Forest Service officials close all California national forests
latimes.com
latimes.com
https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/more-evacuation-order...
https://www.tahoedailytribune.com/news/lake-tahoe-residents-...
https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/article/Caldor-F...
I guess fire can be added to that now as well :(
"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."
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010382535/gavin-newsom-misle...
that is utterly not true by any stretch of the words .. it is literally political theater hit piece. see for yourselves...
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/04/13/governor-newsom-signs-land...
https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/press-publications/
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
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.
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.
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/06/23/newsom-misled-t...
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.
So does this mean that less work will be needed (state-wide) when this fire season is over?
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/06/23/newsom-misled-t...
Newsom tried to lie his way out by blaming climate change which is laughable, here is a 40 year usgs scientist roundly refuting that lie:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/04...
Here is an article talking about why 2020 was so bad in california for wildfires: https://www.insider.com/california-facing-a-shortage-of-inma...
And things are looking worse as Newsom is closing the prison inmate fire training programs which help train firefighters: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/desperate-need-these-pr...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912193742/california-bill-cle...
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.
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.
Calling it that can be a trap. Stick to climate change.
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.
[0] https://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/08/uah-global-temperature-...
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.
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?
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.
Based on...what?
What will happen is not dependent on the US or the EU. It depends entirely on India and China.
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.
Global warming has only increased the Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius? That doesn't seem like a lot.
Read Spencer’s book for an alternate point of view. Global warming is real, but it is not catastrophic.
And then there's the scale of what you propose.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/roofing/21018219/fire-resistant...
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.
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.
Probably not of much value as roofs are (or can be) relatively fireproof.
The issue is vents, decks, windows to some extent.
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.
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.
(my broad understanding is that property insurance is a relatively functional market where they won't underwrite a policy that doesn't make sense)
I wouldn't be surprised to see wildfires go a similar route in California if the situation isn't resolved.
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.
But it would probably still help. It doesn't have to be perfect to help firefighters out.
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.
Are you willing to move out of fire country for the greater good?
https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...
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).
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.
"Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do."
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/20/an-oregon-wildfire-is-so-in...
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.
I expect large swaths of the Sierras will soon be uninsurable for all practical purposes. Anybody with a mountain home with a mortgage will be SOL.
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.
Direct source: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...
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.
https://slate.com/business/2021/08/california-wildfires-airp...
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.)
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.
Anyone got recommendations for a last minute 20 day off grid vacation? Have car, supplies, ready to go.
Just be grizzly aware.
Probably still much open wilderness.
Maybe central Montana?
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!
Any number of Wilderness Areas in the Rocky Mountain West. Prepare for inclement weather as you might encounter an early season snowstorm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes[^1].
> Sure a joint could "start a fire" but a lot of other things could too.
This is whataboutism[^2]. The fact that other things can start a fire doesn't make starting it with a joint or cigarette less of a possibility
> a combination of things that are required to create a fire
Like hot weather and dry vegetation?
> Maybe we just don't like to admit it but climate change is here
And so we should stop smoking joints in the forest when it's hot and dry to prevent starting fires?
[^1]: https://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=327 [^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I know that an embers can mature into big fires, that's obvious.
The issue is, there is a severe drought in California, attributed to climate change, which made the Forrest go up like a house of matches.
It's not _just_ because of joint smoking hippies.
https://projects.capradio.org/california-fire-history/#6/38....
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.
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.
It's going to get a lot worse.
Peak fire season should still be in October, and be much bigger than now. Assuming the winter rain starts in November.
We used to be able to manage this.
caltopo.com