
We Know How to Prevent Megafires - philips
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen/
======
jefftk
It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent
problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on
their own:

 _Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all
environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits
the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events.
In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air
resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed
fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told
me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up
to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much
smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too
many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017
and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB /prescribed fire
rules, but we still have a long way to go._

 _“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed
burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said
Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico
and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate
change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan
ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational
plan to live with smoke._

~~~
murgindrag
One more odd thing is how fast we forget. There were no articles after-the-
fact even indicating the fire was over, or how things were going. I searched
major web sites like NY Times. Things were burning like crazy, and then
reporting stopped.

Is it over? Is it contained? Are San Francisco, Mountain View, and Stanford
just gone? Reading the newspapers, you just don't know.

I'd like to have a retrospective. How much damage was there? What's gone?
What's still there? Etc.

~~~
brudgers
CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco
and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon
Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute
fire response times throughout.

~~~
murgindrag
Five minute fire response times presume that there isn't a million acre fire
saturating all fire departments. If CZU were rapidly spreading and hit the
side of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose all at once, I think we'd have
multiday response times. Fortunately, it wasn't.

Was it possible for it to spread like that? I don't know. During COVID19, we
had a constant series of claims, repeated by politicians and public health
officials, which had no basis in fact. Post-COVID19, I just don't believe
claims like these anymore without a citation. Most were wishful thinking.

~~~
mc32
If the CZU fire had jumped jurisdictions (HWY 35?) it would have turned worse
because the Evergreen fire had sucked all those resources already.

The governator really needs to return firefighting resources back to normal.
There has been a significant drawdown of resources in Cal as other states
boost their capabilities but the governator has not countered that and now
resources are thin in CA.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
We also need to pass AB 2147: [https://www.firehouse.com/operations-
training/wildland/news/...](https://www.firehouse.com/operations-
training/wildland/news/21147461/ca-bill-could-help-inmate-firefighters-find-
future-in-fire-service)

------
jeffbee
There's a couple of misleading statements in here. It's true that CDF
firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true that every other fire
department pays better. They'd all take a position in a city fire department
if they were after more money.

The other misleading thing is associating these current fires with bad forest
management practices. It's true for Sierra Nevada forests generally, but
that's not where these fires are. The Big Basin area near Santa Cruz isn't
supposed to regularly burn. Historically it goes through intense fires rarely.
"Preventing megafires" isn't what that coastal redwood forest wants. The other
big fire in the San Antonio Valley and Del Puerto Canyon is virtually all
privately-held land. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to
require a prescribed burn through private lands, like you might do in a
national forest or BLM holding.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It's true that CDF firefighters make a decent living, but it's also true
> that every other fire department pays better.

Except CDCR, which pays notably worse, but that's not really competing for
firefighters.

> There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for the state to require a prescribed
> burn through private lands, like you might do in a national forest or BLM
> holding.

There's not mechanism for the _state_ to require a prescribed burn on national
forest or BLM land, either (both of which are federally managed.)

~~~
samcheng
To save some people a search:

CDF = California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as
"CALFIRE"

CDCR = California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which in this
context supplies convict labor to fight fires.

One issue this year is that the California State Prisons are all horrifically
overrun with COVID-19, thereby incapacitating what had previously been a
critical firefighting function.

The situation (mass incarceration, crowded conditions, negligent and/or
derisive healthcare for inmates, climate change, lack of prescribed burns, and
now inadequate resources to fight large fires) is really quite depressing to
untangle.

~~~
mschuster91
Ideally, the state should not require (it is what it is) slave labor to
fulfill basic needs of society. Yes I know in theory it is voluntary and
everything, but it is wage dumping using forced labor - because without said
slave labor the state would have to pay _a lot_ more for a real standing
force.

As with most cost cutting measures, eventually the chickens _will_ come home
to roost, and there has been quite a horde of chickens that came home over the
last months, across the world.

------
philips
My big takeaway from the article is it will require a big culture shift in the
general public, two quotes:

> “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra
> Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and
> thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then
> they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural
> emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they
> don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to
> some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long
> way to go.

> She’d like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the
> Southeast where, she said, “Your average person goes out back with Grandpa,
> and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday.” Fire is not
> just for professionals, not just for government employees and their
> contractors.

~~~
perl4ever
I don't understand how a private individual would deal with the liability.

~~~
dmurray
Here in Ireland farmers regularly burn fields and occasionally the fire gets
out of control and destroys an entire mountainside. A couple of years ago one
came within 100m of my parents' house - one more change of wind direction and
they would have lost everything.

No one ever seems to get criminally or civilly prosecuted for starting the
fires. Often everyone knows who did it but there's no irrefutable evidence and
the police aren't interested - perhaps as a policy because it's understood
that some controlled burns are useful. California's police could equally well
be told to "focus on other priorities" instead of investigating fire starters.

~~~
rectang
California law enforcement could choose to look the other way, but it's a
statistical certainty that if there's money to be made through civil suits,
there will be plenty of litigation. How do you get around that?

~~~
dmurray
The police are important in civil suits too. Arguably their main function in a
civilised society is that you can call them when you get in a car accident and
they'll write up an official report for the insurance company. If they don't
spend their time writing detailed reports on the causes of fires, that at
least pushes the balance of power away from the plaintiff.

