My family has a cabin up there. Grandpa bought the land in the 50s and finally built on it in the 70s. Always imagined it would be there. Will be very strange if that's suddenly not true. Of course it's the way of all things but it's different when it's firsthand.
“ bluer-than-blue Lake Tahoe, majestic mountains, more fun, sun, sand, snow, well, more of just about anything you’d want in your destination vacation.”
"So early on, Newsom identified some key wildfire prevention projects, and that includes things like forest thinning and prescribed burns, and they were meant to protect some of the most vulnerable communities in California. And he claimed 90,000 acres were treated, but we found that's not true. The state's own data shows that, in reality, it was less than 12,000 acres, so just a fraction of what Newsom claimed. And looking at the bigger picture, not just those specific projects, we also found that the state's fire prevention work overall dropped by half last year, which was the worst wildfire season on record for California. And during that time, Newsom also slashed about $150 million from the state's wildfire prevention budget."
I have one piece of anectdata. I own some property in the Sierra foothills, and a couple of years ago spent considerable time talking to the California Department Forestry (CDF) fire chief for the area about clearing a fire break through it. It was part of a huge project. We agreed on the path, had the legal paperwork signed... and then...
COVID, and then,
100% of local crews were dispatched to fight last year's fires, and then,
still COVID, and now,
even yet more worse fires...
The fire prevention projects are what they work on when they are not fighting actual fires. And they aren't exactly over-staffed to begin with.
There simply hasn't been any staff to work on the big fire prevention projects. If there is anybody out there that thinks Newsom and the CDF are behind plan and need to move faster, I have several shovels I can loan out so that you can help. Heck, you can borrow my chain saw.
Yes. Although there will still be places that need work. The Detweiler fire burned across my place a few years ago. Mostly burned “cool” - ground fire not crown fire - so a lot of fuel got eliminated. Came back healthier. Still, it could use some work to create a defense line. There is a fire road through the property so it is possible to move equipment through there in case of a fire, so it is a defensible ridge. The neighboring canyon would be a death trap for a Cat crew if the fire jumped them.
the claim is that a particular State of Calif, Dept of Forestry perhaps, program was supposed to thin acreage and had not done more than 12,000, and that is proof of the entire effort failing and unfunded?
this seems to be the kind of writing that relies on a complete lack of history and context on the part of the reader, on the subject timeline and any previous events
The State of Calif. has been very, very, very active along with a hundred high tech partners and the state resident academics. Huge volumes of money are in play as the State is rich at the moment. It strains the credibility of the printed word to pass on these rumors and tortured phrases for some backroom purpose. amazing
As required by Newsom’s executive order, the agency said it paid particular attention to equity — focusing on areas with high “poverty levels, residents with disabilities, language barriers, residents over 65 or under five years of age, and households without a car.”
Is the same “equity” philosophy guiding California’s responses to crime and homelessness?
How does one apply this rubric to management of national forests in California? I don’t understand.
here is text from a 2019 ExecOrder (smaller than subsequent 2020 and 2021) which required a dozen branches of govt to file binding 45 day response:
--
Executive Summary California experienced the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in its history in 2017 and 2018. Fueled by drought, an unprecedented buildup of dry vegetation and extreme winds, the size and intensity of these wildfires caused the loss of more than 100 lives, destroyed thousands of homes and exposed millions of urban and rural Californians to unhealthy air. Climate change, an epidemic of dead and dying trees, and the proliferation of new homes in the wildland urban interface (WUI) magnify the threat and place substantially more people and property at risk than in preceding decades. More than 25 million acres of California wildlands are classified as under very high or extreme fire threat, extending that risk over half the state. Certain populations in our state are particularly vulnerable to wildfire threats. These Californians live in communities that face near-term public safety threats given their location. Certain residents are further vulnerable given factors such as age and lack of mobility. The tragic loss of life and property in the town of Paradise during the recent Camp Fire demonstrates such vulnerability. Recognizing the need for urgent action, Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-05-19 on January 9, 2019. The Executive Order directs the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), in consultation with other state agencies and departments, to recommend immediate, medium and long-term actions to help prevent destructive wildfires. With an emphasis on taking necessary actions to protect vulnerable populations, and recognizing a backlog in fuels management work combined with finite resources, the Governor placed an emphasis on pursuing a strategic approach where necessary actions are focused on California's most vulnerable communities as a prescriptive and deliberative endeavor to realize the greatest returns on reducing risk to life and property.
