42 ms·

The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much burnable matter over time. Small fire

• lnwlebjel 5y ago
  Alternatively, this allows you to burn when you want to, such as when conditions are favorable to maintain control of the fire. You're correct that preventing large fires is important - control burns must be part of the solution.
  • RC_ITR 5y ago
    Yeah, we should definitely put out small fires in August and let (or force) bigger ones to burn in March. Wild how little critical thinking gets put behind these meme ideas like 'historic forest management is the only problem and we should let everything burn'.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      Instead of snark I'd suggest doing some research. The science on this has been solid for about 50 years now. The political will is the problem.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • RC_ITR 5y ago
        You think controlled burns during fire season are a good idea? I agree with you that controlled burns are good, but I'm saying a 'controlled burn' is impossible from Aug-rainfall. And sure, letting the entire Sierra burn is one solution, but we have the technology to do controlled burns when appropriate and not let wildfires run unfettered. Those are not mutually exclusive. Hence the 'critical thinking' snark. The answer to stopping massive wildfires is not to stop fighting them whole cloth, because, surprise California's equilibrium burn pre-contact was probably 4m acres/year anyway!
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• Teever 5y ago
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    Living near something doesn't make one an expert in that thing. I live near a school, but I'm still fairly worthless as an elementary school teacher or administrator. The actual experts agree with the parent poster. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/06/how-forest-management-helps-lay-the-conditions-for-wildfires https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/06/how-fore... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-led-choked-forests-now-it-s-time-clear-n1243599 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-l... https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-... https://www.vox.com/2015/9/17/9347361/wildfire-management-prescribed-burn https://www.vox.com/2015/9/17/9347361/wildfire-management-pr... (We could also do what Australia does, and set better standards for buildings and neighborhoods for surviving fires.)
    • cgriswald 5y ago
      The grandparent poster seems to be commenting about relative risk rather than personal expertise. You may not make a good elementary school teacher or administrator, but it would make sense for you to have an opinion on how the school manages traffic. Certainly you wouldn't value my opinion since I don't live by the school and even if I had expertise in school traffic management I might not have your interests in mind. That said, I don't agree with the poster's attitude. (For the record, I live next to, and essentially in a large forest.) A controlled burn could get out of hand, but in general, controlled burns will do so less frequently than an unplanned wildfire if we aren't doing controlled burns. Or, in other words, whatever short term risk there is from a controlled burn near me is paid back by a reduced overall long term risk. Since I have no plans to sell my home (and even if I did, because I care about other people) controlled burns is a clear path forward from my point of view.
      • ceejayoz 5y ago
        > it would make sense for you to have an opinion on how the school manages traffic No, we have traffic engineers for that. Decisions should be made based off expertise, not proximity.
• dillondoyle 5y ago
  I would be interested to hear from a scientist on a couple questions I've had around this thinking: I've read that because of this built up material AND dead trees from beetle kill, no water or snow, etc that the fires burn too hot and kill the regenerative seeds. Is this true? If so how does that factor into the balance of that decision? And do they take into account the carbon and pollution emitted that's a HUGE net negative? Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first place perhaps it's more flatten the curve Plus landslides and instability. I think I've also read burn scars don't absorb and retain as much water - but I'm not as confident in that memory?
  • CrazyStat 5y ago
    > Maybe we can't ever stop them from happening in the first place perhaps it's more flatten the curve We've been trying to "flatten the curve" for the past century. Turns out that was a bad idea. The only way too get back to a healthy ecosystem at this point is to allow a hundred years of excess built up fuel to burn. California had artificially pleasant (i.e mostly wildfire-free) summers for many years. The next few decades will be paying the price for that.
    • space_fountain 5y ago
      Isn't this a very norm biased idea. I think geo engineering gets too much of a bad rap. It's powerful and thus massive mistakes have and will be made, but we're only going to get better at it. Why resign ourselves. Would logging at sufficient amounts help, could we better smooth the release of water and fix this? I sort of hate the modern environmentalisms insistence that we should just throw up our hands and anything else is inherently bad.
      • 8note 5y ago
        Just log out the whole forest you say? Removing the forest has the same problem as doing nothing about the fires. People want to have houses in the forest
      • marssaxman 5y ago
• sharp11 5y ago
  Our past forest management practices are a part of it, but climate change is also a huge part: <https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change/ https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change/>
  • lambdadmitry 5y ago
    I don't think it meshes well with Spanish wildfire stats [1]. I can't see any serious trend there, definitely nothing like California. The main difference is that they manage their forests and do prescribed burning. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265354/area-burned-by-wildfire-in-spain/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265354/area-burned-by-w...
    • sharp11 5y ago
      I can't speak to Spain, specifically, but the relationship between climate change and wildfires is well-established. See for instance: https://www.preventionweb.net/files/73797_wildfiresbriefingnote.pdf https://www.preventionweb.net/files/73797_wildfiresbriefingn...
