We Know How to Prevent Megafires | Hacker News Reader

We Know How to Prevent Megafires

propublica.org

184 pointsphilips103 comments

It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own:

Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.

“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke.

One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then reporting stopped.

Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know.

I'd like to have a retrospective. How much damage was there? What's gone? What's still there? Etc.

CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute fire response times throughout.

Five minute fire response times presume that there isn't a million acre fire saturating all fire departments. If CZU were rapidly spreading and hit the side of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose all at once, I think we'd have multiday response times. Fortunately, it wasn't.

Was it possible for it to spread like that? I don't know. During COVID19, we had a constant series of claims, repeated by politicians and public health officials, which had no basis in fact. Post-COVID19, I just don't believe claims like these anymore without a citation. Most were wishful thinking.

If the CZU fire had jumped jurisdictions (HWY 35?) it would have turned worse because the Evergreen fire had sucked all those resources already.

The governator really needs to return firefighting resources back to normal. There has been a significant drawdown of resources in Cal as other states boost their capabilities but the governator has not countered that and now resources are thin in CA.

We also need to pass AB 2147: https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/wildland/news/...

I guess if these kind of fires are “the new normal” for California [0] (and also probably Australia) we should expect that to carry over to how it is covered in the media, too. Reporting will become increasingly localised to the areas affected

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-wildfire-evacu...

It might not be in the headlines on major news, but there are updates from local cal fire every day. I’ve been following cal fire scu posts on twitter. Currently 375k acres and 40% contained as of yesterday. People living in the evacuation order areas are starting to be allowed to return home. Not a lot of structural damage out here as it’s mostly wilderness, but the other fire up north in the Sonoma area has burned through multiple buildings and homes afaik. I don’t have much information on that one though since I’ve been so focused on the one close to home for me.

Edit: https://twitter.com/calfireSCU

> Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know.

Well, you know that San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford aren't just gone, because that would be a sensational news headline, and there's no way the rags would pass up the opprotunity the write about it. Otherwise spot on, though.

Clean air is the problem?

Most people’s rational plan will be to breathing smoke because they can’t fly to the summer house, live in an apartment without central air, have to go to work, and don’t have the money for Marie Antoinette’s idea of “rational options.”

They don’t live in a bubble where that flavor of bullshit is palatable.

They have to do that anyway when (not if) the forest burns down on its own, as seems to be happening now. If you don't have the money for Marie Antoinette's idea of "rational options", you're kind of fucked regardless of whether the problem is scheduled in advance or not. Maybe try supplying them with options rather than delaying the empirically inevitable?

I think a big part of the problem is the concept of sacrifice is falling by the wayside.

I feel my grandparents had a much more realistic understanding of the world and it's trade offs.

I get it, yes, it sucks to have controlled burns. No, it doesn't suck as bad as out of control wildfires.

But people want to have their cake and eat it at the same time. It's always been that way, but I feel there are less forces constricting such unrealistic, out of touch perspectives with reality. I feel such a perspective comes with wealth and living outside of nature. Anyone who's hiked enough, or gone camping understands the trade off between the convenience of what you carry and the weight it creates.

I've heard highly intelligent people argue that we should 'increase X in the production of Y', where X is some point that pretty much everyone agrees is good. But when I mention, well that will necessitate an increase in the cost of production of Y, since you are adding extra processes, the concept is rejected. It's really quite fascinating to me to see this manifest in so many aspects.

I think there has been a general decrease in the value placed on self discipline. Part of it is the abundance of pretty much everything, and an overall rise in the basic standard of living for the average American. Part of it is the coincidental rise in the exaltation of self- social media reputation, self promotion, self fulfillment.

This change, I think, is especially evident in the change over the past decades in the American Christian communities. Churches with laws and discipline have been on a steep decline, and churches that focus on feel-good messages that basically amount to "try to be nice, it is wonderful!" seem to be becoming the norm. It isn't even just the megachurches, even Catholic traditions have largely abandoned any sense of enforcing the practice of discipline- observing dietary restrictions on Lent is more a holiday and an excuse to eat fish rather than an observation.