Explain what part of it? In that article, the California fire chief took responsibility for communicating the wrong information to the governor's office. I'm gonna guess the pandemic had something to do with last year's shortfall, but this really needs more indepth research that can dig through a few years' worth of records.
Newsom was derelict in his duties as governor and lied about forestry management. this is one of the big reasons for his recall along with the rapidly growing homeless crisis.
Looks like you didn't address this part of my comment: the California fire chief took responsibility for communicating the wrong information to the governor's office
Please don't use HN for electioneering. Given that the recall election is the 3rd such effort in 3 years and that said recall efforts predate this forest management issue you allude to, I do not believe it is the major factor you suggest it to be. It seems much more economical to believe the recall proponents learned from their first 2 failures and succeeded on their third attempt.
Its basically all Newsoms fault these fires are raging out of control(recently) My family and myself have lived in California my entire life and I have never seen the state in such a state of dysfunction(from environment, to social collapse etc), heres an article that puts the blame solely in his lap:
I'm glad to see they're allowing the inmates to actually become firefighters after getting out, looks like up until very very recently you could have spent a bunch of time fighting fires as a prisoner and been shit out of luck after you got out. Shit was gross and exploitative.
The US National Forrest and Calfire have been on the losing side of this fire so far. All the technology that produces memes that spread across the globe in seconds and launches and lands orbital rockets flawlessly cannot stop this fire. This has been a dry summer which can be attributed to global warming.
I for one am not a defeatist that will let global warming beat me. We need to think of solutions to fires like this. 1. We need to apply Phos-Chek from ground based units. 2. Building codes need to be updated to only allow fire resistant structures in wildfire prone areas. 3. Inhabited locations in fire prone areas need need active fire suppression infrastructure around them (agricultural level irrigation at the ready). 4. Forest management around inhabited areas need to reduce forest fire fuel.
We need to apply Phos-Chek from ground based units
Phos Chek is not great for the environment, especially to aquatic life. So ideally there'd be some solution that doesn't use more of it.
agricultural level irrigation at the ready
The fires are exacerbated by California's long term drought, if there's large quanties of water laying around, then they probably wouldn't have such a bad fire season.
Inhabited locations in fire prone areas
I think there should be a re-evaluation of whether or not to let people build or rebuild in especially fire-prone areas.
> I think there should be a re-evaluation of whether or not to let people build or rebuild in especially fire-prone areas.
This is already happening, not by government, but rather by the insurance markets. My friend has lived in a fire-prone area of Southern California for years. His home owners insurances rates have more than tripled in the last few years. He just recently moved (yep, Idaho).
Does the government subsidize fire insurance? I'm always taken aback when I see people rebuilding from a hurricane with subsidized wind and flood insurance. I understand why its nice for those that need it but has perverse incentives.
It does, although indirectly, through municipal fire departments. It's not "insurance" in the strict sense of the word, but it is an abatement mechanism designed to help minimize losses that would otherwise be borne by private insurers.
In California, if you can't get fire insurance through the private market, you generally have access to the FAIR Plan (https://www.cfpnet.com/about-fair-plan/). As the about page points out, it's not taxpayer funded - instead, companies writing home insurance in the state are required to contribute towards a share of risk in the plan.
Entire towns are burning down. This isn’t just people out playing settler in the forest. South Lake Tahoe (currently under an evacuation order) has hotel towers.
Yeah, suburbs of Santa Rosa burned down in the Tubbs Fire of 2017. It burned down suburban neighbourhoods. This isn't people out in the middle of nowhere.
That’s right. Most people have not ever seen large-scale fires and don’t know how powerful they are. As a fire grows larger, it grows in intensity and spreads faster.
A campfire needs tending or it goes out. A bonfire will just burn until it runs out of fuel. A house fire will quickly turn into an inferno. Forest fires are hopefully like nothing you’ve ever seen—the sheer power of them is staggering.
I’ve been in small wildfires before. But yesterday I saw the Caldor fire from a plane… And the shear size of it was shocking. Photos and news clips don’t do the scale justice.
Spoiler: it turns out that if you have a multi-million dollar insurance policy, the insurance company sends over guys to spray everything with fire retardant gel.
