[17][18][19] Areas with Mediterranean climates or in the taiga biome are particularly susceptible.
California and Australia are outliers. Writing off forests in general just because particular sorts of forests are prone to burning doesn't make sense.
It's OK to build there as long as you acknowledge that fire is a natural inhabitant of any forest and over a 20-30 year period is likely to come for a visit at least once.
Most of Michigan is forested. Less than 1% of Michigan has burned in the last 200 years of settlement: there's a ton more precipitation, plus it's under snow for four months a year, so fallen trees and leaves decompose in a couple years and don't increase the fire risk.
My house in a Michigan forest has a very, very different risk profile from a home in a California forest. And California is a big state, I'm sure there are forests that have similarly low risk profiles.
> And California is a big state, I'm sure there are forests that have similarly low risk profiles.
Well, there used to be. For example the coastal quasi-rainforest in Big Basin near Santa Cruz.
But climate change appears to have pushed places like that into the burn zone. Nowadays even Olympic National Park, an area full of temperate rainforest, is experiencing wildfire.
it seems like pretty much any forest area of California is at wildfire risk these days.
By choosing to live in a forest, you are creating problems for the society you are part of. Among them are the related risk you cause a fire that affects others, need to protect you from fires, and inability to set controlled fires near you that would protect others. It makes sense to have rules and/or fees to prevent or offset that.
It's funny. In a recent discussion I was arguing against someone wanting to increase power costs on rural customers, because I think doing so carelessly would impact the food supply chain. But it doesn't take too much "living in forests is great" foolish selfishness in the middle of a discussion of wildfires to make me wonder if I was on the wrong side of that one.
The apparently controversial remark is in the commentary. Tacitus (Germania 1,16) merely says that the Germanic tribesmen, barbarians they are, do not live in towns but each family in their cleared patch of forest. The commentary expands on that, saying that that statement doesn't need much elaboration, humans do not belong in the forest.
“The fires have released about half the typical annual emissions from the transportation sector. And they’ve topped annual emissions from all of the state’s power plants—a threshold that hasn’t been passed even in recent severe fire seasons.”
“In Oregon, a similar story is unfolding—except there, wildfire emissions have managed to surpass annual transportation emissions as well.”
Trees work on a much shorter carbon cycle though so shouldn't be equated to digging million year old oil out of the ground and burning that. 20 years time, most of that carbon will be sequestered back in the form of new trees.
Unsettling observations of burn scars have hinted that, thanks to climate change, some of these burning wooded areas may not grow back, and instead convert permanently into scrubland or grassland.
From an Australian perspective the main factor in us not getting as many hazard reduction burns as we’d like completed isn’t financial it’s the weather. There’s such a thin window of time when the bush is dry enough that we can actually light it but the weather conditions aren’t so dangerous that to do so would be foolhardy.
We could spend money to eke out a little around the margins like using more paid firefighters to do mid week burns. It’s not addressing the main issue, though. The climate is changing.
The end of the article talks about grants for homes in fire-prone areas. No thanks; this sounds just like the FEMA rebuilding the same flood-prone areas again and again.
Let's not subsidize the exurbs, but get people away from dry Forests.
Totally agree. You just have to look around and see tons of really nice houses up in the hills that will be very hard and extremely expensive to defend. These people should have to buy market based fire insurance or figure out something else. It's much more efficient to defend groups of hundreds or thousands of houses in towns.
Ideally, people shouldn't live in high risk fire areas. However, there's already a shortage of housing on the west coast. Removing housing stock from fire areas will reduce the fire risk to human life but will also make the housing shortage worse.
Short of resolving the NIMBY problem that prevents higher-density construction in fire-safe areas, paying residents in fire-prone areas to harden their communities is the best choice out of a selection of bad options.
Also keep in mind that keeping people away from fires does nothing to reduce the smoke problem, which is very severe in its own right. The solution needs to be fewer fires, whether they pose an immediate risk to human life or not.
Building into fire areas is not a solution for the housing shortage. Usually these houses are widely distributed with tons of land around them. In absolute numbers they are probably negligible. But they cost a lot of money to protect during a fire.
