People are starting a lot of fires in the Pacific Northwest | Hacker News Reader

People are starting a lot of fires in the Pacific Northwest

hcn.org

44 pointsLinuxBender44 comments

> For a hundred years, fire suppression policies prevented necessary fires from occurring in the West, creating a buildup of fuel. Today’s hotter and drier conditions are priming those fuels, making them more combustible.

Thank you for getting the facts correct. The primary cause of "giant fires" is in fact piss poor forest management, egged on by other factors. Controlled, planned, prescribed, forest fires are necessary to replace the natural processes that humans have interfered with. No idea when we'll actually start putting this into practice, but one would hope the US would learn a few lessons after watching nearly half of RMNP burn down in a single summer.

Prescribed burns have been part of US federal forestry policy for quite a while now. However, I think many state agencies have yet to get the memo.

State agencies, Locals, among many other things. Also fire resources tied up in "unprescribed" fires

They are, but once in a while one gets out of control and burns people's stuff.

Indeed, and state governments are possibly more averse to controlled burns precisely because they're more worried about the political repurcussions in the event that one gets out of control.

> The primary cause of "giant fires" is in fact piss poor forest management, egged on by other factors. Controlled, planned, prescribed, forest fires are necessary to replace the natural processes that humans have interfered with.

The problem is that the only long-term answer is to simply let things burn.

You cannot controlled burn the vast amounts of areas that need to burn. I mean, maybe you could, but it would take a VAST amount of money that nobody seems willing to throw around. There is a LOT of land out West in the US.

The problem is that once a fire starts, a lot of very loud voices want it put out. And the crying victims play really well on TV. And so, everything gets into "We must do something!" mode.

All good points. There are other tools too though, like permanent logging cuts. I Not an expert, but I imagine you also don't have to burn the entire thing, just the worst sections, or choke point areas that would contain otherwise larger fires.

I used to work in wild land firefighting as contractor for the Forest Service. From how my coworkers understood it, everyone got paid more fighting fires than preventing them, and the national budget reflects that [sources needed]. Not only firefighters but also all the contractors, air tanker and helicopter companies, and the retardant manufacturer, Monsanto, are paid well. It’s very easy for me to imagine such interests lobbying in congress to direct more and more funds toward fire fighting rather than prevention efforts.

HCN also has a very good article about two hikers caught on Baring peak during the Bolt Creek Fire last year. The steepness of that terrain is impressive and intimidating even without the forest being on fire.

There are some similarities in the roughness of the terrain to the Sourdough fire currently burning near the Diablo dam. Firefighters were talking about burning logs and pinecones rolling down the mountain and spreading the fire. That fire caused Seattle City Light to disconnect the Ross and Diablo dams from the power grid.

https://www.hcn.org/issues/55.8/north-wildfire-we-have-fire-...

For a hundred years, fire suppression policies prevented necessary fires from occurring in the West, creating a buildup of fuel. Today’s hotter and drier conditions are priming those fuels, making them more combustible.

My question: Is this something we should be planning for further east?

I always assumed that we are too wet here or it's different tree species leading to the forest fire problem out west, from Yukon down to southern California.

But then this summer parts of Quebec and The Maritimes went up in flames. Could we start seeing major fires in southern Ontario, and heavily wooded reaches of the northern US (Maine, NY, Michigan, Minnesota)? What about further south in the Appalachians?

What makes the west different is that it historically should have been burning, and yet those burns were artificially prevented for a century. In the east, the forests were mostly cut down for agriculture, and have only returned in recent decades because agriculture shifted to the midwest. So while the east will have wildfires, I don't think they'll have the bonus severity of western wildfires because there hasn't been a century of buildup.

Appalachia has fires every summer now. They aren’t quite on the level of west coast or Canada, but they still are there.

We get minor brush fires in the spring during dry spells and I have seen fire watchtowers (mostly abandoned) all over the northeast. But nothing on a giant scale in my adult lifetime.

> By the end of July 2022, there were 86 human-caused or undetermined-caused fire starts on national forest lands, officials said in a statement on July 28. This year, there have been 197 over the same time span.

For an additional 111 fires over ~180 days. I wonder if time and distance make it possible for a single pyromaniac to be responsible for much of the difference. They could be justifying it with a Thanos-like delusion of being the only one with the will to do the ecologically necessary thing.

As a PNW local, we're getting hit hard by smoke. Fires have popped up around the region, and smoke also blows in from fires in Idaho & Canada.

We thought we'd escaped this by leaving California!

It's almost as if Mother Earth doesn't respect these lines we've drawn on her to keep things separate. Doesn't she know the ones on that side of the line are to be punished, and the ones on my side of the line are to be rewarded? How could she!‽?

Blaming individuals when all the elements for a fire are already common place seems like we’re trying to blame someone when there is actually a systemic issue

Individuals should absolutely be blamed for starting forest fires. It’s a fourth-degree felony.

Among the largest fires in California history, four that I'm aware of were attributed to:

- Mowing a field. This was in fact illegal of itself, due to the fire hazard, but the fire (near Redding, CA) was literally started by sparking steel off rocks.