1. Phos Chek is probably better than the long term effects from a wildfire. I would recommend looking more into consiquentalists ethics. 2. The mountains have excesses of water in the spring which could easily be sequestered for wildfire season. 3. I own land and live in a wildfire prone area. I will not be moving out to live in a human shit ridden city. I am prefer nature over close human habitation.
Yes, I would sacrifice the Sacramento River Smelt for more water for agriculture and humans. Again, I'm more of a consequentialist. I'm for forest management, which means cutting down some trees. Many modern environmentalist deontologists will call me a racist for suggesting we need to cut down some trees for the greater good.
They do. Many species of conifer seed don't even begin to germinate until exposed to the heat of a wildfire. Fire's are a part of the natural lifecycle of a west coast forest. Unfortunately the over suppression of fires over the last 120 years has over fueled these forests and we are witnessing the consequences now.
In some areas too much fuel has accumulated, causing fires to burn so hot that they kill the trees and destroy the seeds. After that it can take many years for the forest to recover.
Wildfires have many transformative and beneficial effects for an ecosystem when they happen naturally and haven’t been made unnaturally large by 100 years of eager suppression.
We also need more large firefighting aircraft. There is a perpetual shortage because the state and federal governments typically only hire them on annual contacts. So the operating companies can't afford to invest in more aircraft. If governments put out 10 year contracts that would give them enough stability to expand the fleet.
Annoyingly the biggest plane was taken out of service this spring, partially because of liability issues after a retardent drop killed a firefighter and mostly because it was more lucrative to move freight.
https://fireaviation.com/2021/04/23/the-747-supertanker-is-c...
We badly need more of this size carrier base don what my fire fighter friends tell me, although removing fuel in winter months would solve the problem at its core
Would fire retardant applied as required from static base units help in any way? Imagine a chain of them launching or exploding to release product as required. Then re-stocked after the event.
> I for one am not a defeatist that will let global warming beat me.
Thinking about it in terms of victory and defeat isn't very helpful IMO. The reality is pretty clear: humans need to adapt to climate change. We are already past the point of no return, and in places like California the effects of climate change are mounting at a faster rate than we can realistically mitigate them.
> We need to think of solutions to fires like this. 1. We need to apply Phos-Chek from ground based units. 2. Building codes need to be updated to only allow fire resistant structures in wildfire prone areas. 3. Inhabited locations in fire prone areas need need active fire suppression infrastructure around them (agricultural level irrigation at the ready). 4. Forest management around inhabited areas need to reduce forest fire fuel.
I'm an advisor and investor in a company that serves this market and while all of the things that you mention can help, they are not "solutions" per se. For example:
1. "Fire resistant" structures are not fire proof. Many rural homeowners in the most vulnerable areas don't have the income to make significant upgrades to their homes. A lot more funding for retrofit subsidies would be required and then you need adequate man power to run inspections and perform upgrades.
2. California already has water problems. "Agricultural level irrigation" in every rural community simply isn't realistic.
2. Forest management could definitely be improved, but it's costly and labor intensive. Where are you going to get the labor?
The sad truth is that a lot of places in California (and the Western US in general) are becoming uninhabitable. Lots of people will need to relocate, or they'll eventually be forced to.
Humans have the technology to build structures that can withstand wildfires. It's like saying we should not live in cold climates before we had good insulation. I can build a concrete or metal structure that would be fine in a wildfire. Mountains have access to tons of water during the winter. They just need to retain that water for wildfire season.
Since you're a software engineer in SF, I wouldn't be surprised if you have the financial ability to pay a homebuilder to build a concrete home in a rural, high-risk area.
But even putting the costs aside (which are out of the reach of many/most California rural homeowners) do you have the ability (expertise, materials, LABOR) to demolish and rebuild thousands upon thousands of homes scattered throughout California?
It's simply not as easy as having the "technology" and snapping your fingers. Forget building houses. Even finding someone to drill a well for you on short notice these days is next to impossible.
Since you brought it up, it seems fair game to ask: do you work on climate solutions?
I always find it odd & off-putting when people demean or pass judgement on others' professions -- eg social apps & rocket ships -- especially if they ironically work in similarly "mundane" fields themselves. It just doesn't seem very constructive.
(Also: not sure I'd agree with the equivalence of the two examples, but that's another topic.)
As a thought experiment, I wonder what it would cost to build a European village scale town for 22k people (the population of SLT) and then literally build a moat around it as a firebreak.
