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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

> This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.

It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy. It doesn't change the fact that it won't be happening though.

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> It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy.

Yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41920127 ("HN: The Forest Service Is Losing 2,400 Jobs–Including Most of Its Trail Workers")

Relevant comment by S201: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41922195

"The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades

> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs."

Don't "prescribed burns" fall under the category of firefighting? That's the whole reason you do controlled burns in the first place, right? To prevent a larger fire later?

Sadly no, and (IANAL) the law here is clear AFAIK. Money cannot be spent outside of what it was allocated. Firefighting I'm given to understand explicitly excludes prevention. This might be one of the most short sighted budget allocations I've ever seen. As a dollar spent on prevention easily covers 10 on fighting.

Can the Forest Service make this up with use fees? Like, could California pay the Forest Service to take care of its land surrounded by California?

I think the issue is that it's federal land. They would just have to authorize California to do it on their behalf.

Here in Oregon (and elsewhere), we have multi-agency partnerships between governments, different federal agencies, local tribes, homeowners, etc.:

https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/Fi...

https://firenetworks.org/

I'm not sure how it works in California, but wildfires don't really care about our jurisdictional boundaries...

It could possibly be managed by the state by placing a tax on fire insurance which would basically be a workaround to Proposition 13. That would probably be about as popular as a Chinese "weather" balloon but it does have a certain poetry of having the people who use the forest — by living in it — pay to manage it.

The fire insurance that is unaffordable or just straight not available anymore to those same people?

If the fire insurance is just straight not available, that is probably because people should not be living there.

There is only one reason why insurance straight up isn't available somewhere, and the reason is regulation.

I can assure you that no matter how high the risk of fire, insurers will be willing to provide insurance on that so long as they are legally allowed to charge the appropriate premiums.

> There is only one reason why...

Not true. Assume for the moment that you're the CEO of Golden Insurance Co., and you're still writing fire insurance policies in Burn County, CA. After Yet Another massive fire - and loads of "100% loss" payouts - from your balance sheet - the experts in your Risk Estimating Dept. say the premium to insure a $600K house in Burn Co. needs to be $200K/year - because they expect to pay out to replace that house ($600K) every 4 year ($150K/year), and they need the other $50K for overhead and temp. relocation benefits and rebuilding-cost inflation and a bit of hedge - just in case they're wrong, and things burn down even more often.

Now - if the fire insurance for a $600K house costs $200K/year, how many of the homeowners can and will actually pay that much for fire insurance? Perhaps a number that's falling like a rock? Meanwhile, Wall St. is howling about the horrible risk that your balance sheet is facing, if there's another big fire season. And the 99% of homeowners who can't afford those premiums are bitterly angry, and in a mood to string up the bearer of bad news (meaning you) from the highest tree still standing.

SO - why wouldn't you, as CEO, make the unfortunate decision to just stop writing fire insurance policies for properties in Burn Co., CA?

The answer amid a lack of regulation is NumptyCo sells a policy for $10k, pays most of that to its owner, and declares insolvency at the first sight of a claim.

That would be the part of the grandparent where the other option is ‘unaffordable’ yes?

No one is going to spend $10 a month to insure a paper plate. If no one is going to buy a policy, it doesn't make sense to have the infrastructure in place to sell that policy. Thus no one offers insurance policies on paper plates.

>people should not be living there

How do people afford to move and start new lives when you can't sell your property because it is uninsurable?

perhaps we should not treat systemic social failure as individuals' responsibility to resolve on their own without support of the State

> we should not treat systemic social failure as individuals' responsibility to resolve on their own without support of the State

Nobody is suggesting jailing the irresponsible. But there is no reason they’re entitled to that capital. They took a risk and it was a bad one.