> Risk-related barriers (fear of liability and negative public perceptions) prevent landowners from beginning the burn planning process. Both resource-related barriers (limited funding, crew availability and experience) and regulations-related barriers (poor weather conditions for burning and environmental regulations) prevent landowners from conducting burns, creating a gap between planning and implementation [0]
My opinion is that this legislation does not go far enough to address the chronic disregard of action to inhibit these cataclysmic events. I would much rather have the government over-correct and over-allocate instead of taking an incremental approach on this. I do not want to wake up to months of awful quality air or see the forests that I have come to love so much be scorched more than is necessary.
I think this is a good idea, but I doubt it will end up being popular. One of these prescribed fires is going to get out of control, then the victims will sue the state, and it will end up being much more expensive for the taxpayers than a larger fires with less payout per victim. Any such law should include a component freeing the state from any liability for damage.
I agree, although it's ridiculous- judging by past news releases, a prescribed fire that gets out of control will grab headlines if it burns 50 acres more than planned. What is 50 acres compared to preventing the next August Complex?
Key point readers are missing from the bottom of the article-
Jack Cohen is a retired U.S. Forest Service Research fire scientist who has spent years determining how structures ignite during extreme wildfires. In a September 21, 2020 article he wrote for Wildfire Today with Dave Strohmaier, they addressed how homes ignite during extreme wildfires.
“Surprisingly, research has shown that home ignitions during extreme wildfires result from conditions local to a home. A home’s ignition vulnerabilities in relation to nearby burning materials within 100 feet principally determine home ignitions. This area of a home and its immediate surroundings is called the home ignition zone (HIZ). Typically, lofted burning embers initiate ignitions within the HIZ – to homes directly and nearby flammables leading to homes. Although an intense wildfire can loft firebrands more than one-half mile to start fires, the minuscule local conditions where the burning embers land and accumulate determine ignitions. Importantly, most home destruction during extreme wildfires occurs hours after the wildfire has ceased intense burning near the community; the residential fuels – homes, other structures, and vegetation – continue fire spread within the community.
“Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable, however, by reducing home ignition potential within the HIZ we can create ignition resistant homes and communities. Thus, community wildfire risk should be defined as a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem.”
i was hoping to see mention of employing cultural burning methods used by indigenous folks[0], who have multiple generations of experience already in this area. it seems possible some of this money does end up being employed this way, but it's disappointing that it's not more prominently featured in a story like this.
As an amature biodiversity-focused conservationist, I've found it hard to keep policy conversations from devolving into zero sum economic reasoning. It seems like once a certain threshold of wealth and equity issues is crossed, systems thinking goes out the window completely.
* 33 million acres of forest in CA, 57% owned by the feds, 3% by CA, 14% by the logging industry, 26% by others
* $200/acre for prescribed burns, $1000/acre for thinning, ~$800/acre on average for the US fire service
* 1.1 million acres need treatment each year (~$1B/year) to be effective, according to the little hoover commission
* ~$2B committed by CA, but over at least 5 years
* this bill would appropriate $300M/yr from feds
on the flipside, it's harder to pin down benefits. they cite $9B in costs from one fire, but how much of that is (socialized) losses from excessive (private) risk-taking? it's unclear, but likely not none. how does insurance account for and/or distort that risk?
none of the articles spend much time quantifying health or environmental costs (e.g., CO₂e) of forest fires on the population, and the potential reductions from better management.
it's hard to take a reasonable position without knowing the magnitude of these benefits as well.
Among estimates I've seen are 20,000 homeless (I belive from 2017 fire season), another source gives 67,000 displaced in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties alone, and as many as 3,000 premature deaths from smoke-induced air pollution, most to 65+ age groups.
Probably high-side, but a portion of the fire-displaced are likely to become so. If we assume half that cost, displacement alone is ~$340 million/yr.
The US puts a statistical quality year of life at $129,000. Life expectancy aged 65 is 20 years. Again, reducing this by half (assuming premature deaths are spread across the age cohort), we get a ~$4 billion value. This would again be an annually-incurred cost.
thanks, that seems to be a reasonable analysis. i'd like to look into the disproportionate risk side of things too, but data on that seems less accessible/more scattered.