This is why the building code in high risk areas should require Class A fire resistant roofs. This won't protect homes from huge firestorms but they're effective against falling embers.
When Paradise was burning I was thinking if I lived in a fire prone envionment; I would have sprinklers on roof of my home. It would be a simple 1/2" copper pipe feeding a few sprinkler heads on the roof. Maybe a few mercury switches placed around the property, or remotely controlled through the phone line, wifi, or sat phone enabled? Nothing too elaborate. It wouldn't protect everyone. It might save a few house fires that were started with embers though?
I know there one company selling roof fire sprinklers. I know of one small city who's experimenting right now with roof sprinklers. Hell, I wouldn't mind firing a bunch of Firefighters, and seeing that money go to Roof Sprinklers. (I haven't quite figured out exactly what Firefights do all day, with the hard exception of Paramedics. Buildings in cities don't burn like they used too. Wood stick homes in the country are another story.)
I heard one guy say that there wouldn't be enough water pressure if everyones roof was on, but that doesn't make sence either. Not everyone's roof sprinklers would be going off simultaneously if properly implemented, and designed. Firehouses could be in charge of which houses sprinklers go off?
Right now in CA, if you live in a fire prone area, Insurance (Property) is not suspose to be higher. As much as I despise Insurance companies--this provision needs to be nixed. (I don't think it will happen because Insurance companies use it to raise our city insurance rates, and politicians have northern cabins.
A small residential fire sprinkler head outputs around 15gpm of water. While keeping a roof wet is different than wetting down a room on fire, a roof is big and you need to be sure it stays wet, so let's say you want to keep it wet with 30gpm.
And lets say you have to keep it wet for 24 hours until the fire danger passes. That's around 40,000 gallons of water.
Where are you going to get that water? You can't count on the local utility keeping pumps running. If you're lucky you have a well, but a good residential well would yield around 10gpm, and if you and your neighbors are all pulling out water at the max rate together for hours or days, it may run dry while you wait for water to percolate in.
So you need a huge tank of water - a 50,000 gallon tank is around 35 feet in diameter and 7 feet high. Hope you have a big yard and lots of money, the tank alone will probably cost $30K. So figure around $50K to install the system. I hope you have a big back yard for it.
That bunch of firefighters you want to get rid of help protect many square miles of land, putting that $50K sprinkler system on 10,000 homes would cost $500M - that's a lot of firefighters and equipment.
I think there are better ways to keep your roof from burning, but even a metal roof is no guarantee that your house will survive a large wildfire unless you also keep the land devoid of fuel. And you could still fall victim to a piece of flying ember that happens to land on a vulnerable spot of your house.
Don't forget that most of the water you sprinkle onto the roof will collect in the gutters which can feed immediately back into the tank, so you only need enough water for a few cycles plus 24 hours of evaporation loss - still a decent amount of water, but a lot more like a large garden water-butt than an industrial tank.
That sounds like moderately more flow than needed for much longer than needed. Based on some searches for bushfire tanks, you could meet the water storage recommendations for $3k.
And sure, the idea of replacing the fire department is probably not great, but it wouldn't hurt to have a bunch of these around.
I think getting rid of firefighters and installing hoses on your roof is probably not the idea of the century. Do you suppose its the asphalt catching on fire?
Houses burn (usually) because they have vented attics that embers can blow into. Fire screening your attic or not using vented attics altogether, along with concrete and masonry construction and reasonable vegetation management go a long way toward protecting structures but the fact that structures are there in the first place is the problem.
You can't take an ecosystem based on periodic fire cycles and turn it into a suburb and expect everything to continue to work. Forests need to burn a little bit all the time or they will burn a lot all at once.
While these are earnest and constructive suggestions that would work in some contexts, I'm not sure you're taking the drought conditions into account. The basic problem we have in California is that water levels are hitting historic lows while forests are bone dry and so are the winds that fan fires.
While sprinklers are probably impractical as they require large storage or that you (and your neighbors) starve the mains, I'll bet that a person could design a fast-to-deploy thermal blanket system of some sort.
Insurers aren't perfect. For example, the Northridge earthquake was so expensive it caused insurance companies to exit the California earthquake insurance market. Now the state provides earthquake insurance with high deductibles.
