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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

There are two issues. For thousands of years, indigenous people maintained the forest and small fires cleaned out the underbrush. The US halted maintenance, and suppressed fires, creating a backlog of fuel.

The second issue is global warming.

If you have any ideas on how to get the manpower necessary to perform 100+ years of backlogged forest maintenance spanning the entire west coast, or (better) how to fix global warming, I’d love to hear it.

Also, desalination at the scale necessary to meet California’s demands is beyond current technology (especially if it’s done without destroying the ocean ecosystem). Note that the central valley relies on irrigation, and is the bread basket of the US.

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This is a misnomer, Calfire does a lot of prescribed burns already. It's really difficult to do them safely around urban interfaces.

They also just get sued all the time for doing their job

https://x.com/alecstapp/status/1877114784149029252

https://x.com/alecstapp/status/1877145129351323920

They do, but they’re still way behind where they need to be.

They also do shaded fire breaks, which make sense.

> manpower necessary to perform 100+ years of backlogged forest maintenance spanning the entire west coast

Curious what is involved with this. If indigenous people could do it, why couldn't a larger population with superior tech do it? Sounds like a worthwhile venture. Even if it costs a fortune it might be better than rebuilding LA every 30-50 years.

It’s unfortunate that Claude can’t provide references, but it plausibly suggests that the indigenous population actively managed forests in a radius around their population centers, not the entire land area. So the current larger population doesn’t make the task easier, since the size of the task scales with the population size. Superior technology should certainly make it easier, though. Probably a matter of lack of political will, and bureaucratic inefficiency.

You missed the third issue which was utterly incompetent management from the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and the governer of California, Gavin Newsom.

You can extinguish a fire with salt water.

Connect the sewage / storm water system to a few massive pumps and back flush everything.

Set off a few nukes in the bay to cause a tidal wave.

I’m no civil engineer / hydrologished, so there’s probably issues with my drive-by dismissal of a serious issue.

So yes, you can put out fires with salt water but its bad for any equipment that is currently being used * and it hurts the future plant life (salting the earth is an old method of hurting your enemies * ).

* https://firefighterinsider.com/can-you-put-out-a-fire-with-s...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth

I love how you respond seriously to the logistical challenges of salt water, and don’t blink at the prospect of using nukes to create a tidal wave.

While we’re speaking about future plant life, it isn’t necessarily looking particularly good.

This is the most HN comment ever.

Aww thanks, you’re making me blush.

But I think the honorific goes to the Dropbox dismissal.

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