Obviously, there are no shortage of examples of strict laws going wrong, but I do think that society as a whole could do better by practicing forms of discipline- whether religious observances, meditation, or entirely secular things like community organized walks or workout routines.

The power of sacrifice, as you put it, is a strength to overcome adversity, and is a state of mind and habit that requires practice.

This is called “anecdata”

Discussions are full of anecdata. That's what makes them interesting.

Care to contribute some of your own that add to or argue against the GP's?

"I think there has been a general decrease in the value placed on self discipline."

This is 100% just an opinion. I could also say that there are a LOT of people who are training harder and dieting due to things they see on Instaram for example.

It's really just hard to quantify something like this and it's really just a subjective opinion.

He said, "I think there has been...", not, "Studies have shown that there has been...", which implies that it's a statement of opinion. In the context of the discussion, that makes perfect sense. What's the problem?

If you want objective data, look at obesity levels, that is fairly well studied. Instagram is popular (and, I think, contributes to the culture of self) but does not seem to have had a statistically significant effect on exercise habits.

What pisses me off is that there are tons of people turning on their bloody fireplaces once the temperature drops below 60F. Then they complain about crap like this

> It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own:

Except there is one really big obstacle that you fail to mention:

Money.

You can clear brush without controlled burns. You can engineer firebreaks. etc.

The problem is that you have to maintain these continuously--and that is expensive.

The reason why people only talk about "controlled burns" to clear brush is because that is cheap--not because it necessarily what is most effective.

There's a couple of misleading statements in here. It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better. They'd all take a position in a city fire department if they were after more money.

The other misleading thing is associating these current fires with bad forest management practices. It's true for Sierra Nevada forests generally, but that's not where these fires are. The Big Basin area near Santa Cruz isn't supposed to regularly burn. Historically it goes through intense fires rarely. "Preventing megafires" isn't what that coastal redwood forest wants. The other big fire in the San Antonio Valley and Del Puerto Canyon is virtually all privately-held land. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding.

> It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire department pays better.

Except CDCR, which pays notably worse, but that's not really competing for firefighters.

> There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM holding.

There's not mechanism for the state to require a prescribed burn on national forest or BLM land, either (both of which are federally managed.)

To save some people a search:

CDF = California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as "CALFIRE"

CDCR = California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which in this context supplies convict labor to fight fires.

One issue this year is that the California State Prisons are all horrifically overrun with COVID-19, thereby incapacitating what had previously been a critical firefighting function.

The situation (mass incarceration, crowded conditions, negligent and/or derisive healthcare for inmates, climate change, lack of prescribed burns, and now inadequate resources to fight large fires) is really quite depressing to untangle.

Ideally, the state should not require (it is what it is) slave labor to fulfill basic needs of society. Yes I know in theory it is voluntary and everything, but it is wage dumping using forced labor - because without said slave labor the state would have to pay a lot more for a real standing force.

As with most cost cutting measures, eventually the chickens will come home to roost, and there has been quite a horde of chickens that came home over the last months, across the world.

"the state" is often used as a general term for the government and not necessarily the government of a specific area.

The current biggest fires are not in the Sierra Nevada and the ones in the coastal range tend to burn more structures because there are more of them, but there are also many large fires in the Sierra Nevada at the moment. Check out this map[1] from Cal Fire. Almost no media coverage for the Sierra Nevada fires though.

One other thing I've recently learned is that outside of cities, fire departments are mostly volunteer. Here in the Vacaville Fire Protection District (most of northwest Solano county, which burned heavily in the LNU complex) the department is 90% volunteers. And that's fairly typical.

(I recently applied)

Hah, growing up in a rural area, I assumed that fire departments were volunteer-based everywhere, and didn't discover otherwise until I moved to a large city.

> The Big Basin area near Santa Cruz isn't supposed to regularly burn.

Do you have any sources you can share for further reading on this?

I did a little bit of digging and found https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/firemanagement_fir..., but couldn’t come up with anything for Big Basin specifically.

