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California Megafires Are Solvable

169 points by panic 5y ago

wwweston 5y ago
See also: https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-management-sierra-nevada https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma... tl;dr: state and federal officials have actually been thinking about most of the contents of the article for a while, there are intermediate political/resource/coordination problems to solve.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Sure, planned burns. The big political problem is this: a planned burn is started. It hops a firebreak and incinerates a retirement home, killing a hundred grandmas. Who's responsible? If you want to have a functional planned burn program, the answer must be: nobody. Everyone shrugs and says oh well, no wrongful death lawsuits are filed, and life insurance companies are prevented from clawing back payouts from the state. But if the state is at fault for property loss or death resulting from planned burns, you will get exactly what we've got right now: no planned burns. I the political will isn't there for California, and I can't really imagine any circumstance where it would be, unless a wildfire someone wipes out all of LA.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Who’s responsible? The fire department obviously will have committed manslaughter. But also clearly the nursing home management has some responsibility here because they failed to evacuate after an evacuation was ordered.
    - vkou 5y ago
      > Who’s responsible? The fire department obviously will have committed manslaughter. Which is why prescribed burns won't happen. Nobody wants the liability.
      - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
        Make them liable for fires in poorly maintained forests and watch the prescribed burns happen very quickly.
        fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        Or no one will sign up
        jdavis703 5y ago
        Who is “them?” The taxpayers? I don’t see anyone who’s not in the WUI going for this.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      > The fire department obviously will have committed manslaughter. This isn't obvious, and it's not the only way to set up policy here. If you have an area with enormous built-up fuel, you could choose to treat it as something that is going to burn at some point instead of trying to set up incentives so that no one sets it off. More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/fire-law-incentives https://www.jefftk.com/p/fire-law-incentives
  - wwweston 5y ago
    Yeah, the way planned burns make people anxious and provoke questions about unintended consequences is a pretty good example of a political problem with implementing something officials have known is generally good policy for a while. That said, there are certainly other areas in which the law has come down on the side of limited-to-no liability for officials acting within certain bounds of reason/propriety in their capacities of office, so it's not exactly unheard of.
  - femto 5y ago
    Here's a case study. The solution was: cover it up. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-bushfire-investigation-the-government-wants-to-stay-secret-20210621-p582tt.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-bushfire-investigati...
jdoliner 5y ago
The frustrating thing about this argument is that you can't even begin to have it because it challenges climate change as the cause of the forest fires. This is completely stupid because climate change just makes it more important that we do prescribed burns for a couple reasons. First it makes the fires more likely, so decreasing the fuel to burn is that much more important. Second, fires themselves create more CO2, much more than prescribed burns.
- AvesMerit 5y ago
  Are we reading the same article? Here's the text from article mentioning climate change # 4. Climate change hasn’t helped. “Increasing heat, changing rain and snow patterns, shifts in plant communities, and other climate-related changes have vastly increased the likelihood that fires will start more often and burn more intensely and widely than they have in the past,”
  - jdoliner 5y ago
    This article does a good job of acknowledging global-warming as a cause. Which I do too. I'm agreeing with it that the best way to respond is to do prescribed burns. They ameliorate the short-term and long-term ill effects of the megafires. Which ultimately contribute more to climate change. The frustrating thing is that no-burns is typically seen as the pro-climate change response, which makes a certain amount of sense because doing a burn puts smoke into the air. It's also naturally controversial because it affects the air quality around where you do the burn. No one wants to have smokey air. With a prescribed burn they blame the government. So it carries a lot of political liability.
Trisell 5y ago
They don’t seem to address the elephant in the room. Environmental groups have sued to stop every single logging plan the USFS has tried to put in place since sometime in the mid 90s. This even includes logging burnt areas where dead trees are left to rot and feed the next fire. Until these organizations are held to task for the conditions they have helped create in the name of the environment, the fires will continue to burn over grown forests that have had all natural and artificial management removed from them.
- eplanit 5y ago
  It's time to re-educate or ignore the elephant, whose policies are what brought us what we have now. It was that elephant who eradicated logging, promoted extinguishing all natural fires, and told us that the best thing is to allow unchecked growth.
- bsder 5y ago
  I'd rather burn the forest than allow logging. Logging always turns into felling the valuable trees (read--old trees that fire leaves alone) and leaving behind the scrub that feeds the fires.
  - billclerico 5y ago
    This used to be true, but really no longer is with modern logging practices and regulation
    - quantified 5y ago
      Given human nature and economic imperatives, I think some skepticism is warranted.
      - robbedpeter 5y ago
        Exactly, so we better do nothing at all and cower behind the maybes as the world literally burns down around us.