Systemic risk are inherently difficult to assess. They're often rare, complex, distributed, in time, space, population, and mechanisms. All of these make both quantification and messaging much more difficult.
sure, and that's the rub. the systemic risk in this case is for a relatively small/local system compared to the state. if the systemic risk were distributed across the state, the easy answer is socializing the cost at the state level. but here, it's more localized than that (even as the boundaries might be long, since the risks tend to be on the edges). how much should be apportioned to the individuals/companies, insurance, and the government?
it's similar to the discussion around flood maps in relation to assessors/appraisers, risk adjusters, fema, and insurance. those maps are at least in part designed to apportion risk and responsibility.
Not sure I agree here. In recent years, wildfire has hit urban parts of Santa Barbara and surrounding communities (Goleta, Monticello, Carpenteria), downtown Ventura, Santa Rosa, both city and suburban Los Angeles and San Diego, and entire rural cities (e.g., Paradise).
Urban-wilderness interfaces are major feaatures of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Vacaville, and other counties and metro areas.
The prospects for major urban-impinging wildfires in Solono, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Sonoma, and Napa counties, even if generally subject to less-severe conditions (lower temps and winds, higher humidities) is high and growing. (Several of these regions have seen major fires.)
Newsom was touting the other day that the state is dedicating another $2B (not sure if incremental or what) towards fighting wildfires.
The problem is, the more money you make available, the more that the agencies will find to justify that it needs to be spent. How? Well, we'll figure that out later. Probably something having to do with more planes, technology, contractors, etc. I.e. bandaids.
Seems similar to healthcare -- you pay for treatments, and that's what you're gonna incentivize. As many treatments as doctors can justify, with outcome or root cause only as an afterthought.
Healthcare worker here. Love this comment, spot on. Newsom should allocate 2B, or 20B, and create a metric of fire prevention relative to fire risk, and then reward communities with a higher value (i.e., fewer fires per unit of fire risk means more dough). That would align incentives and fix the problem (or at least, not make it worse).
Can I ask a bit of a dumb question though? It seems like educated opinion has swung towards doing prescribed burns, and I remember hearing about this decades ago too. But- don't the same areas keep burning in California every fire season? Shouldn't these uncontrolled burns have already swept out the detritus, easily burnable material, etc.? If the same areas burn every year- doesn't that sort of indicate that controlled burns aren't effective?
The crux of the matter here is that getting forested areas to the point of being able to do controlled/prescribed burns is going to take an insane amount of effort and is only happening to a fraction of the forest needed to keep things under control.
You can't just go start a fire in a forest and hope it goes well. You have to manually go through and clear the brush in the understory, or else the fire will be so hot it will burn down large trees.
Once you've cleared much of the small woody brush, etc that causes these fires to be absolutely massive, regular fires will typically be much more mild and continue helping keep the forest understory clear without requiring much manual labor.
It really is pretty effective, but it does require lots of little fires quite frequently.
Most of it doesn't burn every year, but many places that have been logged and now have no trees will have issues with invasive species that grow quickly and explode into flame.
Those invasive species will be displaced when larger tress grow over them, but in the meantime will be a substantial fire risk.
Having both the invasive species and high fuel loads under large trees leads to megafires.
At the end of the day things are going to burn. The question is can we build better to lessen some parts of the human impact, such as houses not burning to the ground. We may not be able to do anything about the air quality at all.
What is interesting is that you may not get the same habitat you started out with. The current forest may be what is overgrown for over a hundred years.
What grows well after a fire might be different trees that thrive in the current climate. Many parts of Colorado have had fires in pine forests. What grows back will be pinion and scrub.
A lot of discussion on this issue rightfully centers on California and often touches on the prison labor aspect without exploring the history. Anyone who wants to understand the real priorities behind California’s “honor camps” (later “conservation camps”) should compare their history and expansion [0] to the demographic changes happening in the state around the same time [1].
Anyone with a rural home should know how to clear a fire zone around his humble Adobe unless they’re prepared to lose it.
Once cleared, it’s easy to cut trees down to keep it clear when these trees are smaller.
Same thing with maintaining MANY fire-lines (wide cleared path) crisscrossing their precious forest.
Modern folks expects modern firefighters. And one of the modern tools for today’s firefighter MUST be clear-burning and control-burns.
But do modern folks know this? Noooo, it’s just a pearl-clutching, collective-gasp that their poorly-trained notion expect firefighters not to start fires and ONLY to stop fires.
Me think firefighting unit and forestry management needs to be a bit more cohesive either in principle or practice.
