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controlled burns require weather conditions that allow them to be done safely, as well as people knowledgeable enough to keep them controlled. and the amount of

controlled burns require weather conditions that allow them to be done safely, as well as people knowledgeable enough to keep them controlled. and the amount of the time in the year when temperatures are cool enough and the ground is dry enough keeps shrinking. controlled burns are only really a solution for a very small percentage of a space as big as california if you want to do them safely. What they sometimes do up here in canada is just monitor and let the fires burn out of control as long as they're not moving towards a populated area, to reduce fuel in a large area. but you can only do that as long as the area is truly unpopulated, if one person builds a cabin in the woods you have to move to suppression. as i understand it, there's been a fair bit of progress in the last couple years regarding best practice for wildfire protection in populated areas. you can do a lot by removing underbrush and building firebreaks around a town, as well as relatively simple measures like disallowing cedar-shake roofs. there's probably a future where properties in towns that implement strong wildfire protection plans can continue to be insured, and towns that don't cease to exist. but that only solves the problem for towns, i don't see what can be done for properties in the woods outside a town's firebreak.

lumost 3y ago
I’d imagine that it is feasible to defend any area with greater than x people per square mile from fire, aye? At some point you could install multiple fire hoses per block, build river beds to create fire breaks, and clearcut the surrounding area, no?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Schiendelman 3y ago
  Sure, at far greater cost than the houses themselves. Who pays for that?
  - lumost 3y ago
    We wouldn’t debate fire risk with a city as dense as Manhattan. There is a cutoff where the population density and size makes fire prevention/risk management economical.
    - Schiendelman 3y ago
      That cutoff is probably two orders of magnitude higher density than these places that are burning.
- sologoub 3y ago
  That depends on where you are talking about. In SoCal with the Mediterranean climate and relatively few forests, it would probably work. Brush clearance is already a thing and it’s possible to step it up a lot more and enforce on absentee land owners that don’t do it. NorCal with the thick forests, you’d need to clear cut so much, you’d be irreversibly altering the landscape and will probably get other bad things for it, such as erosion and landslides. The vegetation will also try to grow back aggressively (NorCal is a lot wetter than SoCal). So you’d end up doing this over and over again. It’s unlikely to be economical.
  - lumost 3y ago
    The northeast is full of managed landscapes. It’s not necessarily cheap to do, but it’s also not expensive. However we do not generally have landslide risks.
- bandrami 3y ago
  > build river beds to create fire breaks Ah, I see you've never tried to do anything involving water or drainage in California
sologoub 3y ago
In california you also have to deal with CARB (Air Resource Board) and get allocated burn days. They are so few that even when conditions allow no burns happen because of this logistical nightmare: https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-help-solve-californias-fire-problem-so-why-arent-there-more-of-them https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he... Firefighting resources are already stretched thin. Adding more bureaucracy on top of these tough logistics make any preventative burns impossible to plan since CARB can just deny it the last minute. CARB performs a useful function (acid rain anyone?), but if you asked most people in CA, I suspect wildfires will come in a lot higher on the list than smog from occasional burns. With uncontrolled fires, even more smoke and who knows what else goes into the air already.
- bitbckt 3y ago
  I’m sorry I have but one upvote to give, but those who aren’t local don’t seem to have any notion of how stringent environmental and air quality regulations are in California in this arena. Nobody wants the LA smog of the 1970s back, but controlled burns are largely impossible much of the year due to their effects on air quality. Wildland firefighters - of whom I count several among my cousins - are between a rock and a hard place on this issue. They spend more of each year in “fire season” in part because they cannot pollute the air during “not fire season” with controlled burns.
  - sologoub 3y ago
    Thank you and your family for their service and protection to all of us!!! Hopefully one day we get a study that shows the fires end up spewing even more pollutants than any controlled burn, so the net effect of not doing these controlled burns is likely a lot worse.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    Of course they are too chicken shit to take more aggressive action against the real emissions problem: cars. Allowing new pollution spewing gas guzzlers to continue to be produced and sold until 2035 is absurd. They should ban production in 5 years and ban use by 2035.

lumost 3y ago

I’d imagine that it is feasible to defend any area with greater than x people per square mile from fire, aye? At some point you could install multiple fire hoses per block, build river beds to create fire breaks, and clearcut the surrounding area, no?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Schiendelman 3y ago
Sure, at far greater cost than the houses themselves. Who pays for that?
- lumost 3y ago
  We wouldn’t debate fire risk with a city as dense as Manhattan. There is a cutoff where the population density and size makes fire prevention/risk management economical.
  - Schiendelman 3y ago
    That cutoff is probably two orders of magnitude higher density than these places that are burning.
sologoub 3y ago
That depends on where you are talking about. In SoCal with the Mediterranean climate and relatively few forests, it would probably work. Brush clearance is already a thing and it’s possible to step it up a lot more and enforce on absentee land owners that don’t do it. NorCal with the thick forests, you’d need to clear cut so much, you’d be irreversibly altering the landscape and will probably get other bad things for it, such as erosion and landslides. The vegetation will also try to grow back aggressively (NorCal is a lot wetter than SoCal). So you’d end up doing this over and over again. It’s unlikely to be economical.
- lumost 3y ago
  The northeast is full of managed landscapes. It’s not necessarily cheap to do, but it’s also not expensive. However we do not generally have landslide risks.
bandrami 3y ago
> build river beds to create fire breaks Ah, I see you've never tried to do anything involving water or drainage in California

sologoub 3y ago

In california you also have to deal with CARB (Air Resource Board) and get allocated burn days. They are so few that even when conditions allow no burns happen because of this logistical nightmare: https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-help-solve-californias-fire-problem-so-why-arent-there-more-of-them https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he... Firefighting resources are already stretched thin. Adding more bureaucracy on top of these tough logistics make any preventative burns impossible to plan since CARB can just deny it the last minute. CARB performs a useful function (acid rain anyone?), but if you asked most people in CA, I suspect wildfires will come in a lot higher on the list than smog from occasional burns. With uncontrolled fires, even more smoke and who knows what else goes into the air already.

bitbckt 3y ago
I’m sorry I have but one upvote to give, but those who aren’t local don’t seem to have any notion of how stringent environmental and air quality regulations are in California in this arena. Nobody wants the LA smog of the 1970s back, but controlled burns are largely impossible much of the year due to their effects on air quality. Wildland firefighters - of whom I count several among my cousins - are between a rock and a hard place on this issue. They spend more of each year in “fire season” in part because they cannot pollute the air during “not fire season” with controlled burns.
- sologoub 3y ago
  Thank you and your family for their service and protection to all of us!!! Hopefully one day we get a study that shows the fires end up spewing even more pollutants than any controlled burn, so the net effect of not doing these controlled burns is likely a lot worse.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Of course they are too chicken shit to take more aggressive action against the real emissions problem: cars. Allowing new pollution spewing gas guzzlers to continue to be produced and sold until 2035 is absurd. They should ban production in 5 years and ban use by 2035.