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Comment by everythingfine | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to point out that this problem can technically be solved by a well-meaning arsonist who's willing to break the law. Simply send a public message to fire departments naming the date and location that a forest fire will start, let the fire departments prepare like they would for a controlled burn, and then set off the blaze. There's some difficulty involved with establishing sufficient credibility for this to work, but it's a weird case where illegal action can accomplish things that operating within the legal system cannot.

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An extremely brief google search tells me that controlled burns require firebreaks, knowledge of the wind patterns (something called a downwind backfire?) and presumably continued monitoring/support from firefighters to actually be a controlled burn over the area that needs it.

I think what you're describing is a total fantasy.

The only controlled burn is one that happens regularly. You cannot start with a controlled burn after years of suppression as there is too much fuel. You have to "rip the band-aid off". That is evacuate the whole state, and then start the whole state on fire at once. If you want your house to survive, then you use the warning to clear all the trees/bush around your house so it isn't close to the fire (this is easy to say, impossible to pull off).

This is not really true, and if you'd like to learn more than you ever wanted to know about this topic then you should start following Zeke Lunder from The Lookout and review some of his wildfire analysis videos on YouTube. He often talks about the idea of "good fire". Not all fire is "good fire". A lot of megafires, the kind that might be sparked by an arson technique ignorant of modern wildfire management practices, do not necessarily lead to "good fire". They may at certain stages (especially when wind dies down) exhibit some traits of "good fire", but for the most part, these are forests that are the way they are due to too much suppression for too long, and now require "good fire" if our goal is to still have a healthy forest after the fire. An arson that starts a megafire is going to potentially transition to a very different type of forest, or an un-forested wasteland, as seen in various places in the Sierra foothills and SoCal.

We had a small fire that had to be fought last year on the mountain that shadows the city by a teenager. I was hiking through the area affected recently and there were burn piles being created in the parts that didn't burn last year, so I guess that the arsonist at least created the impetus to prevent future burns closer to the city.

This is the general message, and is extremely poisonous and insidious. "Arsonists are heros"

Thousands of puppets ear-whispered to break the laws. Then there came the consequences, the dry, the mud flood, the people killed and the houses burnt. The best joke is to blame the green and the hippies.

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