Oh, I KNOW that I Should Too, but it's kinda like trying NOT to Look when driving past an accident scene, you just can't Help It
Doug
I have some questions about California
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Oh, I KNOW that I Should Too, but it's kinda like trying NOT to Look when driving past an accident scene, you just can't Help It
Doug
I worked for the USFS in the '80s, in Arizona California and Wyoming. My work for them in California took me to much of the lumber generating forests in the central Sierra. I also studied fire ecology at university while getting a wildlife biology degree. Even back in the '80s (and earlier) land managers knew that the years of fire supression was creating a build up of fuels. There's only two ways to deal with that- burn it or thin it. I worked on thinning crews when I was a firefighter in Arizona. The goal there was for the remaining trees to make 2x4s faster but a side effect was reducing fuel loads, especially small fuels. (after thinning they used cats to pile the slash and burned it in the winter). Control burns can do the same thing at a much lower cost. Control burns are not illegal in California! Even close to the more urban areas where air pollution is a concern. They did some in a park not far from me a few months ago. I can't do one as a regular private citizen but my land's not appropriate anyhow.
As more people (like me) move into the "wildland urban interface" it gets harder to burn- no one want to chance burning up people's houses. So they have to thin, which costs more. The federal land management agencies have had their budgets cut repeatedly since the '80s in both R and D administrations. Which means less thinning, when we need more. As the linked article earlier in the thread stated, logging makes for a worse situation for fire, not better. Clear cuts mean lots of small trees and brush in 10 years. Select cuts take the big trees that survive fire the best and leave the smaller more flammable trees. We can't log our way out of the problem. Climate change is making fires bigger and hotter and the fire season longer. We need to address this, at the federal, state and local levels. In my area a resident's group does fire mitigation. Among other things they get grants to clear along the roads to make an evacuation safer, and they sponsor free chipping programs to get rid of people's slash from their thinning.
The houses in Paradise were pretty close together for "wildland"- look at the videos. More like suburbs with pine trees. Thats not the best situation for fire- houses burn hot, so one can ignite the next if it's close. The videos from people fleeing show embers being blown along by the wind and passing the cars. That's bad. That combined with super low humidity and very dry vegetation made for a bad situation. Even worse, there's only a few roads in/out of Paradise and some were cut off by the fire. Paradise knew they had a problem and they recently came up with a complicated evacuation plan with many zones. But they did not plan for having to evacuate all 27,000 at once.
My house has roof sprinklers and a big water tank up the hill to supply them. Cement siding and class A deck materials. Fire hose and tools. My house is well away from the neighbors. I've been clearing and thinning on my property- that's why I came to this site. Would it be enough in a fire like Paradise? Hard to say but there's a good chance it would not. It should help in a lower intensity fire though.
As more people (like me) move into the "wildland urban interface" it gets harder to burn- no one want to chance burning up people's houses. So they have to thin, which costs more. The federal land management agencies have had their budgets cut repeatedly since the '80s in both R and D administrations. Which means less thinning, when we need more. As the linked article earlier in the thread stated, logging makes for a worse situation for fire, not better. Clear cuts mean lots of small trees and brush in 10 years. Select cuts take the big trees that survive fire the best and leave the smaller more flammable trees. We can't log our way out of the problem. Climate change is making fires bigger and hotter and the fire season longer. We need to address this, at the federal, state and local levels. In my area a resident's group does fire mitigation. Among other things they get grants to clear along the roads to make an evacuation safer, and they sponsor free chipping programs to get rid of people's slash from their thinning.
The houses in Paradise were pretty close together for "wildland"- look at the videos. More like suburbs with pine trees. Thats not the best situation for fire- houses burn hot, so one can ignite the next if it's close. The videos from people fleeing show embers being blown along by the wind and passing the cars. That's bad. That combined with super low humidity and very dry vegetation made for a bad situation. Even worse, there's only a few roads in/out of Paradise and some were cut off by the fire. Paradise knew they had a problem and they recently came up with a complicated evacuation plan with many zones. But they did not plan for having to evacuate all 27,000 at once.
My house has roof sprinklers and a big water tank up the hill to supply them. Cement siding and class A deck materials. Fire hose and tools. My house is well away from the neighbors. I've been clearing and thinning on my property- that's why I came to this site. Would it be enough in a fire like Paradise? Hard to say but there's a good chance it would not. It should help in a lower intensity fire though.
