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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 whi

by 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.
- trhway 6y ago
  >Each DC10 tanker costs about $120 million. The newer 747 tanker starts at $140 million and that's before customization. One drop from such a plane covers with fire retardant an area 90ft wide 1-2 miles long. 100 of these would definitely be more than enough, and isn't really needed. Especially considering that those planes are pretty picky about airstrips, and Cal Fire can't (or wouldn't) use them in the first attack waves. The majority of Cal Fire air tanker fleet - about 30 planes - is something like 7 of C130 ($30M, fire retardant payload 4000gals, 1/3rd of DC10) and 20 something of S-2Ts (1200gals, 1/10th of DC10). So in total in one sortie they can cover an area 90ft wide 4 miles long which is obviously wasn't enough, even if we consider 2-3 sorties in a row (i.e. 8-12 miles), to extinguish/contain all the fires started in the thunderstorm night. Whereis scaling that fleet 5-10 times (which would mean on the scale of $2-5B if C130 are used) we'd get to cover 90ft by 20-40 miles (40-120 miles for 2-3 sorties in a row) in the first few hours - thus these megafires wouldn't have a chance to develop. >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. that is just ridiculous demagogy, a high school debate club level. Lets look into the real numbers - DC10 (or 3 sorties of C130) takes about 40 tons, so 100 would take 4000 tons, which is 0.005 of 1 day of San Francisco water consumption , and in CA agricultural water consumption dwarfs the urban like 4 times. So what those planes would use is even less than that proverbial drop in a bucket.

by trhway 6y ago

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.

trhway 6y ago
>Each DC10 tanker costs about $120 million. The newer 747 tanker starts at $140 million and that's before customization. One drop from such a plane covers with fire retardant an area 90ft wide 1-2 miles long. 100 of these would definitely be more than enough, and isn't really needed. Especially considering that those planes are pretty picky about airstrips, and Cal Fire can't (or wouldn't) use them in the first attack waves. The majority of Cal Fire air tanker fleet - about 30 planes - is something like 7 of C130 ($30M, fire retardant payload 4000gals, 1/3rd of DC10) and 20 something of S-2Ts (1200gals, 1/10th of DC10). So in total in one sortie they can cover an area 90ft wide 4 miles long which is obviously wasn't enough, even if we consider 2-3 sorties in a row (i.e. 8-12 miles), to extinguish/contain all the fires started in the thunderstorm night. Whereis scaling that fleet 5-10 times (which would mean on the scale of $2-5B if C130 are used) we'd get to cover 90ft by 20-40 miles (40-120 miles for 2-3 sorties in a row) in the first few hours - thus these megafires wouldn't have a chance to develop. >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. that is just ridiculous demagogy, a high school debate club level. Lets look into the real numbers - DC10 (or 3 sorties of C130) takes about 40 tons, so 100 would take 4000 tons, which is 0.005 of 1 day of San Francisco water consumption , and in CA agricultural water consumption dwarfs the urban like 4 times. So what those planes would use is even less than that proverbial drop in a bucket.