Only you can prevent a forest fire

I live in Oregon.
We recently suffered a great wild fire outbreak in the beautiful Columbia River Gorge.
This was reportedly started by a kid or group of kids, dropping fireworks into the dry undergrowth.
It was an ignorant action of unthinking youth. But the damage that resulted was catastrophic.

While I have read articles debating how to best handle forest management, today and tomorrow, I don't think I have ever read about either a funded or voluntary effort to encourage the raking of forest undergrowth.

Interesting to see Finlands direct efforts to manage their forest through "grass roots" involvement of their own citizenry.

 

yeti?

 

Sounds like just the job for a dedicated crew of florist friars.

 

Historically damaging fires in upper midwest from about 1860 to 1910. Extensive logging with harvest piles left for long times, and slash piles left indefinitely. Also wooden structures were built with no regard to limiting vertical spread of flames. Such engineering came later.

Do those things, and when a dry summer comes (sooner or later), thermodynamics will do what it does.

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Forest-fuel management is not trivial. Local knowledge informs local policies, that may or may not get carried out. One certain thing is that no forest can be made 'fireproof' - it will have a fire-return interval that is longer or shorter.

Finland forests have return intervals of hundreds of years. Wetter tropical forests, maybe a thousand. "Mediterranean" forests (including much of US west) decades, some places stretching to ~200 years. I cannot cite a large-scale study of how fire suppression has altered return intervals, but such may exist.

We probably want longer return intervals in general. How to achieve them will vary among places. Almost certainly at the urban/wildland interface, it will include grass and brush raking. Whether or not Rakki actually exists in Finland.

 

or just move them out, instead of complaining every time there is a tragedy

 

Forced relocations in US flood plains have not been popular nor highly successful. Hard to imagine they'd play better at forest interfaces.

Countries with stronger central control can pull things like that off.

 

agreed. raking the forests or walling off the ocean isn't working too well either. i guess we'll have to settle on complaining.

 

It seems that would also force a major change to the natural forest ecosystem. Such changes often come with undesirable side effects.

I had understood that numerous Western forests had a much shorter fire return interval, often just a few decades, for low intensity fires that 'cleaned up' the floor frequently without reaching up much into the crown. Suppression efforts leading to longer intervals caused larger amounts of fuel to build up, so that when fires did arrive, that were much more likely to flare up into very destructive crown fires. From this viewpoint, shorter return intervals with lower intensity fires were more desirable from a common human viewpoint.

But this pattern doesn't apply to all Western forests, such as those that can't maintain low intensity floor fires that avoid crowning.

The interface will likely have to be managed different than the core forests. Raking, aggressive pruning, and carefully selected bedding species at the interface, etc., gradually transitioning to a lesser- or un-managed core.

 

Forced relocation isn't needed. Just stop offering insurance in places where this will happen.
If you want to live with that risk, so be it, but the government isn't going to subsidize it.

 

First point made in #9 is accurate. It further shows that fire return intervals are inadequate metrics where they exclude intensity.

Satellites now observe CO2 concentrations with high spatial resolution. Fire emissions of CO2 seems a reasonable measure of intensity. Obscuration by smoke or far-IR emission from hot spots may make that a poor idea. But I'm just putting it out there.

Perhaps we can agree that forest management is underfunded. Possibly that it's under-informed by ground truth. Probably, that (wood) production forests, unmanaged forests, and interface forests need different managements.

Then it gets harder because climates may change. But forested lands respond both to short-term rain excess (by growing small fuels) and drought (by drying those fuels) and longer-term drought by losing defenses against kill-beetles.

I find it all very complicated. Personal desire for most forests to have more dead wood (because it is uniquely valuable for biodiversity) makes me rather unfit to run this show.

 

Fire insurance seems complicated already:

As California burns, here's what you need to know about fire insurance - Los Angeles Times

 

This seems to be 'fire insurance safety net' in California:

California FAIR Plan Association

Not to assail @Zythryn, but one would have to take the matter up with them.

As I understand it is not government subsidized, but 'other insurance policyholders' subsidized. Flood plain insurance has govt finger in the pie. Thumb on the scale. Whatever.

 

Excellent point!
I should have been more clear. I was focusing on insurance, such as the federal flood insurance program. That program is loosing lots of money as people get flooded, then rebuild in the same spot and get flooded again.

Some buyout programs have worked rather well and hopefully will expand.
If insurance companies won’t cover housing in a particular area, there may be a very good reason.

 

What's the deal with those dainty lawn rakes? Isn't it obvious that forest workers use sturdy rakes such as the following?:
USFS fire rake McLeod - Google Search
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In my personal experience, I found it quite simple.

In my youth, I spent several summer vacations doing preventative erosion control and preventative fire control in forests of the western US, in sensitive areas near major roads, campgrounds, and settlements. We piled slash and dug and raked fire lines.

It was funded by the companies who thinned out the trees and maintained fire roads in the contracted parcels. The USFS specified the amount of thinning and fire control measures required, the contractor paid the government for the timber removed, and we were paid by the contractor after the USFS ranger approved our work.

 

Forested federal lands in CA will be more extensively logged, by Executive Order:

White House Orders Up More Logging To Combat Wildfires | HuffPost

I urge readers not to think of this by way of its 'Huffy' source. Rather that there is a policy shift to take more wood out. Sell that wood, one would suppose. Reduce fire risks, as might be demonstrable later.

In eyes of very few, to make smaller this dead-wood ecological niche, which is not valued by US forestry. Which is also not much of a niche in ~1% of CA forest area that burns each year currently.

2017 wood extraction was 3.2 billion board feet and this will be increased to 4.4. This is a Home Depot/Builders Emporium view of wood. Another view is 2.9 million tons of carbon vs. 2.1 previously. Helpful perhaps in thinking about global carbon cycling.

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Wood taken enters carbon pools with 20 to 200-year turnover times. Wood left in forests turns over faster, especially in forests with short fire-return times.

 

How much of this is fire prevention, vs a national security issue of being so dependent on lumber imports from our dangerous archrival: Canada!