California’s drought may have helped solve the mystery of a 1965 plane crash | Hacker News Reader

California’s drought may have helped solve the mystery of a 1965 plane crash

theguardian.com

56 pointsThevet11 comments

Five of the six years that I was homeless in California were drought years. I didn't really understand or appreciate that until that last year when the rains came and I did things like took out a loan to spend three nights in a hotel because my "safe from the storm" campsite was under multiple feet of water and the worst rains were yet to come.

I clearly and obviously benefited significantly from having the good fortune to be homeless mostly during drought years in California. So I sometimes wonder how many silver linings get overlooked while we wring our hands about some obviously bad thing.

Some pine trees cannot reproduce without fire. So if you stamp out forest fires entirely, you kill the forest in the long run.

In reality, we never succeed in completely stamping out forest fires. So what happens is that successfully keeping it to a minimum results in a build up of dead wood and some of the worst fires in the US have followed years of good and successful forest management that was celebrated as a "win" at the time.

Big storms, like typhoons, have been credited with carrying various species to islands where they become distinct species thanks to isolation. The distance crossed with the help of the storm is not one they can fly or navigate intentionally.

I am an environmental studies major and I've lived without a car for over a decade and I've lived without an air conditioner for years. I'm concerned about climate change and I do my best to walk the walk.

But I wonder at times about how things get discussed as if "X is good and Y is bad". I wonder if that's really the best and most useful way to have such discussions.

There's a lot of denial about the natural state of California IMO: fire and drought are an important part of the ecology, but unfortunately humans have built homes on fire plains and there is much hysteria about humans influencing the climate

Just across the border in Mexico the chaparrel is much healthier and more diverse, because they let wildfires burn.

https://calpba.org/good-fire-alliance There is a growing realization again finally that managing vegetation needs on properties through controlled burning and other techniques is essential

California is set up for perrenial failure with this unless there is federal intervention. There is a widely agreed upon need for controlled burns, LA times writes articles about it after every fire. However, the people in charge of the purse for these controlled burns are local politicians, who are beholden to local voters who are actually typically against controlled burns in their areas over air quality concerns. It just circles back to that fact every time and nothing ever gets done.

If the federal government got more involved, however, and acted directly on state controlled lands, there would be none of this local NIMBY concern as these people aren't a big chunk of the electorate or large enough of a body to buy national influence, and the right thing would just be done.

The wreck is actually from a 1986 crash that saw no fatalities.

https://www.facebook.com/199535516767620/posts/4006006656120...

> The wreck is actually from a 1986 crash that saw no fatalities.

I'm obviously as unsure as anybody of the correctness of this analysis, but I found a source that wasn't Facebook for your alternative: https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/06/16/folsom-lake-plane...

I too am generally skeptical of Facebook posts, but this wasn't just some random Facebook user, it was an official post from the Placer County Sheriff's Office. In fact the CBS13 article is simply repeating what the Sherriff's Office had already reported in their Facebook and Twitter posts.

Services like the Internet Archive have a hard time, if they're able to at all, archiving Twitter and Facebook social posts, so having alternate sources is helpful in that regard.

The Guardian also has a follow-up: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/16/california-f...

That may not be a huge benefit, considering the destruction the drought is likely to cause. But it may give some people closure.

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