bsder 5y ago
Solvable does not imply that anyone is willing to spend the money on the solution. It also does not imply that anyone has the will to make the changes required to solve the problem. "Solving" California fires implies both an outlay of money and the willingness to let some homes in these fire areas burn to the ground permanently. As such, right now, no, California megafires are not solvable.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  The latest budget allocated about a billion extra dollars to this problem. As for if we have the will, time will tell, but I’m pretty sure most Californians are pretty tired of dealing with fires year after year.
  - trav4225 5y ago
    We are tired of it, but we're also too busy blaming the problem on electric utilities and cow farts. ;-)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bumbledraven 5y ago
> … I continue to see eye-popping misinformation in prominent outlets like The New York Times. A widely shared article written by Jill Cowan (“California Fires: Why This Year Is Different”) made no mention of fire suppression as a major contributing factor, and bizarrely and falsely claimed that “burning Redwoods and coniferous forests” was “alarming” (neither Ms. Cowan nor her editors seem to realize that Redwoods cannot reproduce without fire).
- not_kurt_godel 5y ago
  They're probably unaware because it's not true. The source he cited (https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-why-giant-sequoia-needs-fire-grow/ https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-why-giant-sequoia-needs-fir...) is about Giant Sequoias, not Redwoods.
- vsef 5y ago
  Despite liking this article and wanting more burns, that last parenthetical is misleading/incorrect. Giant sequoia need fire to reproduce. Coast redwood, which is more common, taller, and what most mean by just "redwood" very much do not need fire and reproduce mostly by stump sprouting. Which they do an awful lot of (source: live in redwood forest, have to cut sprouts back constantly). Coast redwoods are designed for periodic fire and fire suppression does cause problems, like build up of ladder fuel allowing fires to reach the canopy, but reproduction is not an issue.
astockwell 5y ago
More articles like this please! Very well sourced, clearly stating the major nuances of the issue, and offering numerous actionable suggestions for fixes at multiple levels of individual and societal capacity. And (possibly most importantly) it carries itself with a positive and affirmative tone! I’m Disappointed at how negative the comments and nits here are.
billclerico 5y ago
The liability for prescribed burns is a big issue. If the government agreed to co-insure landowners against escaped burns, it would make prescribed burning significantly easier. But right now, landowners have less liability if they just let fuel accumulate and it burns "accidentally" but dangerously than if they undertake controlled prescribed burning operations to reduce fuel loads (the right answer).
mistrial9 5y ago
Worthy research on this topic include Prof. Scott L. Stephens and Jon E. Keeley, PhD. The California Governors Task Force published a comprehensive document in January 2021 "California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan." The Megafires call to arms here is contemporaneous and parallel to established channels and I say this bodes very well for it. The California fires problem is not a new problem but has become dramatically more threatening. The old guard that led the parade cannot be the ones to rise to this occasion, simply because old generals always fight the last war. This succinct and fact-based presentation deserves our attention and support.
rtkwe 5y ago
I think the liability side of things is maybe one of the largest roadblocks to this. Any time one of these prescribed burns gets out of hand and burns down people houses or god forbid kills someone there's going to be a lot of backlash to these programs. It's the kind of pain as a preventative measure we in the US have been very bad at accepting. I think in addition there's a lot of protection that can by had by ensuring when we do build back we build resilient building that can withstand fires. If there's going to be building in these areas they should be designed and landscaped to not burn down immediately; non-flammable roofs, flammable landscaping set back (I think) 5 feet from the house itself, etc.
- abraae 5y ago
  Liability. Sounds like the same kind of mindset that has resulted in the US having an huge overabundance of C-sections over natural births. Allegedly it's because the doctor can't be sued in the event of something going wrong, as they had done "everything possible" - even when it's not in the best interests of the mother and baby.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    I've read there's maybe other even less defendable factors at play; namely convenience. It's much easier for the whole staff compared to a normal natural labor which can go on an indeterminate amount of time. At least if it's liability you could argue doctors were being excessively cautious, the apparent reasons here are pure convenience for the doctors over patients. https://www.tipsonlifeandlove.com/health-and-wellness/c-sections-a-matter-of-doctors-convenience https://www.tipsonlifeandlove.com/health-and-wellness/c-sect...
    - prawn 5y ago
      Yes, easier to schedule a C-section than deal with natural birth arriving less predictably.
- elihu 5y ago
  Seems like the liability problem could possibly be worked out if you had some entity that pays for the damages either way, and then they have an incentive to do the thing that has probabilistically the least cost. For instance, if the government agency responsible for forest management were to take out a fire damage insurance policy, and the insurance company were free to set different rates depending on how the forest is managed. I think non-flammable buildings are a reasonable suggestion in general, but in a lot of cases the amount of heat involved in a serious forest fire just isn't survivable by any ordinary structure, even if the roof is steel and the walls are made of cinder blocks. Landscaping restrictions might help, but it would have to be a lot more than 5 feet. And I think a lot of people would be justifiably resistant to restrictions such as requiring people to cut down all the large trees within a hundred yards of their house. Trees make the built environment much more pleasant to live in.