The closest I found was:

> Fire return intervals range from as long as 500 years on wetter, northern sites to 5–25 years on drier, southern sites. Point Reyes NS falls closer to the shorter end of the fire return interval spectrum. Researchers report a fire return interval of 7.7 years for redwood stands at Point Reyes. A study of redwood stands on Bolinas Ridge and Mount Tamalpais found point estimates of fire return interval ranging from 21.7 to 27.3 years.

Regardless of what the natural fire frequency was in the past, isn’t this an empirical question about unburnt fuel levels and other environmental factors listed in the article? If we have a large surplus of fuel building up in these forests, and more controlled burns would manage it, that seems like a management problem even if frequent burns were not part of the historical norm.

My big takeaway from the article is it will require a big culture shift in the general public, two quotes:

> “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.

> She’d like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the Southeast where, she said, “Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday.” Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors.

I don't understand how a private individual would deal with the liability.

When I lived in the suburbs of Naples people would burn their trash in big piles whenever the garbage collectors went on strike and "nobody" was liable, even though sometimes the fire would spread and burn/damage stuff on the neighbor's property. Then again, Europeans don't have the same litigious culture/attitude that Americans have.

At least Italians don't, but you get a lot of problems stemming from the "whatever, just burn it, not my problem, I just want my garbage gone"-culture.

You'd get into serious trouble doing the same further north in Germany, Denmark or Sweden.

Indeed, and I admit, even within Italy this is likely uniquely a Naples problem.

Another reason is that there have been intermittent issues with garbage pickup for decades in Napoli, but I don't think there's been a full strike in the last few years... but it is of course probably still controlled by the Camorra.

Is it the attitude or is it the system?

per-capita, lawsuits occur at more or less the same level in the USA as across most of western europe.

the USA just has a culture that talks about suing people a lot more; in practice, Europe and the US do so at about the same rte.

How many of those fires burned 10km^2? 100m^2? 1000km^2? That's the size of each of the lightning complexes still burning.

I'd guess that in decades none of them have or it would have been in the news and nobody would have done it again... Lot's of rural places burn garbage in the US. They just don't do it where there's a high risk of burning down the neighborhood.

Call a public service like the fire department, if it gets out of control.

If it gets out of control, it can quickly turn into a multi-million dollar event.

Probably best to notify the fire department in advance of the burn so that they can already be prepared if it gets out of control. I wouldn't be surprised if some jurisdictions require this.

Liability is limited if you follow various statutes in Texas (and other states): https://agrilifeextension.tamu.edu/library/agricultural-law/...

My understanding is that you need re-regulation to protect folks with limited liability if they follow protocol and burn day guidance advice from local authorities.

Here is a summary for Oregon for example https://www.oswa.org/blog/fire-liability/

Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and they would have lost everything.

No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and the police aren't interested - perhaps as a policy because it's understood that some controlled burns are useful. California's police could equally well be told to "focus on other priorities" instead of investigating fire starters.

California law enforcement could choose to look the other way, but it's a statistical certainty that if there's money to be made through civil suits, there will be plenty of litigation. How do you get around that?

The police are important in civil suits too. Arguably their main function in a civilised society is that you can call them when you get in a car accident and they'll write up an official report for the insurance company. If they don't spend their time writing detailed reports on the causes of fires, that at least pushes the balance of power away from the plaintiff.

I don't know if this is realistic. But we have a pretty litigious society these days in Ireland too - behind the US, but ahead of almost everywhere else - and I can't find any evidence of a successful civil suit for starting a wildfire. I did find this which says there are practically no criminal cases:

https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-legislation-4606...

There’s no civil prosecution. Civil means it’s a private injury which the law can remedy. Anyone who has the standing to sue can sue, and that doesn’t make them a prosecutor.

Here is a more extreme example how legislation works against the best interest of people.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7678955/Black-Satur...

Regardless of what usually happens, there have been instances where someone who was negligent or started a fire for fun, was blamed for starting something that destroyed vast amounts of property and killed people. I think they can be/have been considered criminally and/or civilly liable.

