10 ms·

We Know How to Prevent Megafires

184 points by philips 6y ago

philips 6y ago
My big takeaway from the article is it will require a big culture shift in the general public, two quotes: > “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go. > She’d like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the Southeast where, she said, “Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday.” Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  I don't understand how a private individual would deal with the liability.
  - umvi 6y ago
    When I lived in the suburbs of Naples people would burn their trash in big piles whenever the garbage collectors went on strike and "nobody" was liable, even though sometimes the fire would spread and burn/damage stuff on the neighbor's property. Then again, Europeans don't have the same litigious culture/attitude that Americans have.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      At least Italians don't, but you get a lot of problems stemming from the "whatever, just burn it, not my problem, I just want my garbage gone"-culture. You'd get into serious trouble doing the same further north in Germany, Denmark or Sweden.
      - umvi 6y ago
        Indeed, and I admit, even within Italy this is likely uniquely a Naples problem.
        kurthr 6y ago
        Another reason is that there have been intermittent issues with garbage pickup for decades in Napoli, but I don't think there's been a full strike in the last few years... but it is of course probably still controlled by the Camorra.
    - Jommi 6y ago
      Is it the attitude or is it the system?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      per-capita, lawsuits occur at more or less the same level in the USA as across most of western europe. the USA just has a culture that talks about suing people a lot more; in practice, Europe and the US do so at about the same rte.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - kurthr 6y ago
      How many of those fires burned 10km^2? 100m^2? 1000km^2? That's the size of each of the lightning complexes still burning. I'd guess that in decades none of them have or it would have been in the news and nobody would have done it again... Lot's of rural places burn garbage in the US. They just don't do it where there's a high risk of burning down the neighborhood.
  - text70 6y ago
    Call a public service like the fire department, if it gets out of control.
    - tsomctl 6y ago
      If it gets out of control, it can quickly turn into a multi-million dollar event.
    - rascul 6y ago
      Probably best to notify the fire department in advance of the burn so that they can already be prepared if it gets out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if some jurisdictions require this.
  - c0g 6y ago
    Liability is limited if you follow various statutes in Texas (and other states): https://agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/agricultural-law/prescribed-burning-liability-and-insurance-considerations/ https://agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/agricultural-law/...
  - philips 6y ago
    My understanding is that you need re-regulation to protect folks with limited liability if they follow protocol and burn day guidance advice from local authorities. Here is a summary for Oregon for example https://www.oswa.org/blog/fire-liability/ https://www.oswa.org/blog/fire-liability/
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and they would have lost everything. No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and the police aren't interested - perhaps as a policy because it's understood that some controlled burns are useful. California's police could equally well be told to "focus on other priorities" instead of investigating fire starters.
    - rectang 6y ago
      California law enforcement could choose to look the other way, but it's a statistical certainty that if there's money to be made through civil suits, there will be plenty of litigation. How do you get around that?
      - dmurray 6y ago
        The police are important in civil suits too. Arguably their main function in a civilised society is that you can call them when you get in a car accident and they'll write up an official report for the insurance company. If they don't spend their time writing detailed reports on the causes of fires, that at least pushes the balance of power away from the plaintiff. I don't know if this is realistic. But we have a pretty litigious society these days in Ireland too - behind the US, but ahead of almost everywhere else - and I can't find any evidence of a successful civil suit for starting a wildfire. I did find this which says there are practically no criminal cases: https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-legislation-4606187-Apr2019/ https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-legislation-4606...
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      There’s no civil prosecution. Civil means it’s a private injury which the law can remedy. Anyone who has the standing to sue can sue, and that doesn’t make them a prosecutor.
    - StreamBright 6y ago
  - themodelplumber 6y ago
    People do this where I live in NorCal. They seem to do these burns on permissive burn days, for one. Conditions might even be wet. They also tend to let law enforcement know, and law enforcement and fire people seem to understand the purpose. People from the city still call 911, but that's just because they are trained to think that distant fires are dangerous. To be expected.
- kurthr 6y ago
  The parts of this fire that you heard about (LNU and CZU complexes) were not caused by lack of controlled burn (some fires in the Sierra Nevada probably are). In particular North Napa and Lake counties have both burned in the same area in the last 5 years so it's sort of gibberish, while the redwood areas (like north of Santa Cruz) are not forests that regularly burn... and it is still logged which didn't stop the progression. Sadly, this expert isn't an expert on these fires... there are others where his comments would be relevant. The idea of doing controlled burns in areas that recently burned (already causing many $Billions of damage to crops and real estate) or in redwood forests which require a firestorm to ignite in a populated region with many more $Billions in real estate and 10s of thousands of inhabitants which boarder cities of millions... would be hilarious, if it wasn't so dangerous. Look at the caltopo website if you want to look at the area burning and what has previously burned. https://caltopo.com/map.html?fbclid=IwAR3Bd6K6XaKR-S_Co9io8iEWdT2CdjXz1SwEVsSjX2_uLZjXRoRzvyiBE5w#ll=38.84613,-122.84088&z=9&b=mbt&a=cf10%2Cfire https://caltopo.com/map.html?fbclid=IwAR3Bd6K6XaKR-S_Co9io8i...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