Most California landowners are hardly poor. We're talking about a state with more than double the GDP per capita of Japan. And the property taxes are in some cases among the cheapest in the world. We're talking about just over a million homes in fire zones, while the total budget for the Forest Service is about $10 billion per annum. That's $10k per year per house to fund the financial equivalent of the entire Forest Service — for roughly a third the rent I pay on a studio apartment in Bergen County. I'll try to find a small enough violin for these landowners. Yes, there are some people who are asset-rich and liquidity poor, but we are not talking about West Virginia.

Effective fire prevention will also make fire insurance cheaper and reducing development in fire-prone areas will reduce the cost of forest management.

I'm a little consfused what point you are trying to make with those numbers. I don't get how comparing the nation budget of the USFS against homes in California on fire zones is an argument for anything.

California spends a roughly an order of magnitude more per acre they are responsible for, when compared with the USFS so I don't think underspending by California is the issue here. The problem seems to be the lack of authority for CalFire to manage fire risk on federal land.

California has already taxed everything that can be taxed, and raised taxes to the point that further tax increases are likely to result in a decline in tax revenue.

Were the camp fire or the town of paradise burning down counter examples to your points? IIRC those were not terribly wealthy towns. Could you clarify?

Second, how do you know it is just one million homes? I'm interested to learn more there

People living in the forest (who’s doing this exactly? you didn’t specify) are not the problem. Wildfires are a natural event meant to bring balance to an overgrown forest. All of CA suffers from this so why force only some to pay?

Since CA tends to be a rich state, I vote that those living in SF and LA pay 75% of the required fees, and the remainder of the state pay the rest.

They can use the lumber fees from the forests to pay for the cost.

This would be true if the federal allowed more than a nominal amount of logging. Most trees and logs come from private land. See page 8: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45688

That is much more complicated than it appears. Cutting and transporting trees is not easy or free, and there is already a huge glut of wood caused by the die off from phytophthera. Might still be worth looking into.

I'm not from the region so I'm wonder if this glut of wood translating into low prices for end consumers?

"Low prices for end consumers" seems to be around the current $3-$4 per 2x4x8 stud in retail terms, but standing lumber was never worth much even at the peak of the lumber shortage a couple years ago, it was all sawmill-limited.

lumber future prices are up over the last few months. currently 593, was 493 in July.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbr

Most consumers want straight boards for building. Most wood, particularly from die offs, is curvy branches that may be useful when ground up for wood based products like pellets, MDF, or paper.

Have you seen that happening?

Did prices for wood even go down post-COVID back to their previous level?

That's why I'm asking. I live in Canada where we produce a tremendous amount of lumber but it's processed in the US and the prices spiked during COVID and while they've gone down haven't returned to anything resembling the baseline.

It looks like it is more or less back to a rough pre-COVID baseline, if inflation is factored in: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber

(But I'm certainly not seeing the glut of cheap lumber that others may appear to be alluding to here...)

Baseline before COVID, or baseline factoring in the (global) post COVID inflation spike?

Not without Congress doing something to enable it.

> Not without Congress doing something to enable it

Why? We played with the farfetched hypothetical of California unilaterally acting on federal land. But if the Forest Service says “come on in” and they do, I’m struggling to see who would face any real consequences given the Congress’s power of the purse isn’t being touched.

OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service. Different than them handing over a license to burn.

> OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service

Sure. I don’t see how the Congress stops that if the USFS (not Parks) and Sacramento strike a deal.

They're still going broke despite using prison labor to fight the fires?

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/31/us/prison-inmates-fight-calif...

The state of California and its consevation core is not the USFS.

If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.

So is death. Interestingly we've responded by trying to minimize it where rational. Part of preventing fire is preventing death. Fires also shut down roads which can be a major problem where alternative routes don't exist.

A wholesale "do not prescribed burn" is not sensible. Determining which areas are high and low value and then concentrating what resources you have on the highest value areas is.

No my point is stop overfunding firefighting. Over fund forest management.