If it's ok for people to just start fires without any particular authorization or restrictions, then it's not clear to me how you distinguish them legally if the consequences should be particularly bad.

I just don't understand logically, how you can define arson or negligence without clear rules.

It's clearly incorrect that California just doesn't care. After all after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018) PG&E was charged with 84 counts of manslaughter.

Also, remember Sergio Martinez? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Fire

How many parts of Ireland ever receive less than 20cm of rain in a year?

Grass fires are not considered a significant danger in CA... it's the big canyon fires with 20+deg slopes rising 1000m covered with Eucalyptus and other large trees interspersed with scrub brush that create firestorms and can easily burn 40km^2 per day even with mild winds.

People do this where I live in NorCal. They seem to do these burns on permissive burn days, for one. Conditions might even be wet.

They also tend to let law enforcement know, and law enforcement and fire people seem to understand the purpose. People from the city still call 911, but that's just because they are trained to think that distant fires are dangerous. To be expected.

The parts of this fire that you heard about (LNU and CZU complexes) were not caused by lack of controlled burn (some fires in the Sierra Nevada probably are). In particular North Napa and Lake counties have both burned in the same area in the last 5 years so it's sort of gibberish, while the redwood areas (like north of Santa Cruz) are not forests that regularly burn... and it is still logged which didn't stop the progression.

Sadly, this expert isn't an expert on these fires... there are others where his comments would be relevant.

The idea of doing controlled burns in areas that recently burned (already causing many $Billions of damage to crops and real estate) or in redwood forests which require a firestorm to ignite in a populated region with many more $Billions in real estate and 10s of thousands of inhabitants which boarder cities of millions... would be hilarious, if it wasn't so dangerous.

Look at the caltopo website if you want to look at the area burning and what has previously burned.

https://caltopo.com/map.html?fbclid=IwAR3Bd6K6XaKR-S_Co9io8i...

What's interesting is when colonists came to North America, they often described forests of trees that felt like great rooms or halls, teaming with wildlife and human-edible plants. But this itself was not a primordial state, but a heavily managed environment, intended to create favorable environment for flora/fauna through slash & burn forest management. Basically, burning out the undergrowth and allowing human selected plants to flourish. Much of the current problem is an excess of undergrowth, so you would think we could somehow recreate this kind of management for everyone's benefit...

Yes that would be cool. Unfortunately almost all of the old growth forest in the US was cut down and new trees of the size of old will take hundreds of years to grow. Many of the wilderness areas set aside in the 1970 had old growth forests and some are being managed in this way.

The rest of the west forest service land is managed in an inconsistant way that changes somewhat with each administration. I think it would be really cool if somehow the US Public Forests and BLM lands were spit up into three sections. Some land sold off to allow towns and cities in the west to expand, as many people would like to live there and it is very expensive in many places now. Also sell off the land that we want used for timber production. Then some held public and managed for recreation by humans with roads and vehicles, and finally a large expansion of wilderness areas with the idea of connecting large ecosystems and managing them for high biodiversity.

Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.

You don't need to, as you point out that is the current case, but I think that private ownership would do a better job of extracting economic value from land that we want to put to economic use. Motorized recreational forest and timber production could work well together, but I have not seen that. In some places selective cutting is done, but usually the biggest trees are felled. It would be much better, I think, if parts of the public forest were cut to leave the largest trees to become the beautiful and awe inspiring ones people like to be around. I don't have a deep knowledge of how the forest service does timber sales (and I'm sure it varies depending on local political and economic conditions). It would be interesting to read up on how it works in detail.

I’m curious, why wouldn’t a private owner just clear cut all of the land for maximum value? Private land owners choose short term windfall over long term sustainability all the time. I don’t see why private owners would preserve old growth forests if the lumber is more financially profitable when cut down and sold.

Yeah there's really no evidence that private interests would do anything other than clear-cut sections. Check out this picture. The USFS manages the green squares as part of Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The brown squares are private in-holdings.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9320397,-122.0779696,13898a,...

