9 ms·

As a Coloradan, this is something that we have been especially hard hit by. More and more people are living in/around our national forests in the mountains. Nat

As a Coloradan, this is something that we have been especially hard hit by. More and more people are living in/around our national forests in the mountains. Naturally, they don't want to deal with fires, nor the remnants left behind (charred landscape for a decade or more.) But as this article alludes to, it has to burn. It does naturally. We have to let go - we are wasting valuable resources to fight these fires. People have _died_ fighting these fires. And for what? So your house doesn't burn down? I'm sorry, but a fire is typically a slow-moving natural disaster. It rarely strikes without a fair warning. I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN. We can't keep fighting nature and winning.

ghouse 11y ago
"Carry Fire Insurance" -- That raises the fundamental economic issue, which surprisingly the Economist was silent; a policy of fire suppression is a subsidy for the people who choose to live int he forest. If there wasn't a policy of fire suppression, a home owner wouldn't be able to get fire insurance, and without it, they wouldn't be able to get a mortgage so fewer homes would be built in the forest.
- kjs3 11y ago
  See also: flood insurance
  - eastbayjake 11y ago
    Yes! The far bigger cost is subsidizing people who live near hurricane-prone coasts rather than sparsely-populated Western forests.
    - learnstats2 11y ago
      Where are people supposed to live? All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?
      - unprepare 11y ago
        >All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. I guess if you ignore the entire midwest?
        slg 11y ago
        Which is tornado prone ;) Almost every region comes with its own set of possible natural disasters. Maybe we are better off pooling everything and just have natural disaster insurance that covers fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, blizzard, and so on.
        kbenson 11y ago
        Yes, almost every area has it's own disasters to worry about, but it's a mistake to assume that the frequency and average damage for each type of disaster and each area normalizes out to a similar value.
        slg 11y ago
        That is obviously true, but that doesn't stop other insurance industries. A healthy 40 year old women and a 70 year old man with heart disease are going to have different prices for a $1m life insurance policy, but both policies will pay out equally regardless of when they die. I'm not saying home insurance needs to be the same cost for everyone, but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex. Plus climate change is changing the risk profile for everyone and the results of which are not yet clearly understood by climate scientists let alone random homeowners.
        kbenson 11y ago
        > but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex I actually think it's not complex enough. How else do you accurately price natural disasters into existing homes, whose ownership is often measured in decades? I think any area with a chance over a certain percent of a natural disaster that could cause catastrophic loss of property should require insurance, and the insurance cost should be as accurate as possible to the reality of living in that location.
  - bmj 11y ago
    I'd argue that flood insurance isn't necessarily the same thing, at least in some cases. I live in an area with three rivers and lots of creeks and runs that feed those rivers. It isn't always "natural" for the sections of the river, or those creeks to flood. It takes a lot of rain, in some cases "act of God" levels. Flood insurance seems pretty reasonable in those cases, particularly since in many cases, there isn't a ton of flood preventation infrastructure that has been built with tax money.
    - electricblue 11y ago
      in most cases we're talking about people who build their houses in category 1 storm surge / 10 year flood zones and then expect a subsidy when inevitably natures does what it does.
    - cma 11y ago
      He's talking about federal flood insurance subsidies. Which do things like subsidize multi-million-dollar-beach-front-house flood insurance.
    - ajross 11y ago
      > It isn't always "natural" for the [...] the river [...] to flood. It takes a lot of rain, in some cases "act of God" levels. That's a weird definition for "natural" you're using. I think you mean something more like "typical". Unless you're making a theological point, an "act of God" is quite literally as natural (in the sense of un-artificial) as you can get. But the grandparent's point was economic. Disaster insurance can't work: the whole idea behind insurance is that "bad stuff" happens rarely to some people, so everyone pools money together to pay for the few who actually needed. Disasters happen broadly, and to everyone who needs it in the affected area. A "correct" insurance scheme there would be tantamount to everyone having to just save money on their own, there's no efficiency. And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid.
      - kbenson 11y ago
        > And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid. Or changing conditions throw off their actuarial tables, making the company insolvent when reality intercedes. Those changes could be as obvious (at this stage) as climate change, or as subtle as a long-standing practice of preventing forest fires, which while seemingly preventing property loss to fire is actually creating an unstable system which has the capability for much larger destruction than the typical fire.
  - bilbo0s 11y ago