elihu 5y ago
Seems like a shame we can't just sequester all that unwanted surplus carbon somehow, but I can't think of a practical way to do it. I suppose you could have some sort of program where the forest service designates areas that need thinning, and then people go out there with their pickup trucks and collect loads of organic matter, and no branches over, say, 6" in diameter. Loads get dropped off at a collection site, and the people are paid per mass. The organic matter either gets turned into products or converted to biochar and buried in a big hole somewhere. That might work, but you'd probably need to pay quite a bit per ton to make it worthwhile to do mostly manually. Maybe there's brush-clearing machinery that could make this economical to do on a massive scale?
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Old fashioned logging can sequester whole forests quite effectively. Would also produce blue collar rural jobs.
  - elihu 5y ago
    True, and in some cases it would be best to remove many of the full-grown trees. However, often times people would rather the large trees remain and just the combustible brush and debris removed (i.e. the organic material that would be removed by a prescribed burn done in ideal conditions). In this case you have plant matter that few people would object to being gone, but it doesn't have enough economic value to be profitable to remove without artificial incentives.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  Controlled burns sequester carbon too, in the form of charcoal/ash. Trying to reduce fuel load by pulling it out and buying it in a hole isn't a good idea, as it ends up removing important nutrients that forests need.
mupuff1234 5y ago
Moonshot idea: Satellite\ballon real time imagery + cannons that fires ammunition filled with a fire-extinguishing chemicals. If we can intercept missiles, why not intercept fires?
- nomel 5y ago
  Because this will result in unnatural, overgrown, forests, and an ecosystem that has never existed before. Fire is such an normal/important part of California forests that this would result in the extermination of all the California native plants that require fire to germinate. https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf
  - mupuff1234 5y ago
    That's a valid point, but you don't necessarily need to use it on the every fire - maybe just in certain conditions?
glangdale 5y ago
In Australia, one of the problems that we face (and we have much more of a culture of "let it burn" and doing controlled burns than CA) is that chaotic weather (almost certainly the result of climate change) has reduced the number of days available for controlled burns. You need pretty calibrated conditions to do safe controlled burns - not too wet, not too dry, and not too windy. Last round of big fires in Australia, the scale of the fires were contributed to by fewer available days in the previous years to do the burning. Plenty of dipshits with axes to grind blamed it on the "Greenies" as per usual, but the people who manage the controlled burns had another story to tell.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Yeah, California desperately needs a plan to thin vegetation in it's forested areas. But it's disappointing people trying to leverage this aspect to "don't worry about global warming" or "see, it's really the environmentalists' fault".
- jartelt 5y ago
  It's similar in California. In the years leading up to the big Santa Cruz mountain fire in 2020, the scientists and forest rangers were aware of the increasing amount of fuel building up in the forest there. They simply weren't able to do the controlled burns they wanted because of a lack of weather windows for controlled burns. That area is also close to silicon valley so there are extra air quality requirements for the burns.
jmspring 5y ago
The article sort of mentions it, but then doesn't fully conclude, the majority of the fires in north eastern CA are on federal land. CA policy, outside of law suits, doesn't impact Federal Landuse policy. Nearly all of the public land of the Camp, Beckwourth, and Dixie fires are BLM or USFS land. California can only do so much there. There needs to be a comprehensive policy of the feds working with state and private interests.
baybal2 5y ago
In Russia, in some regions there were mandatory 500m-1000m firebreaks in between forests, and residential areas. I guess it will be very hard to force people to alienate 500m of their private land in USA. I believe though, it will be a very sensible regulation everywhere with dense, fire prone forests.
maerF0x0 5y ago
> Here are the facts ... California is naturally combustible. One thing that bothers me about many write ups about nature is there often is this fallacy that returning to what was is the most ethical course of action. Why not take more radical action and aim to make California less dry? Projects like Greening the Desert[1], Allan Savory on reversing desertification etc. suggest we could actually just create a non dry tinder California that wouldn't need either controlled burns nor megafires. In short the game is making the land retain far more water and allowing it accumulate until the region is entirely revitalized. [1]: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ [2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertification_and_reverse_climate_change https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...
- richk449 5y ago
  Every time I hear these types of comments, I think that someone read the first Dune book, but not the rest of the series. In this case, it’s a bit too on the nose.
  - maerF0x0 5y ago
    I have been meaning to read those books. I have not read the first one either though. It's just the logic doesn't work out for me. Just because something was doesn't mean something ought. So why is that seemingly always the presumed right path to pursue. Why do we always look to just make nature static to what it was 100s or 1000s of years ago?