Yes, private ownership would lead to tree farms which might find that clear cutting is the best way to maximize output. With regulations on soil runoff, I don't see that as a problem.

My proposal was one that might have a chance of being implemented, thus the reason for private sale of part of the public forest land. It would be impossible politically to get a 1/3 transfer of Forest Service land into wilderness designation and steep reduction of lumber sales on the rest. Allowing the sale of some areas to open up space for towns and cities and some for high output tree farms seems like a reasonable compromise to me that might be possible and I think a better situation that the current one.

You would not transfer any old growth to private hands. There is almost none left outside national parks and wilderness areas (Edit: excluding Alaska), in any case.

Yes, private ownership would lead to tree farms which might find that clear cutting is the best way to maximize output. With regulations on soil runoff, I don't see that as a problem.

Private ownership could lead to tree farms. It could also just as easily lead to private owners clear-cutting the forest without replacement planting, if the ultimate value of the lumber isn't worth the cost of running a tree farm.

I disagree with the premise that BLM held land is for “providing wood to the nation” especially if we’re clear cutting those forests for profits today and ignore sustainability.

You can disagree with it, but sustainable wood harvesting is a top-level policy of the BLM, throughout its history and most recently in the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Both BLM and USFS are charged with "maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the public lands consistent with multiple use."

I recently read “Dark Emu” by Bruce Pascoe. It’s a great read on Australian indigenous culture.

He notes similar experiences documented by British colonists in Australia. They remarked on how the whole continent was kept like a large and beautiful garden.

In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots of spending, making it untenable for them to run their course, costing a lot of money to address) because some people decided to build a community in the middle of a forest that naturally would tend to burn down every few decades

This is the only correct response to the issue. Stop ripping up the redwoods for your driveways and power lines. Let the mountains be.

The problem is not only new construction but what to do, and what policies to have, about all the people and capital tied up in forested communities already. For example Paradise is actually a pretty decent-sized town basically in the forest; it should be obvious just looking at it on the satellite that it’s going to be affected by fires frequently. I doubt it’s politically tenable to have the policy become to just let places like that burn down or even to make them cut down the forests (which to them is the draw of living there). Just look at the Wikipedia page about what Paradise was going to do after the fire: focus on fire resistant construction and wider roads for evacuations. No measures from preventing the same thing from occurring again and again

The only way a town like Paradise can exist is with a lot of state subsidies. The state should just flatly refuse to maintain SR-191.

I read a long article on Paradise. The town was developed by a group of libertarian developers who took a lot of pride in working around California's regulations on subdivisions. California has rule that kicks in when a property is subdivided more than four times. They worked around that by subdividing the property 4 times, wait then do it again 4 times. Ended up with houses on lots that are too large for the owners to maintain. They don't have fire hydrants. And often there is only one exit.

Paradise also is a bad location that is subject to dangerous wind conditions.

One thing I noticed when looking at zoning regulations in Nevada county is they don't allow for subdivisions that are defensible. Defensible means clusters of houses on small lots. With fire hydrants. But you can't build that anymore.

There's a hell of a lot of welfare libertarians in rural norcal. See: State of Jefferson.

After reading this article I take away the opposite conclusion: with controlled burning these communities could dramatically reduce their risk. What would be helpful is a law requiring controlled burning for human habitation.

Controlled burning would prevent neighboring fires from encroaching but they don’t stop the community itself from becoming a tinderbox, which it will since it’s basically a forest with houses in it. I don’t even know if it’s possible to do a controlled burn in a reasonably densely populated area.

I live in the mountains of Colorado and most homeowners do their part to remove fuels around their home. One major reason is insurers will require it.

It's unmanaged public land that tends to be most dense and fuel rich.

In the interior of British Columbia we had massive forest die-off from Pine Beetle, that was caused by a lack of fires combined with warmer than normal winters. All of that fuel came down to the forest floor where it was a huge fire risk and was cleaned up manually. Now we have some newer growth but way more open grassland. Fires here move a lot faster but don't tend to be as dangerous and controlled burns are much easier. Trees that survive are younger and much thinner coverage, way more deer and cougars and less bears; a lot more birds. It's been pretty unique to watch an entire ecosystem change in 10-20 years; much less than a lifetime. Plus it turns out that historically these areas were predominately grassland not forests!

