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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

I have good news, this is a problem that will eventually solve itself.

Though I also have bad news if you happen to own property in rural CA...

Snark aside… only sort of?

If I remember right about how these ecosystems work, you need the controlled burns so that the underbrush goes up but the trees don’t. Without the controlled burns, the trees also go up, and then “next year” all you have is the new underbrush… and the problem repeats.

What's old is new: defensible spaces around houses [1].

[1] https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace

Excellent podcast on defensible space and how very few actually have it

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

Depending on the severity of the fire (and wind conditions), defensible space will increase the chance your house survives but won’t save it. In Sonoma county, fires hopped over vineyards due to the high winds carrying embers and stuff actively burning hundreds of feet

Wind can spread fire in surprising ways. Here in Norway a town experienced a fire getting out of control[1]. It was in the middle of winter and had been freezing outside for a long time, and was around -10C (13F) when the fire started[2].

Thanks to the wind, the fire managed to jump a distance of 130 meters (426 feet) across an ice rink and set fire to the watering truck.

[1]: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brannen_i_L%C3%A6rdal_2014

[2]: https://www.yr.no/nb/historikk/graf/1-139310/Norge/Vestland/...

> [1] https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace

* https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/prep...

You'd think that insurance companies would make this a condition of coverage: you have to send in photos and be open to random inspections for verification.

Or lungs anywhere in the US

This always amazes me when visiting the US. I'm from a dry part of Australia where bushfires are a regular summer threat, but the smoke seems to dissipate quite quickly. In the US, I've driven more than once for a week across areas where the sky is thick from smoke coming from a fire 1-2 states away. And it's a fire that started weeks prior.

It struck me last trip that an adversary so inclined could really sap lives, morale and resources from huge areas of the country by having rogue individuals secretly starting fires on top of regular lightning and firebug sources.

In forested areas, it really could become a new form of terrorism that's practically impossible to defend against.

Japan tried to do exactly that in WWII, albeit remotely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

On the topic of WWII incendiary bombs, the US also had some interesting programs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

Please keep this idea to yourself, or delete it if you can

The news is wise enough not to make a huge deal of it, but a non-trivial number of the last bunch of fires were determined to be arson. It's hardly even a stretch to imagine that the arsonists might not have been just random folk who thought it'd be really cool to start a fire.

Then again, when a casual arsonist can set significant fractions of a state or even country on fire, and there's millions of people living in the area, and when "pyromania" is sufficiently common enough that it's got it's own entry in the DSM [1] (with estimated incidence at 1.13% (!)), it probably counts as an unnecessary complication to the explanation. There's no way 1.13% of "millions of people" can be stopped. The only solution is to not let the powder keg be created in the first place.

[1]: https://www.theravive.com/therapedia/pyromania-dsm--5-312.33...

If it’s not already, national security budgeting should come into play? Beyond lives at stake, things like morale would impact economy/productivity.

I thought we got rid of all those pesky things during covid

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