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  I don't think you understand the link you're sharing or the article. Undoing desertification restores a pre-existing ecology. All we have in California is a fire-based ecology, there's nothing else to restore. Some part of California are desert but these aren't the parts that are burning, what's burning is poorly managed woodlands that actually need more open space.
- pas 5y ago
  Allan Savory is at best a very stubborn misleading self-deluded crackpot. His ideas simply don't pan out. He shows his fancy power point slides over and over and sells his snakeoil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_critic...
TeeMassive 5y ago
Log the forest near properties. Burn the rest on a regular basis. It's not that hard.
- prawn 5y ago
  Sounds like insurance is one thing that makes it hard.
mnemotronic 5y ago
All the same "You should have done XXX ten or twenty years ago" arguments. We know prescribed burns reduce the intensity of natural fires. For an article entitled "California Megafires are solvable" I wanted to see more "here's how to solve the current problems". And I'm not worried about California being the source of so much of my grown food. I think the central valley aquifer will be unusable within 18 years. I have no proof .... just a hunch.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
Here's a train of thought, leading to an idea to reforest with highly endothermic plants. Am I crazy, or is this a positive action we could do? Hacker News -> Siberia wildfires 28135792 -> comments -> Someone says Arctic lightning tripled in the last decade -> wind and waves cause clouds, cause lightning, cause fires -> Earth struggling against imbalance of air, fire, water -> Need a bigger earth -> go to Mars, or increase efficiency. Forest fire destroys trees -> matter into energy -> too much energy, must capture and turn back into matter -> plant more trees, grow things that can use all this energy -> endothermic reactions -> google "endothermic plants" -> poststar.com -> lotus, water lilies, magnolias, Dutchman's pipes -> Royal Dutch Shell should grow Dutchman's pipes and seashells. As tech people, could we invent something to harness human greed (like finance or Bitcoin) yet use it to create growth and help the environment? More political power in UN correlated with number of trees? If the performance metrics are right, everything is possible. A good community grows from metrics of upvotes/likes/"thank you"s.
daxfohl 5y ago
How about every 100 years let the whole state burn to the ground. That way for 99 of those years you have blue skies, and that 100th year you just summer in France.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  You would end living in the Sahara, but almost nobody lives there for some reason. The amount of population that the place can sustain and feed diminish with each fire.
  - daxfohl 5y ago
    Details, details.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
Skimming through the linked action plan [1], it largely resembles Australia's bushfire management strategy. Unfortunately, what we've seen the past few years here in Australia, is that even prescribed burns and defensible properties aren't enough to stop massively damaging bushfires. [1] https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/media/cjwfpckz/californiawildfireandforestresilienceactionplan.pdf https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/media/cjwfpckz/californiawildfirean...
loopz 5y ago
How much is enough, when is enough enough, what is my purpose for existing, how can I be of service while not being taken advantaged of, and without unreasonable demands? There being an energy imbalance in the world comes from somewhere. It could not have come, at least not so fast, without an imbalance in the human psyche for the last couple of hundred years. This crisis may be of a more spiritual nature than is evident on the surface. There is a need for reckoning, though it needs to start from within.
deleted 5y ago
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pvaldes 5y ago
There is an organized crime component in the recent fires in Europe and US that nobody wants to see or much less deal with it. Is all old history repeated again and again with decens of fires starting mysteriously at the same time and all the typical stuff. Only one of each three wildfires currently active in some parts of Europe are caused by lightning. This means that the majority are caused by man. Either by negligence or are -just- a crime. A boycott. Blaming environmentalists where somebody is serially trying to burn people alive in their own homes, is just the extra laugh and cherry on top of this system. We need better laws, harshest punishment, more resources and more political desire to investigate wildfires. And we need to stop assuming and repeating again and again that fires have a nice side, a good side, and are good management of nature. Period. We are not in the same situation as before. To release purposely much more carbon in the atmosphere when what we need is more time is a suicide.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  "College lecturer charged with starting blaze near Dixie Fire" https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dixie-Fire-Gary-Maynard-arson-Lassen-County-16378399.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dixie-Fire-Gary-Mayna...
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Good job, and interesting also how they traced him remotely.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a-yosemite-watershed/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...
thehappypm 5y ago
Places like Houston, Texas are also in an area of unfavorable nature -- namely huge amounts of flooding. Houston solved this as best they could with levees and dams and the like to steer that water away from people. It usually works. Sometimes not (Harvey), but every failure is a learning experience. California needs to think this way. Fires are natural. We need to focus on steering them away from people. You wouldn't try to stop the rains that create the Texas floods, would you?
camgunz 5y ago
Aren't we also worried about the effects of losing so many trees re: carbon capture? I'm persuaded we need to thin forests in CA, but I think overall we need more trees right?
codyswann 5y ago
I thought this was obvious. Didn't Trump say we just need to rake the ground? /s