    To be fair... (and pragmatic) Societies subsidize people who live in flood plains because of agriculture, infrastructure and logistics. Essentially, we get far more OUT of people living in MOST flood plains than we put in with respect to subsidies. Consider MOST of the coastal cities. We, obviously, get WAY more OUT of Houston, Galveston and New Orleans, for example, than we put in. Those three ports are enormously important to us. If they disappeared tomorrow, you would discover why they were important the hard way. Similarly for people living in midwestern flood plains. We will typically get far more out of them than we put in. Try feeding the world, with currently known agricultural technology, while not using any land in flood plains and you'll see what I mean. Even if you could somehow manage to do it... and I don't think you could.... but even if you could, you would cause enormous damage to the ecological tapestry of the continent. You would have to move MATERIAL amounts of water and soil at a minimum. It's best to subsidize the farmers to do what they do and make sure they're not disturbed in their endeavors. And, yes, many of those farmers and agribusinesses will be in flood plains. Now I'm not saying ALL flood plains in the midwest or on the coast are critical infrastructure. New York, Houston and New Orleans are far more critical to our survival than... say... Miami, Myrtle Beach or Malibu. So obviously, I'm not saying that ALL port cities or ALL midwestern flood plains are critical. But there are definitely some places in this nation that merit sizable subsidies to keep people living and working there. It's the nature of the beast when you're talking about engineering an empire.
    - jvm 11y ago
      For any activities that really are that valuable, there is no need for a subsidy. The revenue from the activity in those cases exceeds the costs of dealing with the disaster. The efficient thing to do is end the subsidy, and have all the less valuable activities whose benefits don't exceed the costs relocate or cease.
      - muraiki 11y ago
        Efficiency must be balanced, though. Say that we end the subsidy on agricultural flood plains, which drives up the cost to farmers, who become less competitive vs imported food. They decide to close up shop and do something more profitable, since they can't complete with imports. The end result is an increase in efficiency but a loss of food security. I'm sure other people have thought this through much better than what I just said. But it seems to me to be a reasonable argument.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  Houses can also be made much more fire resistant than they are. Use metal and masonry for the exterior surfaces rather than wood and asphalt, for example. Keep the fuel and vegetation away from the walls. Build a masonry fence as a fire break. It's all just common sense.
  - btbuildem 11y ago
    Have you seen what these fires do?! Your metal exterior surface will become a puddle of metal, and your masonry fence will be a pile of rubble.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      A house built this way famously survived a fire in California a few years back. http://www.concretethinker.com/solutions/Disaster-Resistance.aspx http://www.concretethinker.com/solutions/Disaster-Resistance... Some friends of mine built a house this way in Montana, and the firefighters told them that if all Montanans built their wilderness homes that way, their job would be a lot easier. You can find a lot of information on this by googling for "fire resistant home".
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - briandear 11y ago
    Fires will jump over that masonry. Unless you live in a concrete dome, the fire will get across. These are infernos not unlike the fires of hell. Fire is almost raining down on you. Fire resistant doesn't work in the middle of a serious wildfire.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Defense in depth works just fine for wild fires. Step 1 is zero trees or flammable brush near structure, step to is active misters to keep place damp. Quick and dirty approach is to use a controlled burn to clear brush near property and then just use a sprinkler system. Granted these are far from 100% effective, but even a 50/50 shot at saving a property is worth a fair amount of effort.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
foldor 11y ago
Just to play devil's advocate. What about the amount of greenhouse gases released by the fires? We're clearly not succeeding in reducing our greenhouse gases, so why not reduce it where we can?
- danharaj 11y ago
  Forest fires are a cyclic phenomenon complemented by forest growth. Best to let nature find its own equilibria and change human processes to be sustainable.
  - TheGrimDerp1 11y ago
    Also a good idea if you live in the woods to trim back from the house & wet things down when a fire's comin your way...
- evgen 11y ago
  You mean the greenhouse gasses that were originally sequestered by the forest into a cellulose matrix and which were inevitably going to be re-released when the tree died and the wood rotted? Yeah, I don't think the process works the way you think it does.
  - msandford 11y ago
    Most of the time when wood rots, it still sequesters CO2. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to create soil through the accumulation of biomass. All the dirt would be mineral only, and no black soil would exist anywhere. The blackness of black soil is due primarily to carbon. Which isn't floating around in the air.
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Seems like the difference in timescale between soil creation and wood decomposition would argue against sequestration occurring "most of the time." Soil biomass might represent only 1% or so of decomposition products. But I haven't seen any actual figures...
xlm1717 11y ago
It does has to burn. This is why we have prescribed burns, to safely burn the forest and reduce future wildfire damages. The article says that the portion of the budget dedicated to fighting fires keeps increasing, giving less money to land management decided to prevent a lot of the fires we are fighting. Seems to me that continuing on this path will just result in ever increasing costs. We have to let it burn, on our terms.
- snuxoll 11y ago
  Logging helps a lot too. I don't get why it's such a controversial topic, I don't advocate chopping down entire forests, but why on earth are commercial loggers not allowed to thin things out?
  - pyre 11y ago
    When have commercial loggers ever "thinned things out?" Since the beginning it's always been a "choose a section of forest and start chopping until nothing is left" industry.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      Well for one, that's not entirely true. Loggers plant just about as many trees as they cut down. Otherwise they'd be out of business pretty quick. And even when they chop, "thinning things out" is a perfectly valid way of logging and is practiced in many places. Secondly, the question was "why don't they thin things out". Not "why don't we let them thin things out". Implying a change to normal behavior.
