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> Except no one wants to take the risk that the small fire becomes a huge one Generally controlled burns are scheduled during wetter seasons for this reason.
by dogorman 5y ago
> Except no one wants to take the risk that the small fire becomes a huge one
Generally controlled burns are scheduled during wetter seasons for this reason. But the difficulty of getting the general public to understand this and go along with it is probably hard to understate.
- lazide 5y agoIt still happens that they get away from the firefighters sometimes [https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/escaped-prescribed-fire/ https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/escaped-prescribed-fire/] With very high fuel loads, the consequences get worse as time progresses, and the odds of it happening get higher - at least without tons of manual shredding and other fuel work first, which is expensive, and what a prescribed fire should alleviate the need for. In the modern legal/liability environment, it’s tough to do - if you do the inexpensive thing (still expensive) like prescribed fires to reduce the catastrophic risk, you get sued. If you do the safer option (mastication, lop and scatter, etc) you can only touch tiny areas at a time - and the catastrophic risk rises. Logging can help, but it also requires management and care to not make the problem worse long term, and in many of these areas it’s a non-starter due to environmentalist pushback. Even if we ignore the cost in money, it delays things for decades sometimes - and by then it’s probably burned down.