169 points by panic 5y ago

See also: https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-management-sierra-nevada https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma... tl;dr: state and federal officials have actually been thinking about most of the contents of the article for a while, there are intermediate political/resource/coordination problems to solve.

sbierwagen 5y ago
Sure, planned burns. The big political problem is this: a planned burn is started. It hops a firebreak and incinerates a retirement home, killing a hundred grandmas. Who's responsible? If you want to have a functional planned burn program, the answer must be: nobody. Everyone shrugs and says oh well, no wrongful death lawsuits are filed, and life insurance companies are prevented from clawing back payouts from the state. But if the state is at fault for property loss or death resulting from planned burns, you will get exactly what we've got right now: no planned burns. I the political will isn't there for California, and I can't really imagine any circumstance where it would be, unless a wildfire someone wipes out all of LA.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Who’s responsible? The fire department obviously will have committed manslaughter. But also clearly the nursing home management has some responsibility here because they failed to evacuate after an evacuation was ordered.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > Who’s responsible? The fire department obviously will have committed manslaughter. Which is why prescribed burns won't happen. Nobody wants the liability.
    - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      Make them liable for fires in poorly maintained forests and watch the prescribed burns happen very quickly.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        Or no one will sign up
      - jdavis703 5y ago
        Who is “them?” The taxpayers? I don’t see anyone who’s not in the WUI going for this.
  - jefftk 5y ago
    > The fire department obviously will have committed manslaughter. This isn't obvious, and it's not the only way to set up policy here. If you have an area with enormous built-up fuel, you could choose to treat it as something that is going to burn at some point instead of trying to set up incentives so that no one sets it off. More: https://www.jefftk.com/p/fire-law-incentives https://www.jefftk.com/p/fire-law-incentives
- wwweston 5y ago
  Yeah, the way planned burns make people anxious and provoke questions about unintended consequences is a pretty good example of a political problem with implementing something officials have known is generally good policy for a while. That said, there are certainly other areas in which the law has come down on the side of limited-to-no liability for officials acting within certain bounds of reason/propriety in their capacities of office, so it's not exactly unheard of.
- femto 5y ago
  Here's a case study. The solution was: cover it up. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-bushfire-investigation-the-government-wants-to-stay-secret-20210621-p582tt.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-bushfire-investigati...

jdoliner 5y ago

The frustrating thing about this argument is that you can't even begin to have it because it challenges climate change as the cause of the forest fires. This is completely stupid because climate change just makes it more important that we do prescribed burns for a couple reasons. First it makes the fires more likely, so decreasing the fuel to burn is that much more important. Second, fires themselves create more CO2, much more than prescribed burns.

AvesMerit 5y ago
Are we reading the same article? Here's the text from article mentioning climate change # 4. Climate change hasn’t helped. “Increasing heat, changing rain and snow patterns, shifts in plant communities, and other climate-related changes have vastly increased the likelihood that fires will start more often and burn more intensely and widely than they have in the past,”
- jdoliner 5y ago
  This article does a good job of acknowledging global-warming as a cause. Which I do too. I'm agreeing with it that the best way to respond is to do prescribed burns. They ameliorate the short-term and long-term ill effects of the megafires. Which ultimately contribute more to climate change. The frustrating thing is that no-burns is typically seen as the pro-climate change response, which makes a certain amount of sense because doing a burn puts smoke into the air. It's also naturally controversial because it affects the air quality around where you do the burn. No one wants to have smokey air. With a prescribed burn they blame the government. So it carries a lot of political liability.

Trisell 5y ago

They don’t seem to address the elephant in the room. Environmental groups have sued to stop every single logging plan the USFS has tried to put in place since sometime in the mid 90s. This even includes logging burnt areas where dead trees are left to rot and feed the next fire. Until these organizations are held to task for the conditions they have helped create in the name of the environment, the fires will continue to burn over grown forests that have had all natural and artificial management removed from them.

eplanit 5y ago
It's time to re-educate or ignore the elephant, whose policies are what brought us what we have now. It was that elephant who eradicated logging, promoted extinguishing all natural fires, and told us that the best thing is to allow unchecked growth.
bsder 5y ago
I'd rather burn the forest than allow logging. Logging always turns into felling the valuable trees (read--old trees that fire leaves alone) and leaving behind the scrub that feeds the fires.
- billclerico 5y ago
  This used to be true, but really no longer is with modern logging practices and regulation
  - quantified 5y ago
    Given human nature and economic imperatives, I think some skepticism is warranted.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      Exactly, so we better do nothing at all and cower behind the maybes as the world literally burns down around us.

bsder 5y ago

Solvable does not imply that anyone is willing to spend the money on the solution. It also does not imply that anyone has the will to make the changes required to solve the problem. "Solving" California fires implies both an outlay of money and the willingness to let some homes in these fire areas burn to the ground permanently. As such, right now, no, California megafires are not solvable.