      - Qworg 11y ago
        Planting trees post clear cutting does not establish a healthy or usable forest. Thinning is more expensive and difficult than clear cutting, which is why we don't do it often.
        11y ago
makecheck 11y ago
Humans cause fires though. Do we know that all human-caused fires would still have occurred "naturally" if the humans hadn't been there? On what do you base the statement that a fire is typically "slow-moving"? It can certainly be fast. Here's an example. [1] [1] http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/the-speed-of-fire/ http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/the-speed-of-fire/
- placeybordeaux 11y ago
  Recent research has been showing that native americans shaped their forests with fire. It's entirely possible that many of the north american forests intentional human caused fires as part of their normal cycle. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire#Human-shaped_landscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire#Hu...
- kbenson 11y ago
  I think that's a combination of high winds and young growth. If it is young growth, it's actually illustrating what the article is describing, the young growth trees are young, but not at young s they should be, and they bridge the gap between the undergrowth and canopy. Once the canopy catches in a dense forest, there's a real problem, but a dense forest with undergrowth only on file may be a mild, slow moving (since the wind may be mostly blocked) fire.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Humans cause some fires. Not all. I'm not even sure that humans cause the majority.
  - fredkbloggs 11y ago
    This varies greatly by region, land use, and weather patterns. In some places and years, humans dominate; others, lightning. Because humans tend to start more fires near cities, campgrounds, and other accessible areas, those fires tend to be contained or extinguished quickly. Lightning starts tend to be on ridgelines, near peaks, and in other remote areas that are difficult to reach. Many of the big, long-burning fires are lightning starts, but they also tend to threaten fewer structures. Obviously there are exceptions all around.
baldfat 11y ago
Just build homes that withstand wildfires: http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a17038/washington-man-survives-blazing-wildfire-by-hunkering-down-in-dome-home/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a17038/wa... http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304315004579383363776343476 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043150045793833...
- kbenson 11y ago
  I was actually thinking this as well. Higher insurance premiums for homes that are not rated to far exceed what should in practice be possible to experience in a hurricane or fire should be the norm. Actually, my guess is this is coming, as soon as the actuarial tables adjust to the new climate reality (barring political meddling to suppress normal market forces). As for floods... I dunno, maybe insurance requiring some portion of the house that is higher than the flood plain and that the house is not in danger of becoming unmoored for any sort of sane rates. I imagine that would make housing in places way under the flood plane or that face both floods and hurricanes expensive to build in, which is the point.
  - spaceactuary 11y ago
    "Actuarial tables" are really only used to price life insurance. Property/Casualty insurance (auto, home, work comp, etc.) are priced by analyzing recent loss experience, then trending loss costs forward (as medical costs & replacement costs go up over time). Hazards that are infrequent and spatially-correlated (hurricane, tornado/hail, fire) are often priced by using simulations, which take into account the nature of the event, engineering simulations, and insurance policy terms. Flood insurance is incredibly politicized, as it's handled at the federal level. Floods are typically considered an "uninsurable event" given that if you live in a flood plan, there's a high likelihood that you'll have a loss due to flood--less of an "if" than a "when". Flood insurance is sold & claims are handled by insurance companies, but it is effectively reinsured 100% by the federal government. Actuarial studies have show the premiums to be highly inadequate, but there has been legislation that aims to reduce that inadequacy.
e40 11y ago
Is it possible to clear enough brush/trees from around your house that the chance of it catching on fire is small? I've always wondered this, but I've never seen this issue addressed anywhere. Thanks. EDIT: of course, if your house was left standing in the middle of a fire wasteland, you might want to live there anymore.
- yxhuvud 11y ago
  Yes, it is possible to make fire-breaks where the fire can be handled. They have to be very large (and therefore expensive. Both in terms of land and in terms of maintenance) to protect your house against a mega fire though. Of course, they could be created in preventative fashion to limit the fires so that the size of the forest fires is limited.
  - maxcasey 11y ago
    While it would have to be "large" for a "mega fire," there are a lot of small and inexpensive things you can do to help protect your home. Things like removing any shurbs around your house are very useful. Won't necessarily save your house, but it's a good start.
- maxcasey 11y ago
  Yes it is, and it's actually pretty easy. There are many ways to reduce the chance of a fire hitting your actual living structure and out west there actually are landscaping firms that specialize in doing that. Unfortunately many older homes/properties aren't set up for this so that's when it can get expensive. Source: I'm a wildland fire fighter. Have seen awesome and terrible uses of fireproofing property.
hugh4 11y ago
>I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN. If people did that, you couldn't buy fire insurance any more. Let's look more positively at the problem. Use robots to fight fires. Use robots to manage fuel stocks. Learn more about firefighting as a species. I think we can get a lot better at fighting fires than we are right now.