At the risk of being an idiot, is the problem firefighting? Is the problem that we're continuing a losing battle? That, even when we had proper forest management, the costs were still shifting towards firefighting? Warming making everything drier on average?

In the end though the only one we're truly hurting is ourselves and our desired life style when it burns out of control.

Firefighting makes the next fire worse. You need to have a theory that doesn't involve more expensive fire fighting every time someone builds a new house. This is general means defending towns and letting the mountainside burn.

This is an insurance problem more than anything else.

If insurers were allowed to and incentivized to price accurately, homes in dangerous areas (flood plains, fire hazards) would be too expensive to buy, and people... wouldn't.

Especially given that if you can't get insurance, you can't get a mortgage, which drastically limits your buyers.

I 100% agree with that, but the way pricing works is generally not sufficiently granular. You either get underpriced government backed plans, or a plan that does not take into account your actual circumstances. Eventually sufficient big data might be able to solve the pricing problem. Defensible construction will have cheap insurance and indefensible buildings will not be economically insurable. The problem is insurance is by county (lol) or by "city". Neither work in CA mountains.

> the way pricing works is generally not sufficiently granular

Is this caused by regulations or the insurers approach?

Genuinely ignorant here.

Legislation generally opposes granular insurance policies, as it is discrimination.

But in the case of home insurance, unlike health, people actually have a choice: build there or do it somewhere else.

Artificially forcing blended home insurance rates lessens the pricing signal that this particular area might be too risky to build in.

At the end of the day, it's developers and the city/county making money while offloading the risk to insurance companies and government mortgage buyers.

There have been endless lawsuits by homeowners alleging discrimination in their insurance rates. All this impairs granular risk assessment and insurance rates. A recent WSJ article was about lawsuits from homeowners who were quoted higher insurance rates because their roof was rotten and/or there were trees that could fall on their house.

The same has happened with auto insurance rates (men and women have different accident rates, so used to have different rates), and, glaringly, medical insurance rates.

Most medical insurance isn't really insurance, it's more prepaid health care.

I've seen people asking why car insurance doesn't cover oil changes the same way dental insurance covers cleanings, so be careful what you wish for, I guess.

It's discrimination when it's based on uncontrollable situations. It is not discrimination when it's based on factors one can control. And an indefensible structure in a fire zone is most certainly something you can control. Pricing it appropriately would keep builders from building them in the first place and it would get the people that have them to do what they can to make it more defensible.

The problem is people come to the legislature screaming about being charged a rate that actually reflects the risk. The legislature eventually responds by making insurance spread the costs over it's policy base. This results in people to screaming to the legislature because their rates are skyrocketing to pay for the idiots in the danger zone. The legislature eventually responds by not allowing insurance companies to charge enough--and they walk.

By the time you reach the point of the insurance companies walking you've already had many chances to fix the problem. But we never learn, people are determined to have their cake and eat it also.

Is that even feasible? How exactly would firefighters defend towns from large wildfires. They can't cut an effective fire break around an entire town.

The bigger the town the easier it gets. Towns have roads and parking lots and cmu commercial buildings that are mostly non-flammable. They also have water supplies and logistics infrastructure. Centralized defense is very feasible. Mountain roads and poor communications cause an underutilization of resources.

That doesn't seem accurate. Commercial buildings aren't necessarily in the outskirts of town. And while the buildings themselves might be slightly more fire-resistant than typical wood frame houses, they're full of flammable materials. Look what happened with the Camp Fire in 2018.

It's simply not possible to make a practical house that won't support combustion. However, we don't need to. The threat is not what happens when the house is exposed to direct fire, but what happens when the house is exposed to ignition sources. And those *can* be stopped. Build your house such that there isn't anything combustible on the outside of the house and all access points are made spark proof.

Our house is not fire engineered--but still it has very few spots that could ignite. That's simply because we have stucco walls and a concrete tile roof. There is some exposed wood but not much. Nor are the vents spark proof.