jdavis703 5y ago
The latest budget allocated about a billion extra dollars to this problem. As for if we have the will, time will tell, but I’m pretty sure most Californians are pretty tired of dealing with fires year after year.
- trav4225 5y ago
  We are tired of it, but we're also too busy blaming the problem on electric utilities and cow farts. ;-)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bumbledraven 5y ago

> … I continue to see eye-popping misinformation in prominent outlets like The New York Times. A widely shared article written by Jill Cowan (“California Fires: Why This Year Is Different”) made no mention of fire suppression as a major contributing factor, and bizarrely and falsely claimed that “burning Redwoods and coniferous forests” was “alarming” (neither Ms. Cowan nor her editors seem to realize that Redwoods cannot reproduce without fire).

not_kurt_godel 5y ago
They're probably unaware because it's not true. The source he cited (https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-why-giant-sequoia-needs-fire-grow/ https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-why-giant-sequoia-needs-fir...) is about Giant Sequoias, not Redwoods.
vsef 5y ago
Despite liking this article and wanting more burns, that last parenthetical is misleading/incorrect. Giant sequoia need fire to reproduce. Coast redwood, which is more common, taller, and what most mean by just "redwood" very much do not need fire and reproduce mostly by stump sprouting. Which they do an awful lot of (source: live in redwood forest, have to cut sprouts back constantly). Coast redwoods are designed for periodic fire and fire suppression does cause problems, like build up of ladder fuel allowing fires to reach the canopy, but reproduction is not an issue.

astockwell 5y ago

More articles like this please! Very well sourced, clearly stating the major nuances of the issue, and offering numerous actionable suggestions for fixes at multiple levels of individual and societal capacity. And (possibly most importantly) it carries itself with a positive and affirmative tone! I’m Disappointed at how negative the comments and nits here are.

billclerico 5y ago

The liability for prescribed burns is a big issue. If the government agreed to co-insure landowners against escaped burns, it would make prescribed burning significantly easier. But right now, landowners have less liability if they just let fuel accumulate and it burns "accidentally" but dangerously than if they undertake controlled prescribed burning operations to reduce fuel loads (the right answer).

mistrial9 5y ago

Worthy research on this topic include Prof. Scott L. Stephens and Jon E. Keeley, PhD. The California Governors Task Force published a comprehensive document in January 2021 "California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan." The Megafires call to arms here is contemporaneous and parallel to established channels and I say this bodes very well for it. The California fires problem is not a new problem but has become dramatically more threatening. The old guard that led the parade cannot be the ones to rise to this occasion, simply because old generals always fight the last war. This succinct and fact-based presentation deserves our attention and support.

rtkwe 5y ago

I think the liability side of things is maybe one of the largest roadblocks to this. Any time one of these prescribed burns gets out of hand and burns down people houses or god forbid kills someone there's going to be a lot of backlash to these programs. It's the kind of pain as a preventative measure we in the US have been very bad at accepting. I think in addition there's a lot of protection that can by had by ensuring when we do build back we build resilient building that can withstand fires. If there's going to be building in these areas they should be designed and landscaped to not burn down immediately; non-flammable roofs, flammable landscaping set back (I think) 5 feet from the house itself, etc.

abraae 5y ago
Liability. Sounds like the same kind of mindset that has resulted in the US having an huge overabundance of C-sections over natural births. Allegedly it's because the doctor can't be sued in the event of something going wrong, as they had done "everything possible" - even when it's not in the best interests of the mother and baby.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  I've read there's maybe other even less defendable factors at play; namely convenience. It's much easier for the whole staff compared to a normal natural labor which can go on an indeterminate amount of time. At least if it's liability you could argue doctors were being excessively cautious, the apparent reasons here are pure convenience for the doctors over patients. https://www.tipsonlifeandlove.com/health-and-wellness/c-sections-a-matter-of-doctors-convenience https://www.tipsonlifeandlove.com/health-and-wellness/c-sect...
  - prawn 5y ago
    Yes, easier to schedule a C-section than deal with natural birth arriving less predictably.
elihu 5y ago
Seems like the liability problem could possibly be worked out if you had some entity that pays for the damages either way, and then they have an incentive to do the thing that has probabilistically the least cost. For instance, if the government agency responsible for forest management were to take out a fire damage insurance policy, and the insurance company were free to set different rates depending on how the forest is managed. I think non-flammable buildings are a reasonable suggestion in general, but in a lot of cases the amount of heat involved in a serious forest fire just isn't survivable by any ordinary structure, even if the roof is steel and the walls are made of cinder blocks. Landscaping restrictions might help, but it would have to be a lot more than 5 feet. And I think a lot of people would be justifiably resistant to restrictions such as requiring people to cut down all the large trees within a hundred yards of their house. Trees make the built environment much more pleasant to live in.

elihu 5y ago

Seems like a shame we can't just sequester all that unwanted surplus carbon somehow, but I can't think of a practical way to do it. I suppose you could have some sort of program where the forest service designates areas that need thinning, and then people go out there with their pickup trucks and collect loads of organic matter, and no branches over, say, 6" in diameter. Loads get dropped off at a collection site, and the people are paid per mass. The organic matter either gets turned into products or converted to biochar and buried in a big hole somewhere. That might work, but you'd probably need to pay quite a bit per ton to make it worthwhile to do mostly manually. Maybe there's brush-clearing machinery that could make this economical to do on a massive scale?

