Cali wildfires

So has anyone on this site been affected by the fires out there in California? If so, I hope you and your family are all alright. But I was hoping to get some opinions on why they are so bad right now, particularly from CA residents that see it first hand, but anyone can answer of course. Do you think that if the authorities were able to properly clean out the forests of fallen and dead debris that it would lessen the intensity of this fire?

Barb's brother lives in Rancho Bernardo, heavily featured on the national news as being completely burned out. It wasn't of course (you don't expect the media to be anything less than sensational or to report the real truth, do you?). There was indeed a lot of damage, with the fires coming to within a couple hundred feet of his house. But his neighborhood was not touched except for the smoke and ash. They did evacuate for a few days, but are now cleaning up the ash and soot. It was bad, of course, and a couple thousand homes were burned (not the total devastation that the media reported, as bad as it was). Something like 7 people died, 3 of whom had refused to evacuate and 4 illegal immigrants in an encampment (a couple dozen others in the same encampment got evacuated by the Border Patrol and Sheriff's office). There were some whole cul de sacs that were burned except for one or two houses. Most of the houses burned had shake roofs (that is, wood shingle). Only a couple had tile roofs, which don't catch fire from a few embers.

Cleaning out the fallen and dead debris - the only real way to do this is to let fires take their natural course. You can do a better job by clearing zones around the residences and businesses, but people seem to insist on having trees right up next to their houses and not clearing defensible zones. Note I said "better job". As long as the urban interface intrudes farther and farther into what was once wildlands, the problem will exist and will get worse. It's the same as building on wetlands and building substandard levees in hopes you won't get flooded (then building back in the same place every few years when you do get flooded, as people did in Jackson MS when we lived down there for 10 years), or build on the Outer Banks, then keep rebuilding on the same spot after every hurricane. Or as some people in snow country insist on doing, build in avalanche paths, then rebuild in the same place after the avalanche sweeps away your house (happens in Utah, happens in Juneau, even happens in Thredbro, Australia).

You can lessen the risk a great deal by proper choice of location and type of construction - wood shingle roofs catch fire easily, composition shingles less so, and tile and concrete much less so. Clearing the vegetation around your house to leave a 50-100 foot defensible space helps tremendously, more so than clearing fallen and dead debris. Type of vegetation you have in your neighborhood makes a huge difference as well.

You should be aware that, while some of the fires were caused by power lines that were knocked down, many were arson. In a couple of the arson cases, the people starting them went along roads setting a string of fires (apparently one such was done by someone very familiar with fire fighting and deliberately set out to make fighting the fire as hard as possible).

So what are you proposing - all forests should have the trees widely spaced, with green grass all around, as in urban parks or golf courses? What means this

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properly clean out the forests of fallen and dead debris

By the way, we have earthquakes here, as well (as we did a couple nights ago, though it was just a little 5.6 that only knocked a few jars off grocery store shelves). What do you propose we do to prevent or lessen the intensity of earthquakes? Maybe we can install steel trusses across the fault lines? Put stoppers in the Cascade volcanoes?

Sorry, but Nature takes its course. You can mitigate the disasters by where you choose to build and by clearing defensible spaces. But fires, earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes will happen

Of course you can not control nature. I never once implied that, but you can clear forests of fallen/dead debris to lessen the risk of fire. To be honest, I have no idea why anyone would want to live in that part of California. Earthquakes, mudslides, sinkholes, landslides, fires, just a few reasons why I will never live there. You definitely took my comment out of context. I suggested clearing it of fallen and dead debris, not making it look like a golf course, but when people chose to build in such a disaster prone area you need to do the extra effort to avoid these natural disasters, such as clearing as much fuel as possible.
And steel trusses on fault lines? Where did you get that from? Do not, for one second, insult my intelligence.

When you "clear forests of fallen/dead debris to lessen the risk of fire" you disrupt the natural cycle which depends on "fallen/dead debris" and even fire to renew the soil and promote new growth. In fact, that is one of the arguments often put forth against campfires: by stripping the forest floor of dead wood, which would eventually decay and fertilize the soil, you harm the health of the forest.

Nature has a way of clearing forests of debris: fire.

carbs are the enemy you know

As rexim says, removing fallen and dead debris disrupts the natural cycle. Though you may not have explicitly said so, your "advice"

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to properly clean out the forests of fallen and dead debris

will disrupt that natural cycle, unless you go to the extent of turning the whole of Southern California into an urban park or golf course with widely spaced trees and grass that must be maintained and heavily watered. And even then, as was shown by the golf course near Barb's brother's house, it doesn't lessen the fire intensity by much.

Unfortunately, people have been building in areas in total disregard to Nature - flood plains, barrier islands, tornado country, hurricane country, directly on fault lines, in the midst of forests. Then they complain that the government has not been doing enough to protect their homes when the natural cycle of Nature wipes out their house. Clearing the debris does not help if you do not clear a defensible space and if you do not use fire resistant materials in construction, just as building on a flood plain or next to an earthen levee does not guarantee you will never be flooded out.

No, I did not take you out of context. I merely pointed out the inevitable consequences of ignoring the way Nature works. Think it through to the ultimate consequences - how big and strong a levee is needed to keep the floods out? How strong a building is needed to keep it from being damaged by a tornado (by the way, every state in the US, including Alaska, sees tornadoes from time to time)? How strong a building is needed to stand up in the maximum possible earthquake in a given area (recall that the strongest earthquake on record in North America happened in Missouri, with serious damage seen from the Great Lakes down to New Orleans, and a couple hundred miles east and west of the Mississippi River)? How can you prevent earthquakes (no, steel beams across the fault line won't do it)? And as shown, clearing the dead and fallen debris won't lessen the fire damage unless you clear all vegetation, and then you increase the flooding and landslide danger. But people seriously propose exactly these very things.