Unfortunately, concrete tile roofs aren't suitable in many places (they don't like hail) and can't be retrofit onto most houses due to the weight.

The cost of a fire break is proportional to the perimeter, the value is proportional to the area.

True in a mathematical sense but irrelevant in practice. Realistically there won't ever be enough firefighters available nearby to cut an effective fire break around an entire town while a wildfire is burning nearby. Do you have any concept of how much manual labor and heavy machinery this takes?

You know firebreaks can be cut before a fire, right?

Even in the case of an emergency firebreak, if there aren't enough firefighters to cut one large one, there aren't enough firefighters to cut lots of small ones with a greater total length.

That's one of those hilarious "peak Hacker News" comments from someone who obviously has never spent much time cutting down trees and clearing brush. There are hundreds towns at risk of wildfires. The scale of effort necessary to cut effective fire breaks around them and keep them clear every summer would be enormous. The state has nowhere near the budget for that. Do the math. And besides that there are numerous other problems including private property access and environmental impact laws that make the whole idea ludicrous to anyone who lives in the real world.

Unfortunately, it's not a binary tradeoff.

Your point of stopping fire suppression has something to it.

Though, 3 issues I see with complete disengagement: (1) there are whole towns that would burn down, avoidably so if some fires were not suppressed

(2) modern fires are rangers and turn the landscape into Savannah. This is not necessary. Healthy forests would be fire resistant and more fires could just run their course (in other words, not suppressing fires can lead to CA forests being removed)

(3) kinda related to (2), the wet/dry seasons creates a lot of burnabke grasses and bushes that pop up. Prescribed burns would tamp that down, giving forests more time to age and be fire resistant

Fire is part of nature, but many of these fires are caused by target shooters, OHV users, and even from home construction. It doesn't make sense to take torches to the forest and then claim it's fine because fire is natural.

Fire is going to happen. The more you prevent fire the bigger the fire becomes when it does happen.

Fire is going to happen to a certain level, given a certain evironment. Again, if people show up and start burning everything around them, fires that would not have happened at all will burn valuable places. I don't need to have preventative fires wash through my living room to maintain an acceptable level of destruction; I just don't do things that will burn down my house inside.

Removing the human-caused fires from the picture will reduce the number of fires but the fuel will still be there, the fires that remain will be bigger.

The real philosophy is in the budget.

Trees and empty land cost nothing. But:

            CA Insurance Claims USFS Wildfire
    Year    and Settlements     Management Budget
    2018    $13.6 billion       $2.5 billion
    2019    $2.8 billion        $2.4 billion
    2020    $3.5 billion        $2.35 billion
    2021    $4.75 billion       $2.4 billion
    2022    (unknown)           $2.65 billion
    2023    (unknown)           $2.97 billion

The expensive part of forest fires is paying back homeowners who lost their homes in places guaranteed to be lit on fire, at prices for homes as though the fires didn't exist. The way we chose to do this is by saying it was PG&E's fault, and in exchange, PG&E gets to recoup those payments via permanently higher rates.

It is a little complicated, but it isn't that complicated. The simple question is, should the government pay a safe home's price for a burnt down home?

No. Let owners exercise owner's responsibility (e.g. insurance, and if insurance is too expensive -- well, the risk is too high).

PS: I heard the thing California does, however, is putting a cap on insurance premiums, so insurers just avoid some regions, and owners cannot find insurance to buy. It's kinda the same thing -- owner's responsibility.

At least you’re answering the question.

California FAIR is the insurance of last resort so what you’re saying isn’t totally accurate.

There has to be an insurance option because you can’t get a mortgage without insurance. And owner occupied real estate prices do not go up without mortgages.

California bends over backwards to make owner occupied real estate risk free.

More provocative questions: what is the difference between someone who lost a home in a place guaranteed for the home to eventually burn down, and someone who doesn’t own a home at all? In that moment: nothing, right? Why is sunk cost a fallacy all the time, except that time?