• tshaddox 5y ago
  I don't think a system like this is comparable to the 10 a.m. policy of attempting to totally suppress all wildfires. It still makes sense to quickly detect and suppress all unwanted wildfires. And as far as I know, the proposed solution to the 10 a.m. policy isn't to just randomly let some percentage of natural wildfires burn as much as they want, but rather to do prescribed burns (and still fight to control and extinguish unwanted wildfires).
• dabinat 5y ago
  I read about this a few months back and it seems that a key issue with controlled burns is liability. No-one wants to be responsible if the wind blows in an unexpected direction and it gets out of control. They’re scared of the variables. And of course, the less you burn, the greater the risk when you do burn, so it’s a vicious cycle.
  • wbl 5y ago
    Sovereign immunity exists for this. It's a choice to let people sue for property damage due to burns.
  • stevage 5y ago
    It is also getting much harder to do controlled burns because of climate change. The ideal weather conditions are getting rarer.
• dragonsky67 5y ago
  One of the biggest problems with managing bushfire in Australia is having the fire "jump the line". Where embers fly ahead of the main fire, starting spot fires that unless dealt with just extend the reach of the fire. Currently a lot of spot fire management is attempted using helicopters with water buckets, but this is both expensive and bloody dangerous. Being able to use semi disposable drones could assist dramatically. There are however a number of problems I can see that this approach will have to overcome. - You need to preposition the drone in such a way that it can remain charged and also is protected from any potential bush fire before it's utilised. This could be achieved with a fire protected, solar powered shelter, but this significantly increases the cost. Maybe they could be deployed from a long duration aircraft? - The airspace around a bush fire is a particularly hostile environment. I'm not seeing the average off the shelf drone deal with smoke, particles and embers and still function effectively. Also the sensor package will have to deal with restricted view as well as reduced GPS/Radio caused by smoke/firestorm interference. That said, this system could be very effective in dealing with smaller locations, close to built up areas where you can target deployment for those high risk fire ban periods.
  • mabbo 5y ago
    Wow, that's a really great point. If we have these sorts of drones helping to contain and manage the allowed fires, in an automated fashion, we can reduce the effort needed to do so, or perhaps even control larger fires. Maybe I was too pessimistic.
    • ashton314 5y ago
      Meta: this kind of back and forth is what makes HN so awesome. Thank you everyone for keeping open minds. I learn a lot from good-faith back-and-forth like this.
    • newbamboo 5y ago
      Too pessimistic is a great, generous way, to summarize your biases which are those shared by most laypeople and even some self professed experts. Don’t try to turn wild fire into some stupid binary like everything else on tv, where you choose a side “pro-fire” or “anti-fire” and then insist that your way is the only one worthy of consideration. Controlled burns, which it seem you favor, do not imply an absence of firefighting. It’s not “fire, good or bad?” Even though many seem to want to have that sort of debate. It’s an idiotic way of thinking.
• coryrc 5y ago
  We can't let them burn at any time of year, because people have moved into the forest all over and we're liable off their property burns or they die. First step, laws made to remove any liability for fire damage outside urban areas. Make it clear fires are coming and they must have a fire-proof house. But we won't, because the rich will use the poor who can't afford to rebuild their homes as a shield against anyone being held accountable.
• tlb 5y ago
  But the answer to this isn't to just let fires start whenever and not put them out. When they start on hot, windy days they can destroy cities. The right answer is some combination of controlled burns (on cool days) and stopping random wildfires as soon as they start.
• robbedpeter 5y ago
  Use those drones to seed locally appropriate mushroom species with spore sprays. Even better, preemptively identify piles of deadwood and prioritize larger piles. Bonus points if the mushrooms are edible. Double bonus points if they're magic. More mushrooms means more water retention, less fuel that's less dry overall, and a niche in the ecosystem is filled , expanding activity in the adjacent niches, which in turn speeds the disappearance of biodegradable mass.
  • robbedpeter 5y ago
    To clarify, just add spores to the water before deploying, it'll still be just as good in suppressing fires, and it reduces long term buildup. Win/Win!
• ajmurmann 5y ago
  I understand that this is true for some forests but not all. Lots of California forests need to burn their underbrush and would do so without human intervention. Out gorge in Oregon is not supposed to do this though.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. No, the reason why the fires are so terrible is because we build way too fucking close to forests. When your house is a couple hundred meters away from a forest that's prone to catch fire, say goodbye to your house in case of a large forest fire. We need to stop encroaching on nature so hard when building settlements, just like our ancestors did - they respected that nature needs distance from humans. Not just because of fires, but also because of pandemics, landslides, floods, hurricanes, storms... nature is dangerous, no matter how technologically advanced we become as a species - it seems as if humanity has gotten a bit megalomaniac in that regard, and we are all paying the price each year for that. And it's not going to get better, only worse with how climate change has increased the severity of extreme weather events. Alternatively: make it clear to people that in the case they want to live in a fire-prone area, they have to protect (e.g. invest in deep underground water tanks for a powerful sprinkler system) and insure themselves. There will be no public investment or action in firefighting for areas designated fire-prone. Why should firefighters have to risk their lives for people who knowingly built houses in a fire-prone area?