I wouldn't be surprised to see wildfires go a similar route in California if the situation isn't resolved.
It’s already like that. Most houses in the Tahoe area that are surrounded by a certain amount of trees are insurable only via the California FAIR plan.
I keep waiting for the insurance war that will break out due to 'managed retreat' by the Coastal Commission.
As someone else said, it's easy to have either extremely high insurance rates or unavailable insurance if you live in the wrong area on someone's map. The result was FAIR plans with add-ons from insurance companies.
California also has government sponsored fire insurance for property owners that can't obtain commercial insurance. While this is good for individual property owners it's not really fair that taxpayers have to subsidize them. We're not allowing the free market to efficiently price in risks.
Subsidized, but not fully sponsored. I live about a mile outside the edge of the 2021 CZU fire, and our insurance costs
about tripled, even with the CA FAIR plan. We’ve followed the CalFire “defensible space” guidelines and covered vents with fine screen, but improving survivability for that
existing house from there would mean reroofing with metal
or tile, removing or replacing all wooden decking, and covering T-111 siding with stucco or stone. Not cheap.
Also effectively a different house.
Multiplied by all the homes in woodlands, still not cheap.
For anyone who has always wanted to live in the woods,
consider living near the woods instead.
Yeah those retro-fits would be very expensive. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that insurance companies paid to rebuild a lot of homes out of materials that aren't suitable for the homes' fire risk. Though, I don't have a ton of knowledge about this.
The insurance thing is interesting. Along the gulf coast insurance has retreated over time, and There are no significant areas that used to be developed that got wiped out in a hurricane and were not rebuilt. Perhaps the same will happen in California.
Winds can carry burning debris hundreds of feet through the air, so it'd need to be more like a village in the middle of a lake. Though it wouldn't have to be a lake, just a barren field that has no (or limited) combustables. But would still need to be quite large for protection, and buildings would still need to be fire resistant to protect against burning embers.
I’ll stick with ‘impending climate disaster’ as winters are getting colder and more intense and infrastructure is more likely to fail in cold than heat.
Except that the actual global atmospheric warming is minimal, 0.14 C/decade. [0]
The actual problem is climate change in the western part of the United States, coupled with higher population density, poor forest management, and poor power line maintenance.
The California problems may well be more due to forest mismanagement and PG&E issues than global warming. But 0.14C/decade is not “minimal” in any useful sense — it’s severely problematic.
Where I sit, there was ice a mile thick 15,000 years ago. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Besides that, we have just come out of the so-called Little Ice Age, at the height of which people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in New York Harbor.
1.5 C per century is inconsequential. Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in any case.
You are mentioning these geological time scales such as 15,000 years ago, but those figures representing delta are derived from a 42 year period.
What is the delta if you account for the temperatures relating to any significant change in human consumption as opposed to this period which is the only one that coincides with fuel efficiency standards and increased environmental enforcement?
Selecting a very small time period that does not include the industrial revolution, large scale construction (New deal public works, highways) operations, world wars, nuclear energy, adoption of mechanized logistics & transportation, any time at all with unrestricted emissions, etc is nearly useless for analysis.
Why should the delta during 1979-2021 be representative of the overall climatology when the dataset appears to be barely large enough to even begin making any analysis?
> Where I sit, there was ice a mile thick 15,000 years ago. Besides that, we have just come out of the so-called Little Ice Age, at the height of which people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in New York Harbor.
At the last glacial maximum, global temperature was about 7°C cooler than today; the “Little Ice Age” wasn't a particular period of global cooling, but a set of unsynchronized localized phenomenon featuring typical less than 1°C of large-area cooling.
> 1.5 C per century is inconsequential.
1.5°C/century of global change is gigantic compared to either of the phenomena you raise to try to minimize it.
> Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in any case.
>Not only that, but I predict that humans will stop emitting CO2 in a few decades, in any case.
I expect that per capita greenhouse emissions will go down, they have in the US for quite some time.
Clean sheet mitigation results in a lot of ox goring. You probably need more nuke plants, less (or no) immigration from the third world to the first, replacement of coal with natgas, hammer on the Chinese, encourage birth control.
People are generally hard on the environment and there's too darn many of them. Environmental issues are typically used to achieve political/financial power.
Look at the satellite temperate record I showed. It is the only believable record at this point, because of terrestrial temperature manipulation by people like Hansen. The linear trend is 0.14 degrees per decade over the last 40 years.