karmakatze 6y ago
I'm curious how much CO2 is stuck in this backlog that should have been burned relative to other sources...
emn13 6y ago
Heads up that propublica doesn't mind intentionally deceiving readers; I don't trust them anymore. Just a few months ago I read this: https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-to-design-a-low-cost-ventilator-for-a-pandemic-instead-the-company-is-selling-versions-of-it-overseas- https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-t... - and my initial reaction was "bad, big company!" A little digging later; turns out the piece is deceptive to the point that I don't buy it's an accident. So hey; maybe they're telling the truth this time. But liar, liar, pants on fire: I'm not believing a word they say without solid external sources anymore. Edit: here, I found a comment by somebody (not me) that sums up the problems with this reporting here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-announces-489-million-ventilator-contract-with-gm/?comments=1&post=38793881 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-an... I get that this isn't terribly on topic for wildfires - but by linking to sources like this we also give them a position of authority, and they don't deserve it. Note that the ventilator article has not been retracted nor updated; they're not willing to admit - let alone correct! - their mistakes either, apparently.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  There is nothing wrong with the propublica article. It simply claims that the company received public money years ago to design a low-cost ventilator that it never sold, and instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling...without any inventory issues. The company claims that the US tried to order the cheapo ventilators for COVID use too late, and they may be true, but that wasn't the point of the article.
  - emn13 6y ago
    The article clearly implies that some or several of involved parties are ripping off taxpayers when instead the actual costs per ventilator are quite low, and not only that, the deal they're referring to wasn't even due now. That's deceptive. Even your summary is deceptive when you say stuff like "instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling" - there seems to be 0 evidence of that occurring at least in any unreasonable sense. Put it this way: what's there actually to report here? That a lowest-possible-cost contract for a few ventilators before 2022 didn't deliver many more before 2020? That the contract looks reasonable, and so far honestly fulfilled? The insinuations aren't harmless. Not only because it might lead people to support more oversight and interventions where none are warranted, but also because they distract from real issues - and there are more than enough of those. Did you look at the slightly more in-depth review of the article in this comment? https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-announces-489-million-ventilator-contract-with-gm/?comments=1&post=38793881 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-an...
softwaredoug 6y ago
What's interesting is when colonists came to North America, they often described forests of trees that felt like great rooms or halls, teaming with wildlife and human-edible plants. But this itself was not a primordial state, but a heavily managed environment, intended to create favorable environment for flora/fauna through slash & burn forest management. Basically, burning out the undergrowth and allowing human selected plants to flourish. Much of the current problem is an excess of undergrowth, so you would think we could somehow recreate this kind of management for everyone's benefit...
- njarboe 6y ago
  Yes that would be cool. Unfortunately almost all of the old growth forest in the US was cut down and new trees of the size of old will take hundreds of years to grow. Many of the wilderness areas set aside in the 1970 had old growth forests and some are being managed in this way. The rest of the west forest service land is managed in an inconsistant way that changes somewhat with each administration. I think it would be really cool if somehow the US Public Forests and BLM lands were spit up into three sections. Some land sold off to allow towns and cities in the west to expand, as many people would like to live there and it is very expensive in many places now. Also sell off the land that we want used for timber production. Then some held public and managed for recreation by humans with roads and vehicles, and finally a large expansion of wilderness areas with the idea of connecting large ecosystems and managing them for high biodiversity.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.
    - njarboe 6y ago
      You don't need to, as you point out that is the current case, but I think that private ownership would do a better job of extracting economic value from land that we want to put to economic use. Motorized recreational forest and timber production could work well together, but I have not seen that. In some places selective cutting is done, but usually the biggest trees are felled. It would be much better, I think, if parts of the public forest were cut to leave the largest trees to become the beautiful and awe inspiring ones people like to be around. I don't have a deep knowledge of how the forest service does timber sales (and I'm sure it varies depending on local political and economic conditions). It would be interesting to read up on how it works in detail.
jeffbee 6y ago
There's a couple of misleading statements in here. It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. They'd all take a position in a city fire department if they were after more money. The other misleading thing is associating these current fires with bad forest management practices. It's true for Sierra Nevada forests generally, but that's not where these fires are. The Big Basin area near Santa Cruz isn't supposed to regularly burn. Historically it goes through intense fires rarely. "Preventing megafires" isn't what that coastal redwood forest wants. The other big fire in the San Antonio Valley and Del Puerto Canyon is virtually all privately-held land. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. Except CDCR, which pays notably worse, but that's not really competing for firefighters. > There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding. There's not mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn on national forest or BLM land, either (both of which are federally managed.)