Is someone who pays less in taxes deserving of less, more or equal government assistance? No, right? Now replace taxes with “compulsory payments” like home insurance: does your answer change?

This should illuminate for you why CA wildfire bailout policy is so inequitable. These communities are not an escape valve from overpriced real estate in California cities, they ARE the overpriced real estate all the same.

AFAIK in CA insurance rates must be set based on historical trends not anticipated future losses or reinsurance prices. It is easy to imagine why - insurance companies love to play financial games when they can. Historical data is lagging by nature and the reinsurance market predicts large fires will continue thus the insurers get hit from both sides.

Note that a lot of the property insurance regulation stems from a 1988 voter proposition. I suppose it has worked fine from then until now but the CA drought and greatly increased fire risk was an unexpected shock.

FWIW I would guess that we won't see extreme fire events for some time going forward - probably not until a "big drought" comes back to CA 30-40 years from now. The reinsurance market will settle down and mutual insurance companies will end up issuing refunds eventually.

The camp fire was caused by a failed hook on lines where similar hooks showed extreme wear-and-tear, despite PG&E claiming to have inspected them recently. It's not like we just decided to say it was PG&E's fault; their inspections were clearly missing important deferred maintenance.

If the fire had been caused by someone without the funds to pay for damages (e.g. a homeless encampment (Day Fire) or college students improperly extinguishing an illegal bonfire (Tea fire)), then there might be criminal charges, but insurance companies will be on the hook.

So some random person lost their job because they didn’t actually do the inspection and now everybody in northern CA pays higher rates. Do you see what you did there? Who do you think won here?

People will not start doing proper inspections until you punish the individual harshly, instead of the company.

My point was that twofold:

1. torts often fail to make people whole, and even when they do, they aren't always a good deterrent.

2. The comment I was replying to implied that SCE was a scapegoat for the Camp Fire; all evidence strongly suggests that this is not the case.

Bad philosophy. Less prescribed burns mean more uncontrollable wildfires which means in the long term costs are even higher.

Prescribed burns are expensive now because we haven't done them for so long. California banned the indigenous practice of cultural burns before it was even a state! But the more we work on restoring this practice the cheaper it'll be for everyone in the long term

Enshittification strikes again. In this case, fees and costs go down by virtue of being pushed out into the future as even higher costs as a result of lack of fees being paid now. Someone should make an encyclopedia or reference doc detailing all the different and specific ways Enshittification manifests. Bonus points if they tie it into Socialism/Communism because I'd bet there is a high degree of overlap between the two in terms of failure modes.

amazing mental gymnastics, describing how western-markets-failure-mode is directly tied to fictional-enemy-politics . More seriously, maybe systems on a large scale are susceptible? we see evidence of this here?

It's capitalism. This is not complicated. This is a direct result of starve the beast ideology depriving agencies of funding.

I slightly grow tired of saying this, but also not. It’s not capitalism, it’s focusing resources on the wrong projects. Homeless people have drugs, but half the state is on fire.

This comment is particularly funny because the neologism "enshittification" was coined by an outspoken anti-capitalist AS a criticism of capitalism

Yes, redirection is a thing. We’re all quite well aware of it.

The USFS (Department of Agriculture) never had enough resources. The amount of land is almost unprotectable: California: 20 million acres Idaho: 20 million Oregon: 16 million. Fighting fires really should be a state job. I think Idaho delivers much better results for resources spent, in areas that are more vulnerable. California is dysfunctional when it comes to multiple teams and agencies working together, and making decisions that could be controversial. I suspect USFS is relieved to interact less.

I could see this being a super-short-term thing, because we've lately been having dry windy weather (bay area), aka Red Flag warnings. But sadly sounds like it's longer-term.

Resourcing issues are changes to philosophy at some level or another

"To preserve funds for flu treatment, we are hereby halting all vaccine-related activity."

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