If you're interested in this topic (and if you live in California, you probably should be), I recommend reading reports like this one from a California State policy arm:
It'll take you through a better-than-surface understanding of the problem history and how we got here, contributing factors, potential solutions, and political/social obstacles.
Great idea the only problem is preventing the fire from getting out of control. As we haven't been doing we can't just start tomorrow as they will turn into the fires we have today.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't still use prescribed burns; we should. Just smaller burns with proper protection to ensure the fire is under control.
Consider that the constant blaming of forest management is actually a tactic from the right to prolong denial of climate change by their voting base. Yes it helps, no it isn't going to do that much when California fire seasons have extended over 2 months due to climate change.
Two things can be true at once: fire season is coming earlier (climate change) and we have known since the 1990s that the West Coast needs controlled burns, but have not been doing them. (I saw an article about the CA wildfire and brush buildup problem in 1998.)
Consider also that truth is not relative to political persuasion, and a commitment to truth above partisanship is likely the only way initiatives will succeed with bipartisan support.
Actual Old Growth Forest is very cool, but it's totally unsuitable anywhere near humans. It will sometimes burn spectacularly for various reasons, which would be devastating locally, and so if there are humans they'll try to stop it doing that because they don't want to die or have their homes destroyed.
So - we're not talking about Old Growth Forest, these are managed forests, humans are already messing with them, the only question is what management strategies to use. "Let's just not manage the forest" is not an option unless you are going to evacuate essentially all the humans from the region. Like, if the only human for 100km is a government official surveying the forest or something, that doesn't need managing. If there's a town there, you have no choice, you're managing that forest now, like it or not.
It's sort of the trolley problem. Prescribed fire might get out of control sometimes and kill a few people and damage property, but overall it should save way more.
Yes. There was a death last year in South Carolina (Angela Chadwick Hawkins) when a device used for starting fires blew up.
According to one article [1] there were 6 deaths from prescribed burns between 1963 and 2013 (and 201 deaths from undesired wildfires). While looking this up,I was also surprised to learn that the #1 cause of death when fighting wildfires is vehicle accidents, and the majority of those are plane crashes
I don't see the connection between prescribed or wild fires with global warming other than global warming has led to droughts and climate change that make these fires worse to manage.
That's what I was writing about. I see wildfires around the world getting more serious (Australia had huge fires effecting the whole southern hemisphere's air quality). I'm worried that forrest management is not enough at this point to stop air quality from getting worse.
Of course, I'm not arguing against controlled burns at all.
My question was: are they enough to stop the huge emissions from forest fires, or are we as a species already over that point, and even with the best available methods air quality will get worse every year?
I'm asking because I have vasomotor rhinitis and I'm extremely scared that I won't have any place on earth to hide from air pollution.
Let'ssstarts with pollution, smoke and particals. There will always be emissions from fires. Smaller fires spread the emissions out over several years, while this large fire is many years at once. However smaller fires don't burn as much of their emissions, so the total over a large number of years is greater. However the earth is better able to absorb them when spread out over time. If you live next to the fire it is better to evacuate every 20 years than live next to the smaller fire every year (Small means you don't need to evacuate) for the rest of the world though the small fire means the pollution doesn't reach you and so smaller is better.
If you are worried about CO2, then smaller fire leave a bit more unburned charcoal (sequestered carbon) behind every year and contribute to a long term global cooling. (it will take thousands of years to make up for one year of the rest of what we do, so don't get excited).
So the plan seems to remove water from the soil to fight the lack of water in the ecosystem, that is bone dry because the water has been removed previously... I can't wait to see the results.
Don't we generally know that we need to do more prescribed fire burning? Isn't this generally highjacked by the timber industry to protect valuable "product?"
If that's true, will this federal bill address that? It seems like it allocates money but doesn't talk about the other 53% of the lands that are not federally managed. And, it doesn't talk about whether the 47% lands are the problem or not. In Oregon where I live, the massive fires were ten miles from me in largely residentially adjacent lands. Are those going to be helped?
I love that this bill offers jobs to formerly incarcerated people that have been fighting fires.
If I'm wrong about my first assumption, would really like to know.
Also, I saw a statistic that said California needs to do prescribed burns of about a million acres a year to manage wildfire risk. They are currently doing only 40,000. But these massive fires over the last month are approaching that million acre number: does anyone know if next year we will be safer because of those fires?