  - samcheng 6y ago
    To save some people a search: CDF = California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as "CALFIRE" CDCR = California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which in this context supplies convict labor to fight fires. One issue this year is that the California State Prisons are all horrifically overrun with COVID-19, thereby incapacitating what had previously been a critical firefighting function. The situation (mass incarceration, crowded conditions, negligent and/or derisive healthcare for inmates, climate change, lack of prescribed burns, and now inadequate resources to fight large fires) is really quite depressing to untangle.
    - 6y ago
fhub 6y ago
Certainly in large parts of Australia, the window to do controlled burns is shrinking due to climate change. Threading the needle on {not windy, not damp, not tinder box} is, on average, getting smaller each year. This checker box theory relies on that time window being bigger than it is in practice.
beamatronic 6y ago
We also know how to prevent the spread of coronavirus but we can’t seem to get that done either
opportune 6y ago
In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots of spending, making it untenable for them to run their course, costing a lot of money to address) because some people decided to build a community in the middle of a forest that naturally would tend to burn down every few decades
- rcpt 6y ago
  This is the only correct response to the issue. Stop ripping up the redwoods for your driveways and power lines. Let the mountains be.
  - opportune 6y ago
    The problem is not only new construction but what to do, and what policies to have, about all the people and capital tied up in forested communities already. For example Paradise is actually a pretty decent-sized town basically in the forest; it should be obvious just looking at it on the satellite that it’s going to be affected by fires frequently. I doubt it’s politically tenable to have the policy become to just let places like that burn down or even to make them cut down the forests (which to them is the draw of living there). Just look at the Wikipedia page about what Paradise was going to do after the fire: focus on fire resistant construction and wider roads for evacuations. No measures from preventing the same thing from occurring again and again
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      The only way a town like Paradise can exist is with a lot of state subsidies. The state should just flatly refuse to maintain SR-191.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
jefftk 6y ago
It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own: Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go. “One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped. Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know. I'd like to have a retrospective. How much damage was there? What's gone? What's still there? Etc.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute fire response times throughout.
cletus 6y ago
I didn't see it mentioned but this came up in an interview with a state head of firefightting in Australia after the most recent bushfires: he said that a big problem is there's less time of the year you can actually do controlled burns because of the warming climate. So a warming climate is not only making the risk of fires starting higher but it's also shrinking the mitigation window.
trhway 6y ago
Control burns look to me just like blood letting - a thing from the past when we didn't know better. how to prevent megafires? How about extinguishing them while they are just fires? A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple hundred $M/year maintenance. Several round trips of those 100 tanker planes in the first day when these fires have just started would have solved the issue. They would have solved the similar issues back in 2018 and 2019 too as well as the coming issues in 2021 and so on. Thus they would be paying for themselves each year over and over again. Not surprisingly, the situation is similar to covid - an initial investment (orders of magnitude lower than the losses otherwise) and a bit of rational thinking would have prevented the covid "megafire", yet here we're... The current human race inability for even minimally rational system scale action is astounding.
- icegreentea2 6y ago
  I think what you might be missing in your analysis is that preventative approaches that only "stop" the spread of fires only contribute to reducing the occurrence rate of catastrophic events, but also contribute to increasing the severity of them as well (through build up of fuel). Robust solutions should ideally both manage occurrence and severity of catastrophic events, and be able to scale through multiple magnitudes of risk. With the limitations we have, we're typically stuck with really only managing one of those levers - but we should absolutely hesitate from solutions that increase severity. We should be spending money scaling our ability to actively fight fires once they start, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also spend money and resources to try to reduce the scope and scale of fires that we do need to fight.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I see a big overlap with Antifragility concepts here. Stopping all the fires at all costs makes the system fragile.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Many of the trees in CA evolved in environments with regular fires. Some, like the sequoias, require fire in order for their seeds to open. A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple hundred $M/year maintenance. Each DC10 tanker costs about $120 million. The newer 747 tanker starts at $140 million and that's before customization. A fleet the size you are suggesting would cost more than $12 billion dollars and would take years for manufacturers to build. And that's assuming you could find sufficient freshwater sources to fill all of those planes. If that amount of water was available, CA wouldn't be in a megadrought and the fires wouldn't be as bad. None of what you suggested is rational.
svrb 6y ago
