Things get worse in The Southwest

To be perfectly fair, the eucalyptus isn't the only arsonist tree and California has several such trees growing natively. Redwoods are among them, their cones are not only fireproof, they actually do not open and release the seeds until a forest fire hits them and the heat is enough to get them to open.

That's not to say eucalyptus didn't make things worse, but the entire California ecology is based on the assumption that there's going to be several low-intensity brushfires a year that clear out the scrub on the ground, redwoods aren't the only tree that can't germinate until they've been set on fire. The fact that the people in charge invariably prevented those fires (because it could destroy some political donor's McMansion vacation home in the woods) and kept fires from clearing the scrub, for years, while also keeping people from removing the scrub via chainsaw is what's let it get so bad. Now the highly flammable fast-growing scrub has grown massive and even more highly flammable.

Basically, nature is now snapping back and it's now demanding all the fires it hasn't gotten for several decades, with interest added.
 
Okay... So in the meantime they didn't do that, and there's massive fires threatening to destroy entire towns. Seems like an obvious solution that ought to at least be tried to me.
 
Captain X said:
Thing is, I'm not even talking about stuff in the past - I'm talking right now as a means to save these towns, and possibly to stop the fires. Just bulldoze some stuff right now.
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Zachowon said:
Know what we do in GA? We actually maintain our forests
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Captain X said:
Okay... So in the meantime they didn't do that, and there's massive fires threatening to destroy entire towns. Seems like an obvious solution that ought to at least be tried to me.
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Goats are more effective and ecologically friendly than bulldozers, and if you clear out the understory fires are much less intense.

They can also do what we've done in CO to combat pine beetles; cut a 60 foot meadow between several rows of trees to allow for new growth and to create natural fire breaks.

The timber that comes out of it still has value, as firewood if nothing else, and it allows for rejuvenation of the area.
 
Captain X said:
Okay... So in the meantime they didn't do that, and there's massive fires threatening to destroy entire towns. Seems like an obvious solution that ought to at least be tried to me.
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California did do that. They spent something like 200 million dollars in 2020 on such firebreaks. It's just that everything's horrifically expensive in California and maintaining the firebreaks is too costly for their economy, plus with the amount of dried scrub blowing around fires can jump breaks easily, plus the wealthy do not like the appearance of breaks and make political efforts to prevent them from ruining the view until it's too late, and there are wealthy people under every rock and tree.

Remember also, the vegetation actively tries to spread fire there, it's really hard to make a break wide enough that rolling and burning bushes covered in organically grown explosive fuel oil can't jump it. They need breaks 200 feet wide in some cases and those breaks have to be actively manned to keep the fire from jumping them.
 
Hell, Ft Jackson SC has fire breaks all throughout its property to make sure fires can not spread easily
 
We do controlled burns in the Great Plains to prevent grass fires, admittedly after the fires start most of the time, and its an ancapistan hellhole in some counties. I can't imagine the poster boy for nanny states lacks the authority to manage things like regularly occurring natural disasters. There has to be some department or organization in California that at least ameliorates the fire issues.

@Bear Ribs I know that California is very expensive state but its also a very rich state. I like to rake the state over the coals as much as the next guy, but is there really not enough lucre in the treasury to maintain fire breaks and other preventative issues? If the state needs to burn every year for ecological purposes is there no way to schedule artifical fires to get the job done and preempt the wildfires?
 
f1onagher said:
We do controlled burns in the Great Plains to prevent grass fires, admittedly after the fires start most of the time, and its an ancapistan hellhole in some counties. I can't imagine the poster boy for nanny states lacks the authority to manage things like regularly occurring natural disasters. There has to be some department or organization in California that at least ameliorates the fire issues.

@Bear Ribs I know that California is very expensive state but its also a very rich state. I like to rake the state over the coals as much as the next guy, but is there really not enough lucre in the treasury to maintain fire breaks and other preventative issues? If the state needs to burn every year for ecological purposes is there no way to schedule artifical fires to get the job done and preempt the wildfires?
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Of course there isn't money. They're too busy spending it fighting species extinction, like trying to breed fish that are so finickyt hey end up spending tens of thousands of dollars per fish. Victor Davis Hanson talks about some of the crap they get up to in California with state government funds.
 
Zachowon said:
Hell, Ft Jackson SC has fire breaks all throughout its property to make sure fires can not spread easily
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Bear in mind, Georgia and South Carolina are a very different environment than California. The East Coast forests are not ecologically built around periodic forest fires, in fact, forest fires are comparably rare, and the weather is considerably wetter. Consider the annual amount of rainfall between the East and West:
190rain.jpg


Note that the lowest regions of rainfall in the Southeastern US correspond to the Shenandoah and Roanoke Valleys in Virginia, and that the wettest parts are either coastal, or that one spot between NC, SC, TN, and Georgia... which corresponds with the Great Smokey Mountains which are an actual temperate rainforest.

Meanwhile the west coast is like, the opposite. A handful of wet areas surrounded by mostly drier land.

What this ends up meaning is that the strategies for mitigating forest fires are quite different between the east and west coasts. In the east coast, underbrush actually tends to be lush and full of wet things. It's easier to burn that trees, sure, but the leaves and droppings from trees are typically soaked and rotting into soil within a few months. Deadwood, unless it's standing, is soaked through between the rain and moisture in the soil, making it terrible fuel for fires. This isn't the case on the west coast for much of it. There's not as much moisture in the ground to soak into fallen things, there's not as much rain to soak into things and lead to the more rapid decay.

As such, the strategies have to be adapted, what works on the East coast isn't necessarily good for the west coast, and vice versa.

The look of forests between the east and west coasts are actually so distinctive that you can immediately tell it just by looking at them. It's one of those things that stands out when you watch TV, especially shows made in California but set on the East coast. I'm reminded especially of shows that like to be based in DC but occasionally go out to the "Appalachian Mountains" for an episode... and the forests invariably look WRONG because they just went out to the California forest to film.
 
Bigking321 said:
Why can't they just follow the science?

Oh, right. Because they don't actually care about the science unless they can spin it to support them.
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There are provisions in state law for controlled burns. The problem is that a human-initiated controlled burn requires very strict control for liability and safety reasons, which is actually extremely hard to do in a naturally fire-friendly ecosystem.
 
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