ghouse 11y ago

"Carry Fire Insurance" -- That raises the fundamental economic issue, which surprisingly the Economist was silent; a policy of fire suppression is a subsidy for the people who choose to live int he forest. If there wasn't a policy of fire suppression, a home owner wouldn't be able to get fire insurance, and without it, they wouldn't be able to get a mortgage so fewer homes would be built in the forest.

kjs3 11y ago
See also: flood insurance
- eastbayjake 11y ago
  Yes! The far bigger cost is subsidizing people who live near hurricane-prone coasts rather than sparsely-populated Western forests.
  - learnstats2 11y ago
    Where are people supposed to live? All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?
    - unprepare 11y ago
      >All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. I guess if you ignore the entire midwest?
      - slg 11y ago
        Which is tornado prone ;) Almost every region comes with its own set of possible natural disasters. Maybe we are better off pooling everything and just have natural disaster insurance that covers fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, blizzard, and so on.
        kbenson 11y ago
        Yes, almost every area has it's own disasters to worry about, but it's a mistake to assume that the frequency and average damage for each type of disaster and each area normalizes out to a similar value.
        slg 11y ago
        That is obviously true, but that doesn't stop other insurance industries. A healthy 40 year old women and a 70 year old man with heart disease are going to have different prices for a $1m life insurance policy, but both policies will pay out equally regardless of when they die. I'm not saying home insurance needs to be the same cost for everyone, but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex. Plus climate change is changing the risk profile for everyone and the results of which are not yet clearly understood by climate scientists let alone random homeowners.
        kbenson 11y ago
        > but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex I actually think it's not complex enough. How else do you accurately price natural disasters into existing homes, whose ownership is often measured in decades? I think any area with a chance over a certain percent of a natural disaster that could cause catastrophic loss of property should require insurance, and the insurance cost should be as accurate as possible to the reality of living in that location.
- bmj 11y ago
  I'd argue that flood insurance isn't necessarily the same thing, at least in some cases. I live in an area with three rivers and lots of creeks and runs that feed those rivers. It isn't always "natural" for the sections of the river, or those creeks to flood. It takes a lot of rain, in some cases "act of God" levels. Flood insurance seems pretty reasonable in those cases, particularly since in many cases, there isn't a ton of flood preventation infrastructure that has been built with tax money.
  - electricblue 11y ago
    in most cases we're talking about people who build their houses in category 1 storm surge / 10 year flood zones and then expect a subsidy when inevitably natures does what it does.
  - cma 11y ago
    He's talking about federal flood insurance subsidies. Which do things like subsidize multi-million-dollar-beach-front-house flood insurance.
  - ajross 11y ago
    > It isn't always "natural" for the [...] the river [...] to flood. It takes a lot of rain, in some cases "act of God" levels. That's a weird definition for "natural" you're using. I think you mean something more like "typical". Unless you're making a theological point, an "act of God" is quite literally as natural (in the sense of un-artificial) as you can get. But the grandparent's point was economic. Disaster insurance can't work: the whole idea behind insurance is that "bad stuff" happens rarely to some people, so everyone pools money together to pay for the few who actually needed. Disasters happen broadly, and to everyone who needs it in the affected area. A "correct" insurance scheme there would be tantamount to everyone having to just save money on their own, there's no efficiency. And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      > And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid. Or changing conditions throw off their actuarial tables, making the company insolvent when reality intercedes. Those changes could be as obvious (at this stage) as climate change, or as subtle as a long-standing practice of preventing forest fires, which while seemingly preventing property loss to fire is actually creating an unstable system which has the capability for much larger destruction than the typical fire.
