Yes that's exactly the idea. And yes those "other means" sometimes exist, but they tend to be much more expensive than controlled burns. The amount of person-po

Yes that's exactly the idea. And yes those "other means" sometimes exist, but they tend to be much more expensive than controlled burns. The amount of person-power and time needed to remove that material manually would be cost-prohibitive. And that's assuming other methods even exist. Much of the fuel that needs to be removed is in places where there are no roads, so the only way to remove that fuel would be hundreds or thousands of individual helicopter trips. No government is going to pay for that. EDIT: Methods like tree thinning are manual methods and they are done routinely and they help. But they cannot take the place of controlled burns for removing large amounts of fuel and creating big fire breaks.