In the 2018 Camp Fire, the towns burned worse than the "unmanaged" public forests.

The situation would probably be a lot better if the human habitation in those areas was built with resisting forest fire as a primary design criteria. If they were built with fire as a fact of life, fire could be allowed to regularly sweep through & clear the fuel load.

Seriously, it’s not like CA doesn’t already have codes that make stuff quake-ready. I live in a flood plain and huge amounts of stuff is built up off the ground enough for a few feet of water to not be a problem, though sadly this is not actually enshrined in codes AFAIK.

I didn't see it mentioned but this came up in an interview with a state head of firefightting in Australia after the most recent bushfires: he said that a big problem is there's less time of the year you can actually do controlled burns because of the warming climate.

So a warming climate is not only making the risk of fires starting higher but it's also shrinking the mitigation window.

Certainly in large parts of Australia, the window to do controlled burns is shrinking due to climate change. Threading the needle on {not windy, not damp, not tinder box} is, on average, getting smaller each year. This checker box theory relies on that time window being bigger than it is in practice.

Though it may not seem like it at first, the problem is ideological. Somewhere along the line CA's left/progressive ideology picked up a deeply ironic tenet that the world must remain absolutely unchanged by human habitation; that whatever the state of nature was on some arbitrary day in the past, we have a moral duty to keep it that way. The strongest example of overreach is that absolutely no species may go extinct, no matter how ill-suited to survival they may be (I'm looking at you, pandas). Other examples that are probably entirely defensible on rational grounds are that the sea level must not change at all; that carbon must remain distributed in the crust and atmosphere precisely as before.

But, more relevantly, we also see this belief at work on both sides of the fire [non-]debate! On the one hand, whatever faceless NIMBY/political force stands in the way of preventative burns says you're not allowed to change the forest by burning it: that would be destroying nature and thus it would be morally bad. But TFA justifies its position according to this tenet too! It says that in "prehistory" (I guess it means pre-1700 or so) so many acres burned, and therefore it is obviously right that so many acres burn again today.

The problem is that this belief, even when it reaches correct conclusions, is deeply anti-scientific and even anti-rational. There's no rational reason to connect morality and stasis. As long as this is a tool for making choices, it doesn't matter how often it's used for making good choices (preventative burns); all those who use it will still be just as culpable for the damage done on the side of bad choices (no burns).

We have a solid idea about about the pre-European history of fire in the US west, including some information about native american practices during parts of that history (they burned, at least in some areas and for some of the time).

We have hard evidence of what the last 100 years of forest management policy has done.

Nobody is proposing "nature can never (be) change(d)". The point is that that we tried to do something different (fire suppression) and it manifestly did not and has not worked.

I believe you misunderstood my comment (perhaps I worded it poorly): I intended that it be interpreted as a statement purely within the meta-discussion. I shared a concern about the arguments used to justify both sides of the debate, and did not intend to advance one side or the other.

While you seem to believe I was arguing against preventative burns, the sibling comment seems to believe I was arguing for preventative burns which are (according to that comment) a crazy libertarian idea. This makes me wonder whether any critique of dogma must be reinterpreted as a disagreement about facts as a kind of memetic camouflage self-defense mechanism...

I don't believe you were arguing against preventative burns. You were clear arguing against the idea that things must remain the same. My point was the people who understand this stuff are not arguing that things must remain the same.

Somewhere along the line CA's left/progressive ideology picked up a deeply ironic tenet that the world must remain absolutely unchanged by human habitation;

You have it exactly backwards. The areas where the CA fires occur are overwhelmingly conservative.

whatever faceless NIMBY/political force stands in the way of preventative burns says you're not allowed to change the forest by burning it

Some of the areas that are currently burning, including Sonoma County, were burned just 2 years ago. That did literally nothing to stop the severity of the current fires.

