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Can I ask a bit of a dumb question though? It seems like educated opinion has swung towards doing prescribed burns, and I remember hearing about this decades ag

Can I ask a bit of a dumb question though? It seems like educated opinion has swung towards doing prescribed burns, and I remember hearing about this decades ago too. But- don't the same areas keep burning in California every fire season? Shouldn't these uncontrolled burns have already swept out the detritus, easily burnable material, etc.? If the same areas burn every year- doesn't that sort of indicate that controlled burns aren't effective?

naringas 6y ago
as far as I know the recent terrible fires swept through parts that hadn't burned in decades
reportingsjr 6y ago
No, they typically don't burn the same regions. The crux of the matter here is that getting forested areas to the point of being able to do controlled/prescribed burns is going to take an insane amount of effort and is only happening to a fraction of the forest needed to keep things under control. You can't just go start a fire in a forest and hope it goes well. You have to manually go through and clear the brush in the understory, or else the fire will be so hot it will burn down large trees. Once you've cleared much of the small woody brush, etc that causes these fires to be absolutely massive, regular fires will typically be much more mild and continue helping keep the forest understory clear without requiring much manual labor. It really is pretty effective, but it does require lots of little fires quite frequently.
almost_usual 6y ago
The fire that burned east Santa Rosa in the past week went between burn scars from the fire in 2017.
pixl97 6y ago
It's a complicated issue for a few reasons... Most of it doesn't burn every year, but many places that have been logged and now have no trees will have issues with invasive species that grow quickly and explode into flame. Those invasive species will be displaced when larger tress grow over them, but in the meantime will be a substantial fire risk. Having both the invasive species and high fuel loads under large trees leads to megafires. At the end of the day things are going to burn. The question is can we build better to lessen some parts of the human impact, such as houses not burning to the ground. We may not be able to do anything about the air quality at all.

naringas 6y ago

as far as I know the recent terrible fires swept through parts that hadn't burned in decades

reportingsjr 6y ago

No, they typically don't burn the same regions. The crux of the matter here is that getting forested areas to the point of being able to do controlled/prescribed burns is going to take an insane amount of effort and is only happening to a fraction of the forest needed to keep things under control. You can't just go start a fire in a forest and hope it goes well. You have to manually go through and clear the brush in the understory, or else the fire will be so hot it will burn down large trees. Once you've cleared much of the small woody brush, etc that causes these fires to be absolutely massive, regular fires will typically be much more mild and continue helping keep the forest understory clear without requiring much manual labor. It really is pretty effective, but it does require lots of little fires quite frequently.

almost_usual 6y ago

The fire that burned east Santa Rosa in the past week went between burn scars from the fire in 2017.

pixl97 6y ago

It's a complicated issue for a few reasons... Most of it doesn't burn every year, but many places that have been logged and now have no trees will have issues with invasive species that grow quickly and explode into flame. Those invasive species will be displaced when larger tress grow over them, but in the meantime will be a substantial fire risk. Having both the invasive species and high fuel loads under large trees leads to megafires. At the end of the day things are going to burn. The question is can we build better to lessen some parts of the human impact, such as houses not burning to the ground. We may not be able to do anything about the air quality at all.