- bilbo0s 11y ago
  To be fair... (and pragmatic) Societies subsidize people who live in flood plains because of agriculture, infrastructure and logistics. Essentially, we get far more OUT of people living in MOST flood plains than we put in with respect to subsidies. Consider MOST of the coastal cities. We, obviously, get WAY more OUT of Houston, Galveston and New Orleans, for example, than we put in. Those three ports are enormously important to us. If they disappeared tomorrow, you would discover why they were important the hard way. Similarly for people living in midwestern flood plains. We will typically get far more out of them than we put in. Try feeding the world, with currently known agricultural technology, while not using any land in flood plains and you'll see what I mean. Even if you could somehow manage to do it... and I don't think you could.... but even if you could, you would cause enormous damage to the ecological tapestry of the continent. You would have to move MATERIAL amounts of water and soil at a minimum. It's best to subsidize the farmers to do what they do and make sure they're not disturbed in their endeavors. And, yes, many of those farmers and agribusinesses will be in flood plains. Now I'm not saying ALL flood plains in the midwest or on the coast are critical infrastructure. New York, Houston and New Orleans are far more critical to our survival than... say... Miami, Myrtle Beach or Malibu. So obviously, I'm not saying that ALL port cities or ALL midwestern flood plains are critical. But there are definitely some places in this nation that merit sizable subsidies to keep people living and working there. It's the nature of the beast when you're talking about engineering an empire.
  - jvm 11y ago
    For any activities that really are that valuable, there is no need for a subsidy. The revenue from the activity in those cases exceeds the costs of dealing with the disaster. The efficient thing to do is end the subsidy, and have all the less valuable activities whose benefits don't exceed the costs relocate or cease.
    - muraiki 11y ago
      Efficiency must be balanced, though. Say that we end the subsidy on agricultural flood plains, which drives up the cost to farmers, who become less competitive vs imported food. They decide to close up shop and do something more profitable, since they can't complete with imports. The end result is an increase in efficiency but a loss of food security. I'm sure other people have thought this through much better than what I just said. But it seems to me to be a reasonable argument.
WalterBright 11y ago
Houses can also be made much more fire resistant than they are. Use metal and masonry for the exterior surfaces rather than wood and asphalt, for example. Keep the fuel and vegetation away from the walls. Build a masonry fence as a fire break. It's all just common sense.
- btbuildem 11y ago
  Have you seen what these fires do?! Your metal exterior surface will become a puddle of metal, and your masonry fence will be a pile of rubble.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    A house built this way famously survived a fire in California a few years back. http://www.concretethinker.com/solutions/Disaster-Resistance.aspx http://www.concretethinker.com/solutions/Disaster-Resistance... Some friends of mine built a house this way in Montana, and the firefighters told them that if all Montanans built their wilderness homes that way, their job would be a lot easier. You can find a lot of information on this by googling for "fire resistant home".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- briandear 11y ago
  Fires will jump over that masonry. Unless you live in a concrete dome, the fire will get across. These are infernos not unlike the fires of hell. Fire is almost raining down on you. Fire resistant doesn't work in the middle of a serious wildfire.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Defense in depth works just fine for wild fires. Step 1 is zero trees or flammable brush near structure, step to is active misters to keep place damp. Quick and dirty approach is to use a controlled burn to clear brush near property and then just use a sprinkler system. Granted these are far from 100% effective, but even a 50/50 shot at saving a property is worth a fair amount of effort.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