Though it may not seem like it at first, the problem is ideological. Somewhere along the line CA's left/progressive ideology picked up a deeply ironic tenet that the world must remain absolutely unchanged by human habitation; that whatever the state of nature was on some arbitrary day in the past, we have a moral duty to keep it that way. The strongest example of overreach is that absolutely no species may go extinct, no matter how ill-suited to survival they may be (I'm looking at you, pandas). Other examples that are probably entirely defensible on rational grounds are that the sea level must not change at all; that carbon must remain distributed in the crust and atmosphere precisely as before. But, more relevantly, we also see this belief at work on both sides of the fire [non-]debate! On the one hand, whatever faceless NIMBY/political force stands in the way of preventative burns says you're not allowed to change the forest by burning it: that would be destroying nature and thus it would be morally bad. But TFA justifies its position according to this tenet too! It says that in "prehistory" (I guess it means pre-1700 or so) so many acres burned, and therefore it is obviously right that so many acres burn again today. The problem is that this belief, even when it reaches correct conclusions, is deeply anti-scientific and even anti-rational. There's no rational reason to connect morality and stasis. As long as this is a tool for making choices, it doesn't matter how often it's used for making good choices (preventative burns); all those who use it will still be just as culpable for the damage done on the side of bad choices (no burns).
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  We have a solid idea about about the pre-European history of fire in the US west, including some information about native american practices during parts of that history (they burned, at least in some areas and for some of the time). We have hard evidence of what the last 100 years of forest management policy has done. Nobody is proposing "nature can never (be) change(d)". The point is that that we tried to do something different (fire suppression) and it manifestly did not and has not worked.
  - svrb 6y ago
    I believe you misunderstood my comment (perhaps I worded it poorly): I intended that it be interpreted as a statement purely within the meta-discussion. I shared a concern about the arguments used to justify both sides of the debate, and did not intend to advance one side or the other. While you seem to believe I was arguing against preventative burns, the sibling comment seems to believe I was arguing for preventative burns which are (according to that comment) a crazy libertarian idea. This makes me wonder whether any critique of dogma must be reinterpreted as a disagreement about facts as a kind of memetic camouflage self-defense mechanism...
01100011 6y ago
I'm not so sure this applies to much of coastal CA. Coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and similar biomes can build up sufficient fuel mass in a couple years. Combined with fierce, hot, dry autumn winds(aka 'Santa Ana' winds) you have conditions where 60mph walls of flame can regularly run from the mountains towards the sea. The solution there is to follow CalFire guidelines for fireproofing your home, force local governments to ensure adequate evacuation routes, and discourage living in the wild land interface. Controlled burns can't reduce fuel because many of those plants can only recover when burned every decade or so. Between frequent burns and non-native plants, we could lose much of our native habitats if we do controlled burns wrong. https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/Homeowners-Checklist.pdf https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/Homeowne... https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/ https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/
luckylion 6y ago
Why is harvesting the trees not an option? Is the wood of such a low quality that you can't use it at all? Are the areas not reachable? I understand burning it might be faster, but it has the obvious problems that are apparently stopping them from doing it today. But why not just allow trees to be harvested?
- dqv 6y ago
  I didn't really get a perfect answer except that if the logging operation is done incorrectly it makes the fires worse. The environmentalist view is that the trees should be burnt but not removed to return the nutrients to the ecosystem. Basically the experts are saying logging won't get us out of this. See https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-our-way-out-of-wildfires https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-o...
brudgers 6y ago
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Even the low end of this is several times what burned this year. I’m drawing a blank on how that level of burning would prevent “mega fires” unless the idea is to replace them with “super mega fires” several times larger.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  The fires covered wide areas, but since they were so frequent, they didn't burn so hot and didn't destroy the forests, just the undergrowth.
- hinkley 6y ago
  There’s a difference between “had flames on it” and “burned to the ground”. There’s also a heat point where the soil is sterilized, meaning it can take many times longer for substantial succession to occur.
BurningFrog 6y ago
This article is a lot more optimistic about the California/Federal plan: https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-plan-actually-matches-the-scale-of-the-problem/ https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-pla...
pegas1 6y ago
Controled burns are only a part of the solution, generally substituting for large grazing animals that would keep the forest density and undergrowth at bay. Also, a lot of wetland in Califormia was dried and even rivers were straightened and deprived of the traditional meandering and inundation area. All that makes California dryer, slowly but surely decreasing water stored in the soil and therefore also decreasing secondary rainfall (summer thunderstorms from local evapotransiration) that would keep forests less dry.
k_sze 6y ago
Instead of burning in place, could the plants be chopped down and used as fuel to generate electricity?
dusted 6y ago
instead of controlled burns, couldn't the wood be chopped down and transported out? I mean, wood is not free.. it's worth something right? Couldn't it be sold cheaply for building materials and energy (a gasification boiler is super clean compared to "natural" burning).