Libertarians act like prescribed fires are some sort of cure-all for mega-fires, and they're simply not. The problem is that the plant life is too dry because of a years-long drought. Megafires aren't nearly as mega in years when there's plenty of rain.

I'm not so sure this applies to much of coastal CA. Coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and similar biomes can build up sufficient fuel mass in a couple years. Combined with fierce, hot, dry autumn winds(aka 'Santa Ana' winds) you have conditions where 60mph walls of flame can regularly run from the mountains towards the sea. The solution there is to follow CalFire guidelines for fireproofing your home, force local governments to ensure adequate evacuation routes, and discourage living in the wild land interface.

Controlled burns can't reduce fuel because many of those plants can only recover when burned every decade or so. Between frequent burns and non-native plants, we could lose much of our native habitats if we do controlled burns wrong.

https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-content/uploads/Homeowne... https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California.

Even the low end of this is several times what burned this year. I’m drawing a blank on how that level of burning would prevent “mega fires” unless the idea is to replace them with “super mega fires” several times larger.

The fires covered wide areas, but since they were so frequent, they didn't burn so hot and didn't destroy the forests, just the undergrowth.

There’s a difference between “had flames on it” and “burned to the ground”.

There’s also a heat point where the soil is sterilized, meaning it can take many times longer for substantial succession to occur.

This article is a lot more optimistic about the California/Federal plan:

https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-pla...

Controled burns are only a part of the solution, generally substituting for large grazing animals that would keep the forest density and undergrowth at bay. Also, a lot of wetland in Califormia was dried and even rivers were straightened and deprived of the traditional meandering and inundation area. All that makes California dryer, slowly but surely decreasing water stored in the soil and therefore also decreasing secondary rainfall (summer thunderstorms from local evapotransiration) that would keep forests less dry.

instead of controlled burns, couldn't the wood be chopped down and transported out? I mean, wood is not free.. it's worth something right? Couldn't it be sold cheaply for building materials and energy (a gasification boiler is super clean compared to "natural" burning).

I'm curious how much CO2 is stuck in this backlog that should have been burned relative to other sources...

Instead of burning in place, could the plants be chopped down and used as fuel to generate electricity?

We also know how to prevent the spread of coronavirus but we can’t seem to get that done either

Why is harvesting the trees not an option? Is the wood of such a low quality that you can't use it at all? Are the areas not reachable?

I understand burning it might be faster, but it has the obvious problems that are apparently stopping them from doing it today. But why not just allow trees to be harvested?

I didn't really get a perfect answer except that if the logging operation is done incorrectly it makes the fires worse. The environmentalist view is that the trees should be burnt but not removed to return the nutrients to the ecosystem. Basically the experts are saying logging won't get us out of this.

See https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-o...

Heads up that propublica doesn't mind intentionally deceiving readers; I don't trust them anymore.

Just a few months ago I read this: https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-t... - and my initial reaction was "bad, big company!" A little digging later; turns out the piece is deceptive to the point that I don't buy it's an accident.

So hey; maybe they're telling the truth this time. But liar, liar, pants on fire: I'm not believing a word they say without solid external sources anymore.

Edit: here, I found a comment by somebody (not me) that sums up the problems with this reporting here: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-an...

I get that this isn't terribly on topic for wildfires - but by linking to sources like this we also give them a position of authority, and they don't deserve it. Note that the ventilator article has not been retracted nor updated; they're not willing to admit - let alone correct! - their mistakes either, apparently.

There is nothing wrong with the propublica article.

It simply claims that the company received public money years ago to design a low-cost ventilator that it never sold, and instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling...without any inventory issues.

The company claims that the US tried to order the cheapo ventilators for COVID use too late, and they may be true, but that wasn't the point of the article.

The article clearly implies that some or several of involved parties are ripping off taxpayers when instead the actual costs per ventilator are quite low, and not only that, the deal they're referring to wasn't even due now. That's deceptive. Even your summary is deceptive when you say stuff like "instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling" - there seems to be 0 evidence of that occurring at least in any unreasonable sense.

