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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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Aug 20, 2018 - 11:16am PT
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Mchale, I was fireman for 30 years, I am not saying climate change doesn't have something to do with it but at least in the west poor tactics is a big player. We in the fire service have known it for years and knew that we were going to end up paying a very high price for it. Just because I am saying we have managed our firefighting tactics poorly for that last 100 years doesn't make me a climate denier.
McHale, don't forget the fire triangle, heat, fuel and O2. Increased heat due to climate change, massive increase in fuel load due squashing every fire as soon as it starts. We are getting fires year round now due to dry fuels and increased fuel load but heat isn't always part of the deal in mid winter fires.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
Wilds of New Mexico
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Aug 20, 2018 - 11:27am PT
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I think some sort of unified agency makes sense. I'd argue for a mix of aircraft, I don't think it's realistic or necessary to use huge jets on many fires. I don't know if there is a pilot shortage, though it is definitely a different type of person than those that fly airliners!
Arizona (I think it is a P3):
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 11:51am PT
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Just because I am saying we have managed our firefighting tactics poorly for that last 100 years doesn't make me a climate denier.
Don't feel too badly about f*#king up the fire-fighting. This is about climate change. I'll let you off the hook. Humans are having such a profound effect on the climate through the burning of CO2 that we don't really need to discuss poor forest management. THAT is just a distraction. We are f*#ked two ways to Sunday because of the larger picture. This has been barreling down on us for awhile now - lots of warnings. We have been warned about climate change. Forest management is part of the little picture and it's just too late anyway to do much about that. The forests really can't be saved now - they will be a changin.
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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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Aug 20, 2018 - 12:01pm PT
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Mchale, I was just a soldier in the fight. I retired out of the fire station at the mouth of Big Tujunga on Wentworth just a year ago. We had been asking our department for years to let stuff burn if safe to do so and they shot it down. We in the field started a unwritten policy of letting stuff burn as much as possible before the chiefs arrived and started yelling at us. We knew if we didn't let stuff burn it would be that much worse the next season. The Vedugo Hills fire is a prime example, the La Tuna side hadn't burned good in recent memory and we all knew that if it ever took off there would be no stopping it and thats exactly what happened. Thankfully the La tuna Fire wasn't a wind driven fire or we would have lost a thousand homes on the La Tuna side and the Burbank side.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 12:14pm PT
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The big fight now is Climate Change. Thinning the forests and forest management, as important as they are, take a back seat to the larger f*#k up…..that we are being told to not pay attention to. It would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 12:19pm PT
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Back seat is still in the car. I'm with Reilly, the fires need to be put out. They are just a feedback making climate change even worse. There are almost too many to do anything about. We don't have the resources, anymore than we have the will to do anything about climate change, or even accept its existence.
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i'm gumby dammit
Sport climber
da ow
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Aug 20, 2018 - 12:34pm PT
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The argument that the fires exist because of a 'forest management' problem is just a buyin to climate change denial. Sure, there is poor management in places, but climate change is what is drying things out. This is simply not true. Climate change probably is making things a tad bit dryer, and the fire season a tiny bit longer. But the far, far bigger problem as it relates to fires is overgrowth.
Here's an example. The numbers are made up but it should make it easy to see.
Climate change = 1 degree hotter and 5% less water for the trees.
Overgrowth = twice as many trees equals 100% increase in water required
Overgrowth = dead trees littering the understory
Overgrowth = susceptibility to disease and infestation
Overgrowth = Ladder fuels everywhere
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 12:37pm PT
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This might be an interesting side-note. A few years back I was interested in the Mountain Man/Fur Trapper era of history, generally 1820-1880. I probably read about two dozen books in a couple of years. I can't specifically quote the references but I can remember at least five different times reading about how puzzled the white trappers and explorers were that the native peoples started fires wherever they went. It added to their puzzlement of the cultures they interacted with. What were they thinking? Very few whites understood why. In hindsight it seems the fires helped what we now consider healthy forests. In reality their motives were not ecological but rather economical in the simplest terms. It made it easier to hunt and bison prefer grassland to forests. The fires could and would get real big sometimes and the descriptions of the smokiness reminds me what I have been experiencing as of late.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 12:43pm PT
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There are so many people burning fossil fuels now that we need to manage that. That's where the real unseen fire is. IT is enormous, and it is having a profound effect. The other fires are just a trickle down from that. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't get the show on the road and take better care of forests - but the real fight will be saving the atmosphere so that it works for humans.
As far as putting out forest fires to quell the feedback loop I mentioned earlier - that may be a bit silly. The larger picture of fossil fuel burning is so exponentially larger. I maintain that the fire problem is a symptom of the much larger fossil fuel fire, and to not mention climate change while discussing forest management is silly.
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Cragar
climber
MSLA - MT
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Aug 20, 2018 - 01:19pm PT
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It is funny how we humans make judgements on systems we can barely understand a fraction of and to make it worse, apply our feelings/perceptions to the system. A tenth of a degree to a forest ecosystem might equal 10 degrees in the human system. People are easily fooled via their own feelings and understanding about themselves. A reason the scientific method is so valuable, almost as valuable as humility.