Read Spencer’s book for an alternate point of view. Global warming is real, but it is not catastrophic.
It doesn't matter what you call it, people won't change their feeling about it whether you call it Global Warming or Climate Change - it's kind of like the people who said they were waiting for FDA approval before they'd take the vaccine. Now that it's been approved, many are still saying "Well, it was rushed, I still want to wait", or "it was a political approval, not based on science".
So I'm all for blaming the ineffectual(or worse) govt agencies responsible for dropping the ball on fire prevention work, but are we going to talk about the communities that continue to ignore the CalFire recommendations for defensible space?
I keep seeing footage of structures burning, and every time they are situated too close to fuel sources. I understand it's tough to sacrifice the aesthetics of your mountain community, but fire is a fact of life in CA and preparing for it is flat out irresponsible.
I'm sorry if this comes across as victim blaming. I suppose it can't be anything but that. But people really need to take responsibility for fire prevention if they're going to live in a wilderness zone.
It's a bit of a haul but you could head for CO and do part/all of the Colorado Trail (485 miles, "the most beautiful trail in the USA"). Probably too long for the 20 days.
Offbeat idea: The middle America route (SF to DC) is about 40 hours of driving. If you have enough drivers to do it in shifts, the appalachian trail in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee is fantastic right now.
Taking Yellowstone for example For all park visitors combined, the chances of being injured by a grizzly bear are approximately 1 in 2.7 million visits. So very good odds.
Surely being in a very populated area of the park lessens the chance greatly. Which would mean 1 in 2.7 million visits isn't accurate for what they would be doing.
Bummer. I did my JMT in 2016. I can’t imagine your disappointment, because I know it takes a lot preparation. I’m curious, did they cancel all JMT permits because the JMT goes through Inyo, or is it only because you were entering from Inyo? I’m curious what happens to people entering from national parks (or people en route for that matter).
As for me, I’m supposed to be doing a 5 night, 60-ish mile loop in Yosemite this week, Sep. 2-7. We’ve had our eye on the air quality and shockingly all signs point to the air quality being quite good, although who knows what will happen!
Drive through Canada into Alaska. The Yukon was a bit prickly on getting your read end in and out of province within 24 hours due to covid, but that’s easily doable. Don’t know if that policy is still in effect.
Once in Alaska, there’s plenty of off grid things to do. If you head to Anchorage you can grab a plane to some bush areas, or drive to Denali, or whatever floats your boat.
That spot in the river where the water flows down a ledge and there’s copious bears feeding on fish? That’s there, and so are the bears right now.
If you're into canyoneering, you could just spend a while canyoneering in Zion and camping on BLM outside the park or get one of the walk in spots in the park (which I think you can just keep indefinitely until you decide to check out)
Second this. You could do the Toiyabe Crest Trail and it won’t be as far of a drive as the suggested CO off grid hike. Make sure to check out some hot springs while in NV.
but there are plenty of trails throughout the Uintas to extend the trip, or just drive over to any number of other ranges (Winds, Teton, Wasatch) or Southern Utah and do some desert hiking in the Canyonlands or Escalante.
Unfortunately the wildfire smoke is prevalent across the west so there's not much escaping it.
Does anyone know, with the scope of fires over the last couple years, is California on track to naturally normalize by burning through the most vulnerable forests or is this still not on that scale?
Roughly 4.3M acres burned in 2020 [1]. I've seen estimates that CA has 15M - 20M acres of overgrowth above equilibrium due to fire suppression and a slowdown of old fire prevention techniques.
So, in roughly ~5 years, if we continue having massive fire seasons like 2020 and 2021. Though even at previous forest levels, hotter, drier summers could still lead to more fires than the historical average.
Also this strategy may involve sacrificing a few not-so-small towns.
Sad but probably efficient. I'm in bc where we've been devastated by forest fires, with cities burning and thousands evacuated. And yet, every other time I get out into the forest I see idiots smoking their freaking joints. The soil is half buried in super dry pine needles, but people still want their kick.
Do you think that smokin' a joint is really enough to set off something like this? Because it's clearly a combination of things that are required to create a fire of this magnitude.
Sure a joint could "start a fire" but a lot of other things could too.
Maybe we just don't like to admit it but climate change is here and it's here for real.
> Do you think that smokin' a joint is really enough to set off something like this?