Put it this way: what's there actually to report here? That a lowest-possible-cost contract for a few ventilators before 2022 didn't deliver many more before 2020? That the contract looks reasonable, and so far honestly fulfilled?

The insinuations aren't harmless. Not only because it might lead people to support more oversight and interventions where none are warranted, but also because they distract from real issues - and there are more than enough of those.

Did you look at the slightly more in-depth review of the article in this comment? https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-an...

Control burns look to me just like blood letting - a thing from the past when we didn't know better.

how to prevent megafires? How about extinguishing them while they are just fires? A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple hundred $M/year maintenance. Several round trips of those 100 tanker planes in the first day when these fires have just started would have solved the issue. They would have solved the similar issues back in 2018 and 2019 too as well as the coming issues in 2021 and so on. Thus they would be paying for themselves each year over and over again.

Not surprisingly, the situation is similar to covid - an initial investment (orders of magnitude lower than the losses otherwise) and a bit of rational thinking would have prevented the covid "megafire", yet here we're... The current human race inability for even minimally rational system scale action is astounding.

I think what you might be missing in your analysis is that preventative approaches that only "stop" the spread of fires only contribute to reducing the occurrence rate of catastrophic events, but also contribute to increasing the severity of them as well (through build up of fuel).

Robust solutions should ideally both manage occurrence and severity of catastrophic events, and be able to scale through multiple magnitudes of risk. With the limitations we have, we're typically stuck with really only managing one of those levers - but we should absolutely hesitate from solutions that increase severity.

We should be spending money scaling our ability to actively fight fires once they start, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also spend money and resources to try to reduce the scope and scale of fires that we do need to fight.

I see a big overlap with Antifragility concepts here. Stopping all the fires at all costs makes the system fragile.

Many of the trees in CA evolved in environments with regular fires. Some, like the sequoias, require fire in order for their seeds to open.

A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple hundred $M/year maintenance.

Each DC10 tanker costs about $120 million. The newer 747 tanker starts at $140 million and that's before customization. A fleet the size you are suggesting would cost more than $12 billion dollars and would take years for manufacturers to build.

And that's assuming you could find sufficient freshwater sources to fill all of those planes. If that amount of water was available, CA wouldn't be in a megadrought and the fires wouldn't be as bad.

None of what you suggested is rational.

>Each DC10 tanker costs about $120 million. The newer 747 tanker starts at $140 million and that's before customization.

One drop from such a plane covers with fire retardant an area 90ft wide 1-2 miles long. 100 of these would definitely be more than enough, and isn't really needed. Especially considering that those planes are pretty picky about airstrips, and Cal Fire can't (or wouldn't) use them in the first attack waves.

The majority of Cal Fire air tanker fleet - about 30 planes - is something like 7 of C130 ($30M, fire retardant payload 4000gals, 1/3rd of DC10) and 20 something of S-2Ts (1200gals, 1/10th of DC10). So in total in one sortie they can cover an area 90ft wide 4 miles long which is obviously wasn't enough, even if we consider 2-3 sorties in a row (i.e. 8-12 miles), to extinguish/contain all the fires started in the thunderstorm night. Whereis scaling that fleet 5-10 times (which would mean on the scale of $2-5B if C130 are used) we'd get to cover 90ft by 20-40 miles (40-120 miles for 2-3 sorties in a row) in the first few hours - thus these megafires wouldn't have a chance to develop.

>And that's assuming you could find sufficient freshwater sources to fill all of those planes. If that amount of water was available, CA wouldn't be in a megadrought and the fires wouldn't be as bad.

that is just ridiculous demagogy, a high school debate club level. Lets look into the real numbers - DC10 (or 3 sorties of C130) takes about 40 tons, so 100 would take 4000 tons, which is 0.005 of 1 day of San Francisco water consumption , and in CA agricultural water consumption dwarfs the urban like 4 times. So what those planes would use is even less than that proverbial drop in a bucket.

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