BurningFrog 5y ago
Old fashioned logging can sequester whole forests quite effectively. Would also produce blue collar rural jobs.
- elihu 5y ago
  True, and in some cases it would be best to remove many of the full-grown trees. However, often times people would rather the large trees remain and just the combustible brush and debris removed (i.e. the organic material that would be removed by a prescribed burn done in ideal conditions). In this case you have plant matter that few people would object to being gone, but it doesn't have enough economic value to be profitable to remove without artificial incentives.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
Controlled burns sequester carbon too, in the form of charcoal/ash. Trying to reduce fuel load by pulling it out and buying it in a hole isn't a good idea, as it ends up removing important nutrients that forests need.

mupuff1234 5y ago

Moonshot idea: Satellite\ballon real time imagery + cannons that fires ammunition filled with a fire-extinguishing chemicals. If we can intercept missiles, why not intercept fires?

nomel 5y ago
Because this will result in unnatural, overgrown, forests, and an ecosystem that has never existed before. Fire is such an normal/important part of California forests that this would result in the extermination of all the California native plants that require fire to germinate. https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/8657/live_w_fire.pdf
- mupuff1234 5y ago
  That's a valid point, but you don't necessarily need to use it on the every fire - maybe just in certain conditions?

glangdale 5y ago

In Australia, one of the problems that we face (and we have much more of a culture of "let it burn" and doing controlled burns than CA) is that chaotic weather (almost certainly the result of climate change) has reduced the number of days available for controlled burns. You need pretty calibrated conditions to do safe controlled burns - not too wet, not too dry, and not too windy. Last round of big fires in Australia, the scale of the fires were contributed to by fewer available days in the previous years to do the burning. Plenty of dipshits with axes to grind blamed it on the "Greenies" as per usual, but the people who manage the controlled burns had another story to tell.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Yeah, California desperately needs a plan to thin vegetation in it's forested areas. But it's disappointing people trying to leverage this aspect to "don't worry about global warming" or "see, it's really the environmentalists' fault".
jartelt 5y ago
It's similar in California. In the years leading up to the big Santa Cruz mountain fire in 2020, the scientists and forest rangers were aware of the increasing amount of fuel building up in the forest there. They simply weren't able to do the controlled burns they wanted because of a lack of weather windows for controlled burns. That area is also close to silicon valley so there are extra air quality requirements for the burns.

jmspring 5y ago

The article sort of mentions it, but then doesn't fully conclude, the majority of the fires in north eastern CA are on federal land. CA policy, outside of law suits, doesn't impact Federal Landuse policy. Nearly all of the public land of the Camp, Beckwourth, and Dixie fires are BLM or USFS land. California can only do so much there. There needs to be a comprehensive policy of the feds working with state and private interests.

baybal2 5y ago

In Russia, in some regions there were mandatory 500m-1000m firebreaks in between forests, and residential areas. I guess it will be very hard to force people to alienate 500m of their private land in USA. I believe though, it will be a very sensible regulation everywhere with dense, fire prone forests.

maerF0x0 5y ago

> Here are the facts ... California is naturally combustible. One thing that bothers me about many write ups about nature is there often is this fallacy that returning to what was is the most ethical course of action. Why not take more radical action and aim to make California less dry? Projects like Greening the Desert[1], Allan Savory on reversing desertification etc. suggest we could actually just create a non dry tinder California that wouldn't need either controlled burns nor megafires. In short the game is making the land retain far more water and allowing it accumulate until the region is entirely revitalized. [1]: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ [2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertification_and_reverse_climate_change https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...

richk449 5y ago
Every time I hear these types of comments, I think that someone read the first Dune book, but not the rest of the series. In this case, it’s a bit too on the nose.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  I have been meaning to read those books. I have not read the first one either though. It's just the logic doesn't work out for me. Just because something was doesn't mean something ought. So why is that seemingly always the presumed right path to pursue. Why do we always look to just make nature static to what it was 100s or 1000s of years ago?
joe_the_user 5y ago
I don't think you understand the link you're sharing or the article. Undoing desertification restores a pre-existing ecology. All we have in California is a fire-based ecology, there's nothing else to restore. Some part of California are desert but these aren't the parts that are burning, what's burning is poorly managed woodlands that actually need more open space.
pas 5y ago
Allan Savory is at best a very stubborn misleading self-deluded crackpot. His ideas simply don't pan out. He shows his fancy power point slides over and over and sells his snakeoil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_critic...