Yes, absolutely yes. One tiny ember can smolder for days until it meets the exact right piece of fuel and sets off a full-blown fire.
> Maybe we just don't like to admit it but climate change is here and it's here for real.
Right, and as a result we either need to be a) more vigilant about not being idiots or b) keep doing everything as if nothing has changed and be fine wth the damage caused.
Climate change is the underlying foundational issue here, but that isn't an excuse to not change our behavior.
Looks like it's missing after 2019, but what sticks out to me is the difference in scale of past fires and current fires. If you imagine where the Dixie fire or last year's August Complex would fit in, they take up relatively huge amounts of the map.
I'm sure at some point in the next 10-20 years, we'll have burned through most of the available fuel and wildfires won't be as bad. Of course, that's a pretty sad end state.
Is it really? We got into this mess because we'd initially assumed that wildfires were "bad" and that we needed to stop ALL of them. However, we later found out just how beneficial small fires can be for the long-term health of a forest. If we can actually allocate funds and people towards this, it won't be an issue anymore.
I see it as a concern because (1) a large portion of wild lands are burning within a short span of time. I would guess (no evidence, just a hunch) that burning was more dispersed in time before modern fire prevention. I also feel that (2) climate change makes these fires much worse, and forests will have a much harder time rebounding.
Probably, but megafires sterilize the soil. Low intensity fires recover much more quickly. Ideally we'd be able to gradually reduce the burn backlog without letting it all go in a few really, really big years.
Yes, there’s an assumption by lots of folks that things will ‘recover’ and return to a similar state as the past, but that’s not what usually happens with megafires, especially with a warmer, drier climate.
Is it just me or are the wildfires much much worse this decade than they were the previous two?
I live in Utah where all the smoke from the west-coast wildfires likes to come take up residence, and I can't recall more than a single summer before 2015 when wildfire smoke was pervasive outdoors. But in just the past few years it seems that a good 50-80% of the summer the air outside is completely unbearable due to smoke.
I can't be making this up, this must be a recent phenomenon. But my Google-fu is failing me in trying to find a chart that confirms my intuition. I'm curious: what changed, and when exactly did this new trend begin?
I don’t understand how a region with some of the smartest people on the planet can afford to excuse public officials abdication of their duties in something as obvious as burning half the state down every summer with smoke visible from satellite and no criticism, healthy or otherwise is tolerated.
This and the drug abuse menace and the serious crime that consumes much of the “progressive” havens of the United States should be a cause for all citizens to question their continued support of administrations that literally burn the country down.
In terms of productivity, California has the 4th highest GDP per capita. But despite that, there has been a significant net migration out of California to other states because the quality of life has deteriorated so much. People are voting with their feet.
> because the quality of life has deteriorated so much
The data does show a net outflow but says nothing about the reason. I’m willing to believe the quality of life has something to do with it, but would be interesting to see the breakdown of who’s exactly leaving by county/age/income.
This sort of flamewar comment will get you banned here. We've had to warn you about this many times before. Not cool.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That means making substantive points thoughtfully, and with respect for other users, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are.
It is what it is. Part of leading the world's sixth largest economy is that the scale of your disasters is also bigger.
I'm surprised it wasn't done before this as you really don't want to have to do evacuations of tourists on top of your evacuations of residents.
However, most vacationers/tourists are done as school has restarted in most places (for better or worse). So, this isn't likely to impact voting much.
As a side note: early ballots so far have been high. Lots of Democratic voters are pissed about this recall (it's costing a couple hundred million dollars for no good reason) and seem to be pretty motivated. That's probably good news for Newsom. However, don't take it for granted--go vote, dammit. Because the idiots behind this recall sure will.
The scale of forest fires in California has little to do with the scale of our state economy. If our economy was smaller we wouldn't necessarily have fewer wildfires.
The recall election costs $276M. To put that in perspective it's about 0.1% of the state annual budget.
This always comes off as buck-shifting to me. Newsom is the governor of the 5th largest economy in the world, I'm sure there are many unconventional mechanisms available to him to get action on these things.
National Forests are federal land owned and managed by the federal government. Why would you think the governor of any state would seize those forests? Even if California decided to force those forests to be open...they're being closed because of the extreme fire danger in many parks. Why in the world would the state want to open them up?