184 points by philips 6y ago

My big takeaway from the article is it will require a big culture shift in the general public, two quotes: > “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go. > She’d like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the Southeast where, she said, “Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday.” Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors.

perl4ever 6y ago
I don't understand how a private individual would deal with the liability.
- umvi 6y ago
  When I lived in the suburbs of Naples people would burn their trash in big piles whenever the garbage collectors went on strike and "nobody" was liable, even though sometimes the fire would spread and burn/damage stuff on the neighbor's property. Then again, Europeans don't have the same litigious culture/attitude that Americans have.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    At least Italians don't, but you get a lot of problems stemming from the "whatever, just burn it, not my problem, I just want my garbage gone"-culture. You'd get into serious trouble doing the same further north in Germany, Denmark or Sweden.
    - umvi 6y ago
      Indeed, and I admit, even within Italy this is likely uniquely a Naples problem.
      - kurthr 6y ago
        Another reason is that there have been intermittent issues with garbage pickup for decades in Napoli, but I don't think there's been a full strike in the last few years... but it is of course probably still controlled by the Camorra.
  - Jommi 6y ago
    Is it the attitude or is it the system?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    per-capita, lawsuits occur at more or less the same level in the USA as across most of western europe. the USA just has a culture that talks about suing people a lot more; in practice, Europe and the US do so at about the same rte.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - kurthr 6y ago
    How many of those fires burned 10km^2? 100m^2? 1000km^2? That's the size of each of the lightning complexes still burning. I'd guess that in decades none of them have or it would have been in the news and nobody would have done it again... Lot's of rural places burn garbage in the US. They just don't do it where there's a high risk of burning down the neighborhood.
- text70 6y ago
  Call a public service like the fire department, if it gets out of control.
  - tsomctl 6y ago
    If it gets out of control, it can quickly turn into a multi-million dollar event.
  - rascul 6y ago
    Probably best to notify the fire department in advance of the burn so that they can already be prepared if it gets out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if some jurisdictions require this.
- c0g 6y ago
  Liability is limited if you follow various statutes in Texas (and other states): https://agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/agricultural-law/prescribed-burning-liability-and-insurance-considerations/ https://agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/agricultural-law/...
- philips 6y ago
  My understanding is that you need re-regulation to protect folks with limited liability if they follow protocol and burn day guidance advice from local authorities. Here is a summary for Oregon for example https://www.oswa.org/blog/fire-liability/ https://www.oswa.org/blog/fire-liability/
- dmurray 6y ago
  Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and they would have lost everything. No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and the police aren't interested - perhaps as a policy because it's understood that some controlled burns are useful. California's police could equally well be told to "focus on other priorities" instead of investigating fire starters.
  - rectang 6y ago
    California law enforcement could choose to look the other way, but it's a statistical certainty that if there's money to be made through civil suits, there will be plenty of litigation. How do you get around that?
    - dmurray 6y ago
      The police are important in civil suits too. Arguably their main function in a civilised society is that you can call them when you get in a car accident and they'll write up an official report for the insurance company. If they don't spend their time writing detailed reports on the causes of fires, that at least pushes the balance of power away from the plaintiff. I don't know if this is realistic. But we have a pretty litigious society these days in Ireland too - behind the US, but ahead of almost everywhere else - and I can't find any evidence of a successful civil suit for starting a wildfire. I did find this which says there are practically no criminal cases: https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-legislation-4606187-Apr2019/ https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-legislation-4606...
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    There’s no civil prosecution. Civil means it’s a private injury which the law can remedy. Anyone who has the standing to sue can sue, and that doesn’t make them a prosecutor.
  - StreamBright 6y ago
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  People do this where I live in NorCal. They seem to do these burns on permissive burn days, for one. Conditions might even be wet. They also tend to let law enforcement know, and law enforcement and fire people seem to understand the purpose. People from the city still call 911, but that's just because they are trained to think that distant fires are dangerous. To be expected.
kurthr 6y ago
The parts of this fire that you heard about (LNU and CZU complexes) were not caused by lack of controlled burn (some fires in the Sierra Nevada probably are). In particular North Napa and Lake counties have both burned in the same area in the last 5 years so it's sort of gibberish, while the redwood areas (like north of Santa Cruz) are not forests that regularly burn... and it is still logged which didn't stop the progression. Sadly, this expert isn't an expert on these fires... there are others where his comments would be relevant. The idea of doing controlled burns in areas that recently burned (already causing many $Billions of damage to crops and real estate) or in redwood forests which require a firestorm to ignite in a populated region with many more $Billions in real estate and 10s of thousands of inhabitants which boarder cities of millions... would be hilarious, if it wasn't so dangerous. Look at the caltopo website if you want to look at the area burning and what has previously burned. https://caltopo.com/map.html?fbclid=IwAR3Bd6K6XaKR-S_Co9io8iEWdT2CdjXz1SwEVsSjX2_uLZjXRoRzvyiBE5w#ll=38.84613,-122.84088&z=9&b=mbt&a=cf10%2Cfire https://caltopo.com/map.html?fbclid=IwAR3Bd6K6XaKR-S_Co9io8i...