- A flat tyre. The wheel's rim ground against the tarmac, again generating sparks, which lit nearby vegetation. Also near Redding. <https://www.propublica.org/article/california-carr-wildfire-...>

- Hammering in a fence post. <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-h...>

- Power lines. Numerous instances, though the Camp Fire which devastated the town of Paradise, CA, is particularly notable.

- Lighting. Most notably the August 2020 California lightning wildfires, resulting from over 11,000 recorded lightning strikes, sparking 21 named fires, many of which were themselves mergers of numerous other fires. A total of 23 souls were lost and 3,586+ structures destroyed.

Yes, human activity (or infrastructure) does start fires, and there are times that the actions are negligent or even deliberate. But the landscape is absolutely primed to ignite, and the least spark (or massive lightning bolts) can set it off.

The problem truly is systemic.

In Montana you are financially responsible for all losses incurred due to a fire you start. Of course nobody is required to prove billions in insurance coverage before lighting up their yarn brush pile...

Fires larger than 48" diameter are generally banned in the dry season here, although that's plenty big enough to set a forest on fire. Sometimes local and federal agencies (depending on jurisdiction) ban all open fires for a while during very dry/windy conditions, and when there's already a big fire to avoid their resource becoming stretched.

Something being illegal doesn’t mean the blame for the fires to catch and spread so quickly has to go to the one who happened to be careless

The blame is for starting the fire, not everything has 3 safety belts in the world, some things just have consequences.. leading to other consequences. There is just no defense or excuse for being carless and doing super stupid things here, no. Not knowing that.. not sure.

Being careless is not what's going on in these instances though. A lot of the time, these are arsonists.

In nature, often the only missing element is a spark. People who don’t respect that situation and take precautions deserve all the blame they get.

Large fires can be started by quite hard to prevent things. We had a fire a couple of years ago that burned a bunch of houses that was started by a lightning strike on a single tree a week or more beforehand. The fire smoldered unnoticed near a popular hiking trail, inside the trunk then emerged much later when wind speed became high.

In current nature this can be blamed on incorrect maintenance or zoning and even education, not just the one who brings the spark.

systemic issues like what? the climate?

sure it's the climate, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't be careful.

Zoning, maintenance and education to name some. Around me (dry, forested part of Spain) there are almost no fires, and I think part of that is because everyone here is taught how to handle something that could ignite it during those crucial months, usually when it happens it’s because people from outside the area have no real idea of the consequences BBQ’ing during this time of year

So you arrest them if they plan to BBQ, you do checkpoints and check for BQQ gear, or you just close the area altogether if people can't behave.

If it was not solved before, it still means restrictions must be taken to avoid fires. A mistake from the past doesn't justify being lenient today.

I mean every household has a knife, but we still blame people when they knife each other.

There's a case to be made that campfires should be banned except for in case of emergencies: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/.... Many legal campfires have caused wildfires, though I doubt any of this season's were allowed. Campfires could go the way of burying our trash in the wilderness.

How about ... no. If we want people to enjoy the wild and think it's something worthy of preservation... we have to preserve not just the wild spaces but also the experience of being in the wilderness. Contrary to popular belief, the stereotype of hippies being the main driver of forestry protections is just wrong. The main individual drivers and supporters of environmental protection are outdoorsmen and women, hunters, fishermen, etc. If we ruin all enjoyment of the outdoors, children and future generations will see no value in its preservation.

For example, America's conservationist Theodore Roosevelt was not only a conservationist but an avid user of the outdoors (and yes, a hunter, fisherman, a camper, etc).

It's totally reasonable to regulate fires, but banning them entirely... I mean the people not paying attention before are not going to pay attention afterwards. And anyway, it does require actual enforcement. On my last trip up to the Cascades, during the fire season, while fires were banned, I saw dozens of instances of fires and rangers / camp hosts simply looking away. What's going to make those campers change if there were a ban? Nothing. They'll still do it.

I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I'll go backpacking without any stove and without building a fire, and that's nice. Usually I bring a stove and use it just for cooking, rarely do we have a fire outside of established campgrounds/areas. When it is windy and dry I think a fire is an unnecessary risk but seeing the fire warning high sign all summer can wear out one's caution to the point where red flag conditions seem like more of the same. I don't think fire bans are a problem when the weather determines the need. Unfortunately the conditions may exist longer than we'd like each summer/fall.

Recently there were some cases of National Forests closing sections due to excessive heat, that I have more of a problem with. Even though I think the argument was to keep SAR safe by keeping people from needing rescue due to the heat.

Last weekend I was backpacking in the Cascades and saw wisps of smoke just off the road a bit before the trailhead. There was a fire that had just been put out but was built on roots and duff which were smouldering. We watched the smoldering spread between checking and going back to the car for water. In the end we used all out water, got water from other cars driving by, and dug about 2 feet down to put it out. Got cut from hot broken jaeger bottles too. There were plenty of fire ban signs on any route to that point. Some people just don't care.

Camp fires are routinely banned around here in late summer (not this year yet). People complain a bit, but otherwise no problem. For larger intentional fires, people have become used to the idea that you don't set fire to stuff unless it's covered in snow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com