You have to know and understand the way Nature works and build in locations and by methods that take that into account.

Ok Bill, you know everything, I get it. You did take my comment out of context. Membership cancelled.

Back one more time, forgot to write something. In both posts you made Bill you qouted the same sentence, but also in both you cleverly left out the last part of it which says, "would lessen the intensity of this fire". Tell me where you got the idea that I thought that would do away with wildfires altogether. Oh, and by the way, I have lived in Tornado Alley my whole life, so thanks for the education on tornadoes.

Ok, include "lessen the intensity" As I posted, clearing the underbrush did not lessen the intensity in the areas where this had been done, such as in the vicinity of golf courses. Remember that the fires spread as crown fires and through airborne cinders carried by the Santa Ana winds, not your "dead and fallen debris". The intensity was driven mostly by the winds and the vegetation that was right up next to the houses.

And no, I did not take you out of context. I took your "dead and fallen debris" removal to be to the extent that would be necessary to have any significant effect. Most of the fire damage was done by what is referred to as "crown fires", which are spread through the upper parts of the growth, with the ground materials burning later in the cycle. Most of the houses involved were lit by cinders falling onto the shake roofs or from neighboring houses that were lit from their shake roofs, not by ground debris burning up to the houses.

By the way, I did ask you (MTB) to explain what exactly you meant by your comment on

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properly clean out the forests of fallen and dead debris

What is your standard of "properly clean"?

Let's all please settle down a little bit about this. Arguing over semantics and demanding rebuttals isn't going to accomplish anything.

Let's re-frame the question: what positive actions can we reasonably take to limit the loss of life and property damage caused by wildfire without disrupting natural cycles and ecosystems that depend on periodic fires?

Actually, it is pretty obvious and has been known for a long time -
1. Given the existing houses, clear defensible spaces around them.
2. Restrict the further expansion into undeveloped areas
3. Provide adequate funding for increasing the number of trained fire fighters and equipment, including the improved distribution of fire stations
4. Controlled burns where possible, during low fire danger seasons (a major contributor to the extent and intensity was the extremely low humidity - in the sub 10 percent range, combined with the katabatic winds, known as Santa Ana winds in this area. Controlled burns have to be done during the rainy season).
5. Failing controlled burns (or letting naturally caused fires to continue to burn while only protecting existing structures), artificially remove the dead and fallen debris and thin the living plants (trees, manzanita and other chaparral, and bushy undergrowth).

The problem is that all of these are politically extremely controversial. Even after the South Tahoe fire, there has continued strong opposition to clearing brush and trees from around houses and businesses, while at the same time loud demands for the "authorities" to "do something" (just who the "authorities" are and the "something" is hotly argued). The Oakland Hills, scene of the disastrous fire of just a few years ago, have been rebuilt with just as many houses on the same narrow roads, with the vegetation back just as thick and as close to the houses as before the fire.

Restriction of expansion is viewed as an intrusion on property owners' rights to do with their property as they please.

Funding increased fire protection requires finding the sources of funding, something very difficult to do without raising taxes or cutting elsewhere in the budgets (schools? health? highway maintenance? somewhere else seen as vital?).

Controlled burns are widely seen as interfering with nature as well as creating large amounts of unhealthy smoke and creating ugly burn scars on the landscape, and when they sometimes get out of hand, the agency doing the controlled burns is excoriated for their carelessness.

Clearing undergrowth and thinning remove needed nutrients, destroy habitat for a wide variety of animals, and create a generally unhealthy ecosystem that is subject to a variety of plant and animal diseases, as well as producing a genetically limited landcover. This will eventually destroy the wilderness playground that a large portion of the population wants to have, and the very thing that people building and buying in the areas are seeking.

At this point in time, we are paying the price for practices of the past that have allowed unrestrained development, pushing the urban-wilderness further and further into the wilderness, vigorously suppressing wildfires (a term which in itself denotes the attitude that led to fire suppression being the standard mode of operation), and at the same time demanding the preservation of the wilderness as a playground.

So even though the answer is obvious and has been known for a long time, the price and restrictions are considered to be unacceptable. What will it take to provide the motivation to make the necessary moves? I have no answer for that.

Last night the National Geographic Channel had a program titled something like Secret Yosemite. As a theme, it had a friend of mine, Lincoln Else, who for many years was the Climbing Ranger for Yosemite, climbing the Nose route on El Capitan. Along with using the climb as a cue for digressions on geology, the waterfalls, and lightning strikes, there was a good discussion of the role of fires.

While I had known (and mentioned above, as did rexim) that some plants depend on fire for activating their seeds, I had not known (or more likely forgotten) that during the 80 years or so of aggressive fire suppression in Yosemite, few if any new giant sequoias had sprouted. The sequoia depends on fire to open the cones and disperse the seeds. Also, the discussion pointed out that fires free the ground of cover so that the young sequoias can grow to a point where they can receive sunlight. In this same section, there was a discussion of deciduous forest (in particular, oak trees), in other parts of Yosemite, that are dependent on fire to open the canopy so that young oaks can receive sunlight necessary for growth.