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karmakatze 6y ago

I'm curious how much CO2 is stuck in this backlog that should have been burned relative to other sources...

emn13 6y ago

Heads up that propublica doesn't mind intentionally deceiving readers; I don't trust them anymore. Just a few months ago I read this: https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-to-design-a-low-cost-ventilator-for-a-pandemic-instead-the-company-is-selling-versions-of-it-overseas- https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-t... - and my initial reaction was "bad, big company!" A little digging later; turns out the piece is deceptive to the point that I don't buy it's an accident. So hey; maybe they're telling the truth this time. But liar, liar, pants on fire: I'm not believing a word they say without solid external sources anymore. Edit: here, I found a comment by somebody (not me) that sums up the problems with this reporting here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-announces-489-million-ventilator-contract-with-gm/?comments=1&post=38793881 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-an... I get that this isn't terribly on topic for wildfires - but by linking to sources like this we also give them a position of authority, and they don't deserve it. Note that the ventilator article has not been retracted nor updated; they're not willing to admit - let alone correct! - their mistakes either, apparently.

gamblor956 6y ago
There is nothing wrong with the propublica article. It simply claims that the company received public money years ago to design a low-cost ventilator that it never sold, and instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling...without any inventory issues. The company claims that the US tried to order the cheapo ventilators for COVID use too late, and they may be true, but that wasn't the point of the article.
- emn13 6y ago
  The article clearly implies that some or several of involved parties are ripping off taxpayers when instead the actual costs per ventilator are quite low, and not only that, the deal they're referring to wasn't even due now. That's deceptive. Even your summary is deceptive when you say stuff like "instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling" - there seems to be 0 evidence of that occurring at least in any unreasonable sense. Put it this way: what's there actually to report here? That a lowest-possible-cost contract for a few ventilators before 2022 didn't deliver many more before 2020? That the contract looks reasonable, and so far honestly fulfilled? The insinuations aren't harmless. Not only because it might lead people to support more oversight and interventions where none are warranted, but also because they distract from real issues - and there are more than enough of those. Did you look at the slightly more in-depth review of the article in this comment? https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-announces-489-million-ventilator-contract-with-gm/?comments=1&post=38793881 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-an...

softwaredoug 6y ago

What's interesting is when colonists came to North America, they often described forests of trees that felt like great rooms or halls, teaming with wildlife and human-edible plants. But this itself was not a primordial state, but a heavily managed environment, intended to create favorable environment for flora/fauna through slash & burn forest management. Basically, burning out the undergrowth and allowing human selected plants to flourish. Much of the current problem is an excess of undergrowth, so you would think we could somehow recreate this kind of management for everyone's benefit...

njarboe 6y ago
Yes that would be cool. Unfortunately almost all of the old growth forest in the US was cut down and new trees of the size of old will take hundreds of years to grow. Many of the wilderness areas set aside in the 1970 had old growth forests and some are being managed in this way. The rest of the west forest service land is managed in an inconsistant way that changes somewhat with each administration. I think it would be really cool if somehow the US Public Forests and BLM lands were spit up into three sections. Some land sold off to allow towns and cities in the west to expand, as many people would like to live there and it is very expensive in many places now. Also sell off the land that we want used for timber production. Then some held public and managed for recreation by humans with roads and vehicles, and finally a large expansion of wilderness areas with the idea of connecting large ecosystems and managing them for high biodiversity.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    You don't need to, as you point out that is the current case, but I think that private ownership would do a better job of extracting economic value from land that we want to put to economic use. Motorized recreational forest and timber production could work well together, but I have not seen that. In some places selective cutting is done, but usually the biggest trees are felled. It would be much better, I think, if parts of the public forest were cut to leave the largest trees to become the beautiful and awe inspiring ones people like to be around. I don't have a deep knowledge of how the forest service does timber sales (and I'm sure it varies depending on local political and economic conditions). It would be interesting to read up on how it works in detail.