foldor 11y ago

Just to play devil's advocate. What about the amount of greenhouse gases released by the fires? We're clearly not succeeding in reducing our greenhouse gases, so why not reduce it where we can?

danharaj 11y ago
Forest fires are a cyclic phenomenon complemented by forest growth. Best to let nature find its own equilibria and change human processes to be sustainable.
- TheGrimDerp1 11y ago
  Also a good idea if you live in the woods to trim back from the house & wet things down when a fire's comin your way...
evgen 11y ago
You mean the greenhouse gasses that were originally sequestered by the forest into a cellulose matrix and which were inevitably going to be re-released when the tree died and the wood rotted? Yeah, I don't think the process works the way you think it does.
- msandford 11y ago
  Most of the time when wood rots, it still sequesters CO2. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to create soil through the accumulation of biomass. All the dirt would be mineral only, and no black soil would exist anywhere. The blackness of black soil is due primarily to carbon. Which isn't floating around in the air.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    Seems like the difference in timescale between soil creation and wood decomposition would argue against sequestration occurring "most of the time." Soil biomass might represent only 1% or so of decomposition products. But I haven't seen any actual figures...

xlm1717 11y ago

It does has to burn. This is why we have prescribed burns, to safely burn the forest and reduce future wildfire damages. The article says that the portion of the budget dedicated to fighting fires keeps increasing, giving less money to land management decided to prevent a lot of the fires we are fighting. Seems to me that continuing on this path will just result in ever increasing costs. We have to let it burn, on our terms.

snuxoll 11y ago
Logging helps a lot too. I don't get why it's such a controversial topic, I don't advocate chopping down entire forests, but why on earth are commercial loggers not allowed to thin things out?
- pyre 11y ago
  When have commercial loggers ever "thinned things out?" Since the beginning it's always been a "choose a section of forest and start chopping until nothing is left" industry.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    Well for one, that's not entirely true. Loggers plant just about as many trees as they cut down. Otherwise they'd be out of business pretty quick. And even when they chop, "thinning things out" is a perfectly valid way of logging and is practiced in many places. Secondly, the question was "why don't they thin things out". Not "why don't we let them thin things out". Implying a change to normal behavior.
    - Qworg 11y ago
      Planting trees post clear cutting does not establish a healthy or usable forest. Thinning is more expensive and difficult than clear cutting, which is why we don't do it often.
      - 11y ago

makecheck 11y ago

Humans cause fires though. Do we know that all human-caused fires would still have occurred "naturally" if the humans hadn't been there? On what do you base the statement that a fire is typically "slow-moving"? It can certainly be fast. Here's an example. [1] [1] http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/the-speed-of-fire/ http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/the-speed-of-fire/

