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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I thought a core issue was that if you just throw firefighting money at a problem, the (well-intentioned and honorable) fire-fighting forces will find ways to use that money. Which long-term, turns into incentivizing the putting out of fires, rather than the prevention of fires (brush clearance, controlled burns, reducing/managing human encroachment into fire-vulnerable areas).

And creating almost a fire-industrial complex that justifies why you need so spend so much money.

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If you want to spend firefighting budget, preventative measures are about as expensive as fighting the fires, and you're still going to get fires anyway. If you are thinking purely in cost of appliances and man-hours, putting crews in the middle of nowhere running controlled burns is pretty costly.

In Australia, cut funding to firefighting caused a reduction in preventative measures, which significantly worsened our 2019/2020 fire season to say the least. An outcome that was signaled to policy makers by the firefighters well in advance of the fires. Pretty much the opposite to the scenario you've described, but in my opinion an outcome that was fairly obvious.

This claim should not be made lightly -- do you have any sources to back up your claim? I imagine the money spent on local and state fire departments does not subtract from the NPS/BLM budget for forest management.

I do not, except from sporadic NPR series on the costs of wildfire fighting versus lack of attention on wildfire prevention. The governor just committed another $2B (I recall), and much of it to go to fighting I believe.

Honestly, I would be glad to see some analysis and find that my uninformed impression is incorrect.

I also find it interesting that I'm being downvoted for raising such a fundamental question. As if the money is clearly being used in the right way.

More money for planes, firefighters, modeling fire behavior: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/07/09/ahead-of-peak-fire-season-...

https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4172

Although some discussion of prevention: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/867395353/california-was-set-...

I do not know anything about Calfire, but I have worked with a few other fire crews at state and federal levels in California and neighboring states, and while they have and love nice fire equipment--would you want bad eqp in an out of control wildfire?--most of it is 100% usable in prevention tactics. As another commenter mentions, fire crews are almost universally very interested in preventative methodology and more broadly in forest ecology--it's in the job description, and certainly necessary for a career path.

Whether or not a given crew is assigned to fuels or other fire prevention tasks in a given jurisdiction depends entirely on the budget priorities of that jurisdiction. In turn, that jurisdiction has to work with whatever annual budget trickles down from administrative and executive levels.

Regarding California, I know too little to speak with confidence on government spending. People I know who live there are work in land management have always said that forest (fire) management has been neglected for many years.

I suspect the budget is actually a fair bit more nuanced than a dichotomy of fighting versus prevention, but regardless, the tools, training and people used to fight fires are the same tools and people that go out and do the preventative measures.

I wouldn't be worried about the macro budget, look at your actual firefighting policies and decide from those if the money will end up spent well.

I don’t know about Californian fire fighters, but the ones that I know here in germany are fairly well interested in all kinds of preventative measures. They’d all prefer to sit on their couch and be paid for not having a fire than donning that flame-proof suit and literally putting their lives at risk. That certainly doesn’t mean that all money is perfectly allocated - they all love their toys and might go procure stuff that’s not truly needed if budget has no limit, but all in all they’re fairly well incentivized towards prevention.

I'm going to weigh in and say the fire fighters here in Canada are pretty much the same. My uncle (now passed) pretty much channelled Smokey the Bear at family BBQs.

The paper didn't recommend throwing money at firefighting, it recommended throwing money at forest management, for long-term forest resiliency.

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