Knowing it all is the classic inverse reality of humanity in the internet/EGO time that we live in.
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Aug 20, 2018 - 04:40pm PT
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There are so many people burning fossil fuels now that we need to manage that. That's where the real unseen fire is. IT is enormous, and it is having a profound effect. The other fires are just a trickle down from that. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't get the show on the road and take better care of forests - but the real fight will be saving the atmosphere so that it works for humans.
As far as putting out forest fires to quell the feedback loop I mentioned earlier - that may be a bit silly. The larger picture of fossil fuel burning is so exponentially larger. I maintain that the fire problem is a symptom of the much larger fossil fuel fire, and to not mention climate change while discussing forest management is silly.
The world faces a lot of problems/challenges.
I agree that climate change is a much bigger issue than forest management.
But Cal fire isn't going to solve climate change. And even if, in the unlikely event, fairly radical action was taken on climate change, there is a lot of climate change already baked in.
As far as keeping CA homes from burning down, California needs to take a hard look at forest management, along with building codes and maybe even where homes are allowed to be built.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Aug 20, 2018 - 04:51pm PT
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True^^^^^^ :>)
I didn't mean to say that solving climate change will put out the fires. I'm mostly tired of the two not getting linked, or when they are linked, climate change gets minimized and forest management gets most the blame. Republican finger prints are all over that. Poor forest management to a Republican is nothing but a scapegoat to not recognize climate change. Republicans won't lift a finger to do anything about forest management. They just want their talking points....yes, the same Republicans that want to keep California from determining its own level of fossil fuel emissions, CAFE standards, that at least 12 other states were going to follow.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Aug 25, 2018 - 08:37am PT
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So ya thought rattlers, ticks, and widow-makers make firefighting tough? Think again - in a forest near Berlin German firefighters are facing WWII ordnance that is being set off by the fire! 😳
Page 2: Rain is expected today over much of British Columbia!
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hooblie
climber
from out where the anecdotes roam
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Aug 26, 2018 - 04:06pm PT
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a conflagration by any other name ...
i laid eyes on my 98 year old great grandma, born in pennsylvania before the first oil well.
i don't care if you want to push the date of peak oil down the road a decade or two or twenty,
the newborns i'll lay eyes upon will, in rough terms, witness the tapered end of the petroleum era.
the idea that i might have laid eyes on every generation to participate in the so called "petroleum era,"
when considered relative to the scope of geologic time, brings to mind the flash of white phosphorus
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looks easy from here
climber
Ben Lomond, CA
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Aug 27, 2018 - 10:09am PT
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I flew from San Jose to Vancouver last week, and the entire flight both directions (a week apart) was over a nearly impenetrable blanket of smoke. In 800+ miles only Baker, Rainier, Adams and Hood poked through (and I assume Shasta probably did, too, but it was on the wrong side).
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labrat
Trad climber
Erik O. Auburn, CA
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Thanks for the heads up. I was planning on heading up I5 on Sunday. Maybe I'll have to take a different route... Hwy 139 probably
Hope people stay safe up there!
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Cali
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Also be aware of the Boot fire that has closed 395 between Bridgeport and Topaz Lake. It is already ay 4,600 acres with 0 containment.
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nita
Social climber
chica de chico, I don't claim to be a daisy.
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Very dark and foreboding all morning...The fire is well over 1000 acres, some reports say 5000 acres now. Have also heard a report that there are possibly two fires, the big one in the feather canyon in Pulga and another fire on Concow rim rd...?
None of my picture came out this morning ..My friend took this photo from her neighborhood in Chico... Picture taken 25 minutes ago.
)-;
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TLP
climber
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A couple months ago, hooblie wrote
the idea that i might have laid eyes on every generation to participate in the so called "petroleum era,"
when considered relative to the scope of geologic time, brings to mind the flash of white phosphorus So true! and it is mind-boggling. If it were in the fossil record, the abruptness and scale of the change in the Earth's ecosystems from burning all that fuel would look exactly like some humongous scale volcanic cataclysm, or another really big asteroid impact. Yikes.
More imminently, for a lot of the central and southern Sierra west side, it's not worth spending any money at all on "forest management" whatever that would be (usually means, carry on logging as before but with a requirement to pile some of the slash so it can be burned later at someone else's expense, maybe leave a few scattered trees). The climate ship has totally left the dock for that big area: it will not be forest at all in a few decades, instead it will be a shrub-dominated landscape. The amount of dead trees is astonishing, and there's not much conifer or oak regeneration happening in a lot of the area. Some, just not much. Some oak regeneration at lower elevations, but it will be consumed in the next fire to come along. Conifer forest can persist with an open understory and withstand frequent (10-30 yr) ground fires, but oak woodland doesn't. It just burns up.
There's some possibility of managing fuels in the forests further north and someday tweaking them back to the frequent-ground-fire model, but unless there's a universal acceptance of having lots of fires throughout the forested Sierra, all the time, every year, things won't get any better at all. Widespread human-caused fire has been the rule throughout the Sierra from the very beginning, some 10,000 years ago. There is no pristine pre-human condition - the entire place was inhabited by arsonist illegal immigrants right away.
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