jeffbee 6y ago

There's a couple of misleading statements in here. It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. They'd all take a position in a city fire department if they were after more money. The other misleading thing is associating these current fires with bad forest management practices. It's true for Sierra Nevada forests generally, but that's not where these fires are. The Big Basin area near Santa Cruz isn't supposed to regularly burn. Historically it goes through intense fires rarely. "Preventing megafires" isn't what that coastal redwood forest wants. The other big fire in the San Antonio Valley and Del Puerto Canyon is virtually all privately-held land. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. Except CDCR, which pays notably worse, but that's not really competing for firefighters. > There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding. There's not mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn on national forest or BLM land, either (both of which are federally managed.)
- samcheng 6y ago
  To save some people a search: CDF = California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as "CALFIRE" CDCR = California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which in this context supplies convict labor to fight fires. One issue this year is that the California State Prisons are all horrifically overrun with COVID-19, thereby incapacitating what had previously been a critical firefighting function. The situation (mass incarceration, crowded conditions, negligent and/or derisive healthcare for inmates, climate change, lack of prescribed burns, and now inadequate resources to fight large fires) is really quite depressing to untangle.
  - 6y ago

fhub 6y ago

Certainly in large parts of Australia, the window to do controlled burns is shrinking due to climate change. Threading the needle on {not windy, not damp, not tinder box} is, on average, getting smaller each year. This checker box theory relies on that time window being bigger than it is in practice.

beamatronic 6y ago

We also know how to prevent the spread of coronavirus but we can’t seem to get that done either

opportune 6y ago

In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots of spending, making it untenable for them to run their course, costing a lot of money to address) because some people decided to build a community in the middle of a forest that naturally would tend to burn down every few decades

rcpt 6y ago
This is the only correct response to the issue. Stop ripping up the redwoods for your driveways and power lines. Let the mountains be.
- opportune 6y ago
  The problem is not only new construction but what to do, and what policies to have, about all the people and capital tied up in forested communities already. For example Paradise is actually a pretty decent-sized town basically in the forest; it should be obvious just looking at it on the satellite that it’s going to be affected by fires frequently. I doubt it’s politically tenable to have the policy become to just let places like that burn down or even to make them cut down the forests (which to them is the draw of living there). Just look at the Wikipedia page about what Paradise was going to do after the fire: focus on fire resistant construction and wider roads for evacuations. No measures from preventing the same thing from occurring again and again
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    The only way a town like Paradise can exist is with a lot of state subsidies. The state should just flatly refuse to maintain SR-191.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago

jefftk 6y ago

It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own: Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go. “One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke.

murgindrag 6y ago
One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped. Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know. I'd like to have a retrospective. How much damage was there? What's gone? What's still there? Etc.
- brudgers 6y ago
  CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute fire response times throughout.

cletus 6y ago

I didn't see it mentioned but this came up in an interview with a state head of firefightting in Australia after the most recent bushfires: he said that a big problem is there's less time of the year you can actually do controlled burns because of the warming climate. So a warming climate is not only making the risk of fires starting higher but it's also shrinking the mitigation window.

trhway 6y ago

Control burns look to me just like blood letting - a thing from the past when we didn't know better. how to prevent megafires? How about extinguishing them while they are just fires? A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple hundred $M/year maintenance. Several round trips of those 100 tanker planes in the first day when these fires have just started would have solved the issue. They would have solved the similar issues back in 2018 and 2019 too as well as the coming issues in 2021 and so on. Thus they would be paying for themselves each year over and over again. Not surprisingly, the situation is similar to covid - an initial investment (orders of magnitude lower than the losses otherwise) and a bit of rational thinking would have prevented the covid "megafire", yet here we're... The current human race inability for even minimally rational system scale action is astounding.

icegreentea2 6y ago
I think what you might be missing in your analysis is that preventative approaches that only "stop" the spread of fires only contribute to reducing the occurrence rate of catastrophic events, but also contribute to increasing the severity of them as well (through build up of fuel). Robust solutions should ideally both manage occurrence and severity of catastrophic events, and be able to scale through multiple magnitudes of risk. With the limitations we have, we're typically stuck with really only managing one of those levers - but we should absolutely hesitate from solutions that increase severity. We should be spending money scaling our ability to actively fight fires once they start, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also spend money and resources to try to reduce the scope and scale of fires that we do need to fight.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I see a big overlap with Antifragility concepts here. Stopping all the fires at all costs makes the system fragile.
gamblor956 6y ago
Many of the trees in CA evolved in environments with regular fires. Some, like the sequoias, require fire in order for their seeds to open. A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple hundred $M/year maintenance. Each DC10 tanker costs about $120 million. The newer 747 tanker starts at $140 million and that's before customization. A fleet the size you are suggesting would cost more than $12 billion dollars and would take years for manufacturers to build. And that's assuming you could find sufficient freshwater sources to fill all of those planes. If that amount of water was available, CA wouldn't be in a megadrought and the fires wouldn't be as bad. None of what you suggested is rational.