TeeMassive 5y ago

Log the forest near properties. Burn the rest on a regular basis. It's not that hard.

prawn 5y ago
Sounds like insurance is one thing that makes it hard.

mnemotronic 5y ago

All the same "You should have done XXX ten or twenty years ago" arguments. We know prescribed burns reduce the intensity of natural fires. For an article entitled "California Megafires are solvable" I wanted to see more "here's how to solve the current problems". And I'm not worried about California being the source of so much of my grown food. I think the central valley aquifer will be unusable within 18 years. I have no proof .... just a hunch.

peterburkimsher 5y ago

Here's a train of thought, leading to an idea to reforest with highly endothermic plants. Am I crazy, or is this a positive action we could do? Hacker News -> Siberia wildfires 28135792 -> comments -> Someone says Arctic lightning tripled in the last decade -> wind and waves cause clouds, cause lightning, cause fires -> Earth struggling against imbalance of air, fire, water -> Need a bigger earth -> go to Mars, or increase efficiency. Forest fire destroys trees -> matter into energy -> too much energy, must capture and turn back into matter -> plant more trees, grow things that can use all this energy -> endothermic reactions -> google "endothermic plants" -> poststar.com -> lotus, water lilies, magnolias, Dutchman's pipes -> Royal Dutch Shell should grow Dutchman's pipes and seashells. As tech people, could we invent something to harness human greed (like finance or Bitcoin) yet use it to create growth and help the environment? More political power in UN correlated with number of trees? If the performance metrics are right, everything is possible. A good community grows from metrics of upvotes/likes/"thank you"s.

daxfohl 5y ago

How about every 100 years let the whole state burn to the ground. That way for 99 of those years you have blue skies, and that 100th year you just summer in France.

pvaldes 5y ago
You would end living in the Sahara, but almost nobody lives there for some reason. The amount of population that the place can sustain and feed diminish with each fire.
- daxfohl 5y ago
  Details, details.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

Skimming through the linked action plan [1], it largely resembles Australia's bushfire management strategy. Unfortunately, what we've seen the past few years here in Australia, is that even prescribed burns and defensible properties aren't enough to stop massively damaging bushfires. [1] https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/media/cjwfpckz/californiawildfireandforestresilienceactionplan.pdf https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/media/cjwfpckz/californiawildfirean...

loopz 5y ago

How much is enough, when is enough enough, what is my purpose for existing, how can I be of service while not being taken advantaged of, and without unreasonable demands? There being an energy imbalance in the world comes from somewhere. It could not have come, at least not so fast, without an imbalance in the human psyche for the last couple of hundred years. This crisis may be of a more spiritual nature than is evident on the surface. There is a need for reckoning, though it needs to start from within.

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pvaldes 5y ago

There is an organized crime component in the recent fires in Europe and US that nobody wants to see or much less deal with it. Is all old history repeated again and again with decens of fires starting mysteriously at the same time and all the typical stuff. Only one of each three wildfires currently active in some parts of Europe are caused by lightning. This means that the majority are caused by man. Either by negligence or are -just- a crime. A boycott. Blaming environmentalists where somebody is serially trying to burn people alive in their own homes, is just the extra laugh and cherry on top of this system. We need better laws, harshest punishment, more resources and more political desire to investigate wildfires. And we need to stop assuming and repeating again and again that fires have a nice side, a good side, and are good management of nature. Period. We are not in the same situation as before. To release purposely much more carbon in the atmosphere when what we need is more time is a suicide.

h2odragon 5y ago
"College lecturer charged with starting blaze near Dixie Fire" https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dixie-Fire-Gary-Maynard-arson-Lassen-County-16378399.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dixie-Fire-Gary-Mayna...
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Good job, and interesting also how they traced him remotely.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a-yosemite-watershed/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...

thehappypm 5y ago

Places like Houston, Texas are also in an area of unfavorable nature -- namely huge amounts of flooding. Houston solved this as best they could with levees and dams and the like to steer that water away from people. It usually works. Sometimes not (Harvey), but every failure is a learning experience. California needs to think this way. Fires are natural. We need to focus on steering them away from people. You wouldn't try to stop the rains that create the Texas floods, would you?

camgunz 5y ago

Aren't we also worried about the effects of losing so many trees re: carbon capture? I'm persuaded we need to thin forests in CA, but I think overall we need more trees right?

codyswann 5y ago

I thought this was obvious. Didn't Trump say we just need to rake the ground? /s