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This part was especially depressing: > The California Air Resources Board restricts prescribed burns to days when pollution is at acceptable levels and the wea
by jefftk 7y ago
This part was especially depressing:
> The California Air Resources Board restricts prescribed burns to days when pollution is at acceptable levels and the weather likely to disperse emissions from fire. In practice, this means that burning can occur only during a few weeks in the spring. In summer and autumn—the seasons when forests would burn naturally—the state’s air usually falls foul of the Clean Air Act. These are also the months that are most prone to uncontrollable wildfires, whose smoke is far more damaging to human health than that from prescribed fire. But, perversely, because wildfires are classified as natural catastrophes, their emissions are not counted against legal quotas.
- abakker 7y agoIt kind of beggars belief that the law intended that. The question is, how to change it?
- torpfactory 7y agoThere’s a strong argument to be made that overall health impacts will be lower if wildfires are reduced through prescribed burns rather than waiting for catastrophic ‘natural’ fires. I think this argument could be used. We can either plan ahead when to have some wildfire smoke and put resources in place to deal with it. Or we can try to react to large blazes.
- fjabre 7y agoFast effective reaction to mega blazes will be key. That they are pretty much talking about the same thing they have been for decades is depressing.
- wbl 7y agoCEQA doesnt work that way as I understand. We need to repeal it.
- labster 7y agoThis is like saying: Safari doesn’t support AV1 as I understand. We need to delete it. Isn’t the obvious thing here to make a patch so it supports the thing we want?
- wbl 7y agoCEQA fundamentally has a status quo bias because of how you do the analysis. Avoided damage from what would happen anyway is not considered.
- BurningFrog 7y agoSadly, California law gravitates towards banning all activity.
- skybrian 7y agoRead on, it seems that's being fixed.
- fjabre 7y agoThat they are still taking about the same prevention techniques for decades is depressing. You would think a state home to some of the worlds best and brightest engineers could come up with a better solution to this than the same old tired argument of forest fire prevention and prescribed burns.
- DataWorker 7y agoBut all those engineers are busy building the high speed rail system that may one day connect Merced to Bakersfield. We make choices in a democracy.
- neverartful 7y agoWhy is forest fire prevention and prescribed burns an old tired argument? It's true that this approach is not new, but it's most likely the best that can be done. Dealing with the wildfires is not purely science and engineering. A huge part of it involves thorny political problems.
- martinmunk 7y agoI volunteer in the Danish national emergency service. A year ago we and Multiple other countries went to Sweden to help out with massive forest fires. I'm talking speeding for an hour in varying levels of smoke and not be half way through our area. I've never experienced fires like that, mainly since we dont have forests like that, but it became pretty clear to me how much the low vegetation meant for the life of the fire. The fire could be burning slowly through the ground vegetation and everybody would pretty much ignore it. But if it hit bigger bushes and spread to the treetops all hell broke loose. Others trucks were written off as a loss and personnel airlifted away on that account. As for a newer approach they stragedly cut down parts of the forest, both for wood production and to vary the age of the forest. This seemed to have great effect when trying to contain the fire.
- kurthr 7y agoIt's not clear to me that 'the months that are most prone to uncontrollable wildfires' are the same as the times we should be doing prescribed burns. Those are typically meant to remove the weak/dead trees and brush rather than clear entire mountainsides of vegetation as might happen in the dry summer and fall. I'm open to burning at the right time, and that might be when smog is high, but I suspect that's not the only/best time for effective prescribed fires.