Fires don't care about property lines. A fire that starts in a National Forest will happily burn through an adjacent state forest or community.
> Why would you think the governor of any state would seize those forests?
Why would you come to that conclusion? He's a politician, I would assume he'd use _political_ pressure to get action.
> Fires don't care about property lines.
Precisely. If the land is being managed in a way that is raising risk and danger to surrounding land, why would you stand idly by and defer to Washington D.C?
Much of the land in California, and throughout the west actually, is owned and managed by the federal government. State government doesn't have jurisdiction, they don't have funding, etc, to do much about that. The BLM isn't just an acronym used for Black Lives Matters (as wall as national forest land and national park land).
Newsom has been governor for two years, and you expect that all power lines in fire-risk areas could've been buried in that amount of time? And in national forests controlled by the federal government, not the state/Newsom?
Some powerlines are over 100 years old. There's untold miles of lines they PG&E themselves don't even have mapped. No way it could be resolved in 2 years.
Which would generate complaints like 'Newsom BANKRUPTS Californians - sends electricity bills SKY HIGH' or the like. Not that I'm a fan of Newsom particularly, but a lot of loudest political voices in the state aren't interested in any particular policy solutions, they're just against whatever comes along.
> Regarding reducing the fuel load, in an interview four months ago, Newsom said that there are “Hundreds of millions of dead trees” in the state and that it cost his father $35,000 to clear “a small little patch of dead trees” on his property.
> Newsom didn’t admit it, but the outrageous cost to remove a few dead trees from private land is a consequence of California’s Byzantine environmental regulatory patchwork.
That quote is about privately-owned land, not federally-owned land. You and the post you're responding to are both correct; the state is responsible for some areas, and the federal government is responsible for others.
You’re missing something here. Fires can start on private and state land and then spread to national forests. Also, more and more Californians are moving away from the coast into rural suburbs due to cost of living. Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns, more people are camping than ever. Fires aren’t started by climate change, they’re started by humans.
I'll grant that perhaps I misinterpreted your response as saying, "No". Without additional comment from you in that post (you only replied with a quote), it's hard to know exactly what you're trying to say.
>Fires can start on private and state land and then spread to national forests.
And they can also start on federal land and spread to private/state land. Hence my comment that both federal and state governments are responsible for fire mitigation/prevention.
>Also, more and more Californians are moving away from the coast into rural suburbs due to cost of living.
I am not sure what this has to do with my comment. But, moving inward towards forests may mean that you're residing on state land right next to a federally-owned forest.
>Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns, more people are camping than ever. Fires aren’t started by climate change, they’re started by humans.
Okay? I didn't say anything about climate change or cause of fires. All I said was that both federal and state governments are responsible for their own areas. Each need to be doing a better job; mitigation can be improved across the board to reduce wildfire strength on state and federal lands, cause of fires be damned.
But, for what it's worth, many fires have been triggered by storms during extra dry, hot weather and severe winds caused by climate change.
I believe that in 2021, most of the wildfires in the west have been started by lightning rather than human error. If so, your final sentence is not really true, and might even be false.
Although I'm not sure what difference it really makes vs. more heavily managing public land but our local planning commission makes it essentially impossible to remove trees.
This is in an extreme fire risk area.
Also, it's quite expense to remove general green waste. High dump fees, long distances to dump, burn piles not allowed, impossible to throw away various types of plants outside house garbage flow.
> The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement.
> The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation. In 2020, The New York Times called it a "global-scale misinformation machine".
The NYT is owned by the Sulzberger family, Time magazine is owned by Marc Benioff, the Washington Post by Bezos. If you dislike any of those people (some of whom are very closely affiliated with the DNC) does that make you refuse to look at anything they produce?!
There is now overwhelming evidence academic environmentalists have done catastrophic damage to the west through refusal to allow fuel clearance.
I happen to know fire personnel in California and also people working as docents in redwood forests. If you choose to have your information laundered through your preferred political channels good luck with that. I think most of us can read or watch perspectives on RT, the BBC etc and know what their perspective is likely to be without being seduced or tainted by it. That video is very close to what I've been hearing from real people on the ground. I urge you to watch it.
The FS is not likely to try to actively patrol any and all access points to FS land. But they will put up barriers and signs, close facilities and so forth. If you are determined, I am sure you could get into most parts of most forests, but "forest closure" was never meant to imply otherwise.