svrb 6y ago

Though it may not seem like it at first, the problem is ideological. Somewhere along the line CA's left/progressive ideology picked up a deeply ironic tenet that the world must remain absolutely unchanged by human habitation; that whatever the state of nature was on some arbitrary day in the past, we have a moral duty to keep it that way. The strongest example of overreach is that absolutely no species may go extinct, no matter how ill-suited to survival they may be (I'm looking at you, pandas). Other examples that are probably entirely defensible on rational grounds are that the sea level must not change at all; that carbon must remain distributed in the crust and atmosphere precisely as before. But, more relevantly, we also see this belief at work on both sides of the fire [non-]debate! On the one hand, whatever faceless NIMBY/political force stands in the way of preventative burns says you're not allowed to change the forest by burning it: that would be destroying nature and thus it would be morally bad. But TFA justifies its position according to this tenet too! It says that in "prehistory" (I guess it means pre-1700 or so) so many acres burned, and therefore it is obviously right that so many acres burn again today. The problem is that this belief, even when it reaches correct conclusions, is deeply anti-scientific and even anti-rational. There's no rational reason to connect morality and stasis. As long as this is a tool for making choices, it doesn't matter how often it's used for making good choices (preventative burns); all those who use it will still be just as culpable for the damage done on the side of bad choices (no burns).

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
We have a solid idea about about the pre-European history of fire in the US west, including some information about native american practices during parts of that history (they burned, at least in some areas and for some of the time). We have hard evidence of what the last 100 years of forest management policy has done. Nobody is proposing "nature can never (be) change(d)". The point is that that we tried to do something different (fire suppression) and it manifestly did not and has not worked.
- svrb 6y ago
  I believe you misunderstood my comment (perhaps I worded it poorly): I intended that it be interpreted as a statement purely within the meta-discussion. I shared a concern about the arguments used to justify both sides of the debate, and did not intend to advance one side or the other. While you seem to believe I was arguing against preventative burns, the sibling comment seems to believe I was arguing for preventative burns which are (according to that comment) a crazy libertarian idea. This makes me wonder whether any critique of dogma must be reinterpreted as a disagreement about facts as a kind of memetic camouflage self-defense mechanism...

01100011 6y ago

I'm not so sure this applies to much of coastal CA. Coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and similar biomes can build up sufficient fuel mass in a couple years. Combined with fierce, hot, dry autumn winds(aka 'Santa Ana' winds) you have conditions where 60mph walls of flame can regularly run from the mountains towards the sea. The solution there is to follow CalFire guidelines for fireproofing your home, force local governments to ensure adequate evacuation routes, and discourage living in the wild land interface. Controlled burns can't reduce fuel because many of those plants can only recover when burned every decade or so. Between frequent burns and non-native plants, we could lose much of our native habitats if we do controlled burns wrong. https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/Homeowners-Checklist.pdf https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/Homeowne... https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/ https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/

luckylion 6y ago

Why is harvesting the trees not an option? Is the wood of such a low quality that you can't use it at all? Are the areas not reachable? I understand burning it might be faster, but it has the obvious problems that are apparently stopping them from doing it today. But why not just allow trees to be harvested?

dqv 6y ago
I didn't really get a perfect answer except that if the logging operation is done incorrectly it makes the fires worse. The environmentalist view is that the trees should be burnt but not removed to return the nutrients to the ecosystem. Basically the experts are saying logging won't get us out of this. See https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-our-way-out-of-wildfires https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-o...

brudgers 6y ago

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Even the low end of this is several times what burned this year. I’m drawing a blank on how that level of burning would prevent “mega fires” unless the idea is to replace them with “super mega fires” several times larger.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
The fires covered wide areas, but since they were so frequent, they didn't burn so hot and didn't destroy the forests, just the undergrowth.
hinkley 6y ago
There’s a difference between “had flames on it” and “burned to the ground”. There’s also a heat point where the soil is sterilized, meaning it can take many times longer for substantial succession to occur.

BurningFrog 6y ago

This article is a lot more optimistic about the California/Federal plan: https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-plan-actually-matches-the-scale-of-the-problem/ https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-pla...

pegas1 6y ago

Controled burns are only a part of the solution, generally substituting for large grazing animals that would keep the forest density and undergrowth at bay. Also, a lot of wetland in Califormia was dried and even rivers were straightened and deprived of the traditional meandering and inundation area. All that makes California dryer, slowly but surely decreasing water stored in the soil and therefore also decreasing secondary rainfall (summer thunderstorms from local evapotransiration) that would keep forests less dry.

k_sze 6y ago

Instead of burning in place, could the plants be chopped down and used as fuel to generate electricity?

dusted 6y ago

instead of controlled burns, couldn't the wood be chopped down and transported out? I mean, wood is not free.. it's worth something right? Couldn't it be sold cheaply for building materials and energy (a gasification boiler is super clean compared to "natural" burning).