placeybordeaux 11y ago
Recent research has been showing that native americans shaped their forests with fire. It's entirely possible that many of the north american forests intentional human caused fires as part of their normal cycle. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire#Human-shaped_landscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire#Hu...
kbenson 11y ago
I think that's a combination of high winds and young growth. If it is young growth, it's actually illustrating what the article is describing, the young growth trees are young, but not at young s they should be, and they bridge the gap between the undergrowth and canopy. Once the canopy catches in a dense forest, there's a real problem, but a dense forest with undergrowth only on file may be a mild, slow moving (since the wind may be mostly blocked) fire.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Humans cause some fires. Not all. I'm not even sure that humans cause the majority.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  This varies greatly by region, land use, and weather patterns. In some places and years, humans dominate; others, lightning. Because humans tend to start more fires near cities, campgrounds, and other accessible areas, those fires tend to be contained or extinguished quickly. Lightning starts tend to be on ridgelines, near peaks, and in other remote areas that are difficult to reach. Many of the big, long-burning fires are lightning starts, but they also tend to threaten fewer structures. Obviously there are exceptions all around.

baldfat 11y ago

Just build homes that withstand wildfires: http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a17038/washington-man-survives-blazing-wildfire-by-hunkering-down-in-dome-home/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a17038/wa... http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304315004579383363776343476 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043150045793833...

kbenson 11y ago
I was actually thinking this as well. Higher insurance premiums for homes that are not rated to far exceed what should in practice be possible to experience in a hurricane or fire should be the norm. Actually, my guess is this is coming, as soon as the actuarial tables adjust to the new climate reality (barring political meddling to suppress normal market forces). As for floods... I dunno, maybe insurance requiring some portion of the house that is higher than the flood plain and that the house is not in danger of becoming unmoored for any sort of sane rates. I imagine that would make housing in places way under the flood plane or that face both floods and hurricanes expensive to build in, which is the point.
- spaceactuary 11y ago
  "Actuarial tables" are really only used to price life insurance. Property/Casualty insurance (auto, home, work comp, etc.) are priced by analyzing recent loss experience, then trending loss costs forward (as medical costs & replacement costs go up over time). Hazards that are infrequent and spatially-correlated (hurricane, tornado/hail, fire) are often priced by using simulations, which take into account the nature of the event, engineering simulations, and insurance policy terms. Flood insurance is incredibly politicized, as it's handled at the federal level. Floods are typically considered an "uninsurable event" given that if you live in a flood plan, there's a high likelihood that you'll have a loss due to flood--less of an "if" than a "when". Flood insurance is sold & claims are handled by insurance companies, but it is effectively reinsured 100% by the federal government. Actuarial studies have show the premiums to be highly inadequate, but there has been legislation that aims to reduce that inadequacy.

e40 11y ago

Is it possible to clear enough brush/trees from around your house that the chance of it catching on fire is small? I've always wondered this, but I've never seen this issue addressed anywhere. Thanks. EDIT: of course, if your house was left standing in the middle of a fire wasteland, you might want to live there anymore.

yxhuvud 11y ago
Yes, it is possible to make fire-breaks where the fire can be handled. They have to be very large (and therefore expensive. Both in terms of land and in terms of maintenance) to protect your house against a mega fire though. Of course, they could be created in preventative fashion to limit the fires so that the size of the forest fires is limited.
- maxcasey 11y ago
  While it would have to be "large" for a "mega fire," there are a lot of small and inexpensive things you can do to help protect your home. Things like removing any shurbs around your house are very useful. Won't necessarily save your house, but it's a good start.
maxcasey 11y ago
Yes it is, and it's actually pretty easy. There are many ways to reduce the chance of a fire hitting your actual living structure and out west there actually are landscaping firms that specialize in doing that. Unfortunately many older homes/properties aren't set up for this so that's when it can get expensive. Source: I'm a wildland fire fighter. Have seen awesome and terrible uses of fireproofing property.

hugh4 11y ago

>I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN. If people did that, you couldn't buy fire insurance any more. Let's look more positively at the problem. Use robots to fight fires. Use robots to manage fuel stocks. Learn more about firefighting as a species. I think we can get a lot better at fighting fires than we are right now.