Lower-intensity fires via thinning and RX burns should be a priority. We can't prevent all fires. We can, however, reduce their impacts. It's gonna be expensive, which will be a hard sell in good years where fires are scarce, but it's going to have to be done if these tragedies are to be curtailed.
clear cuts mimic fires, all the brush and slash is stacked, possibly burned, then replanted at appropriate spacing, if done right it should be just as resilient to fire as any thin.
The problem with unmanaged forests is the fuel load on the ground, dead branches and brush pile up, dry out and wait for a spark. These really bad forests will burn the ground sterile, so hot it burns the nutrients right out of the dirt, nothing grows then, nothing survives
Thinning is good yes, maybe even better then clear cutting in a fire management sense, but thinning is expensive to do right, so if you want proper management you need a balance of both, clear cuts to pay for thins that then get clear cut to pay for more thins. The upside to proper management is that it becomes very profitable, thinning promotes better growth to the leave trees, which then produce more money, etc, and thinning if done right does not have to be a net loss. Anyway if folks would stop muddling with DNR and Forest Service, they might be allowed to do their jobs, and be self sustaining again.
Please note, that every forest is different, even just a few hundred yards away could be a totally different forest and different issues, bold statements about how to manage nature tend to cause catastrophic back lash from nature
The problem with unmanaged forests is the fuel load on the ground, dead branches and brush pile up, dry out and wait for a spark. These really bad forests will burn the ground sterile, so hot it burns the nutrients right out of the dirt, nothing grows then, nothing survives
Thinning is good yes, maybe even better then clear cutting in a fire management sense, but thinning is expensive to do right, so if you want proper management you need a balance of both, clear cuts to pay for thins that then get clear cut to pay for more thins. The upside to proper management is that it becomes very profitable, thinning promotes better growth to the leave trees, which then produce more money, etc, and thinning if done right does not have to be a net loss. Anyway if folks would stop muddling with DNR and Forest Service, they might be allowed to do their jobs, and be self sustaining again.
Please note, that every forest is different, even just a few hundred yards away could be a totally different forest and different issues, bold statements about how to manage nature tend to cause catastrophic back lash from nature
To the end of mankind for that it is nature paying the price for mankind.
Mountain pine beetle (MPB) have been an important part of the 'Rocky Mountain ecosystem' and fire being another important ingredient for perhaps millions of years. Why does it carry a fungi in it mouth that can shut down the trees ability to circulate nutrients as well larvi that can girdle a tree? Its got two ways to kill in sick trees. It also has the ability
to seek out the sick/stressed. In the past these would have been the largest trees in the canopy. If they were naturally coming to their lifes end then the beetles would make the kill that would create voids in the canopy that would have let the light in and in return create 'growth spurts' in the understory in healthy but otherwise supresed by crown competition.
In cases like dwarf mistletoe were the disease from the residuals drop down and affect the understory the beetles were natures way. The females found the sick and put off the phermones for the others. Thinning of stands. Frequent fires would also pass through to clean the ground and pop the seeds from the resin cones. Next 'outbreak' the beetles may hit some likely then smaller ones that were more prone to fire damaged and repeat.
Well it was a nice story anyways
Mountain pine beetle (MPB) have been an important part of the 'Rocky Mountain ecosystem' and fire being another important ingredient for perhaps millions of years. Why does it carry a fungi in it mouth that can shut down the trees ability to circulate nutrients as well larvi that can girdle a tree? Its got two ways to kill in sick trees. It also has the ability
to seek out the sick/stressed. In the past these would have been the largest trees in the canopy. If they were naturally coming to their lifes end then the beetles would make the kill that would create voids in the canopy that would have let the light in and in return create 'growth spurts' in the understory in healthy but otherwise supresed by crown competition.
In cases like dwarf mistletoe were the disease from the residuals drop down and affect the understory the beetles were natures way. The females found the sick and put off the phermones for the others. Thinning of stands. Frequent fires would also pass through to clean the ground and pop the seeds from the resin cones. Next 'outbreak' the beetles may hit some likely then smaller ones that were more prone to fire damaged and repeat.
Well it was a nice story anyways
A good assessment of beetles as a disturbance agent in closed-canopy forests. Shoulder-to-shoulder stands well into stem exclusion need a hand sometimes. Beetles and root rot make the holes in the closed canopy that make the next generation possible. Holes don't pay in the business model of trees as a crop, so they have been banished. This is one of the more significant problems in western forestry as practiced today.
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