I don't know if this is realistic. But we have a pretty litigious society
these days in Ireland too - behind the US, but ahead of almost everywhere else
- and I can't find any evidence of a successful civil suit for starting a
wildfire. I did find this which says there are practically no criminal cases:

[https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-
legislation-4606...](https://www.thejournal.ie/wildfires-donegal-
legislation-4606187-Apr2019/)

------
softwaredoug
What's interesting is when colonists came to North America, they often
described forests of trees that felt like great rooms or halls, teaming with
wildlife and human-edible plants. But this itself was not a primordial state,
but a heavily managed environment, intended to create favorable environment
for flora/fauna through slash & burn forest management. Basically, burning out
the undergrowth and allowing human selected plants to flourish. Much of the
current problem is an excess of undergrowth, so you would think we could
somehow recreate this kind of management for everyone's benefit...

~~~
njarboe
Yes that would be cool. Unfortunately almost all of the old growth forest in
the US was cut down and new trees of the size of old will take hundreds of
years to grow. Many of the wilderness areas set aside in the 1970 had old
growth forests and some are being managed in this way.

The rest of the west forest service land is managed in an inconsistant way
that changes somewhat with each administration. I think it would be really
cool if somehow the US Public Forests and BLM lands were spit up into three
sections. Some land sold off to allow towns and cities in the west to expand,
as many people would like to live there and it is very expensive in many
places now. Also sell off the land that we want used for timber production.
Then some held public and managed for recreation by humans with roads and
vehicles, and finally a large expansion of wilderness areas with the idea of
connecting large ecosystems and managing them for high biodiversity.

~~~
jeffbee
Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS
lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the
decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of
tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.

~~~
njarboe
You don't need to, as you point out that is the current case, but I think that
private ownership would do a better job of extracting economic value from land
that we want to put to economic use. Motorized recreational forest and timber
production could work well together, but I have not seen that. In some places
selective cutting is done, but usually the biggest trees are felled. It would
be much better, I think, if parts of the public forest were cut to leave the
largest trees to become the beautiful and awe inspiring ones people like to be
around. I don't have a deep knowledge of how the forest service does timber
sales (and I'm sure it varies depending on local political and economic
conditions). It would be interesting to read up on how it works in detail.

~~~
landryraccoon
I’m curious, why wouldn’t a private owner just clear cut all of the land for
maximum value? Private land owners choose short term windfall over long term
sustainability all the time. I don’t see why private owners would preserve old
growth forests if the lumber is more financially profitable when cut down and
sold.

~~~
njarboe
Yes, private ownership would lead to tree farms which might find that clear
cutting is the best way to maximize output. With regulations on soil runoff, I
don't see that as a problem.

My proposal was one that might have a chance of being implemented, thus the
reason for private sale of part of the public forest land. It would be
impossible politically to get a 1/3 transfer of Forest Service land into
wilderness designation and steep reduction of lumber sales on the rest.
Allowing the sale of some areas to open up space for towns and cities and some
for high output tree farms seems like a reasonable compromise to me that might
be possible and I think a better situation that the current one.

You would not transfer any old growth to private hands. There is almost none
left outside national parks and wilderness areas (Edit: excluding Alaska), in
any case.

~~~
gamblor956
_Yes, private ownership would lead to tree farms which might find that clear
cutting is the best way to maximize output. With regulations on soil runoff, I
don 't see that as a problem._

Private ownership _could_ lead to tree farms. It could also just as easily
lead to private owners clear-cutting the forest without replacement planting,
if the ultimate value of the lumber isn't worth the cost of running a tree
farm.

------
opportune
In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many
of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under
human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house
in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by
thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many
fires be an emergency (requiring lots of spending, making it untenable for
them to run their course, costing a lot of money to address) because some
people decided to build a community in the middle of a forest that naturally
would tend to burn down every few decades

~~~
ip26
The situation would probably be a lot better if the human habitation in those
areas was built with resisting forest fire as a primary design criteria. If
they were built with fire as a fact of life, fire could be allowed to
regularly sweep through & clear the fuel load.

~~~
egypturnash
Seriously, it’s not like CA doesn’t already have codes that make stuff quake-
ready. I live in a flood plain and huge amounts of stuff is built up off the
ground enough for a few feet of water to not be a problem, though sadly this
is not actually enshrined in codes AFAIK.

------
cletus
I didn't see it mentioned but this came up in an interview with a state head
of firefightting in Australia after the most recent bushfires: he said that a
big problem is there's less time of the year you can actually do controlled
burns because of the warming climate.

So a warming climate is not only making the risk of fires starting higher but
it's also shrinking the mitigation window.

------
fhub
Certainly in large parts of Australia, the window to do controlled burns is
shrinking due to climate change. Threading the needle on {not windy, not damp,
not tinder box} is, on average, getting smaller each year. This checker box
theory relies on that time window being bigger than it is in practice.

------
svrb
Though it may not seem like it at first, the problem is ideological. Somewhere
along the line CA's left/progressive ideology picked up a deeply ironic tenet
that the world must remain absolutely unchanged by human habitation; that
whatever the state of nature was on some arbitrary day in the past, we have a
moral duty to keep it that way. The strongest example of overreach is that
absolutely no species may go extinct, no matter how ill-suited to survival
they may be (I'm looking at you, pandas). Other examples that are probably
entirely defensible on rational grounds are that the sea level must not change
at all; that carbon must remain distributed in the crust and atmosphere
precisely as before.

But, more relevantly, we also see this belief at work _on both sides_ of the
fire [non-]debate! On the one hand, whatever faceless NIMBY/political force
stands in the way of preventative burns says you're not allowed to change the
forest by burning it: that would be destroying nature and thus it would be
morally bad. But TFA justifies _its_ position according to this tenet too! It
says that in "prehistory" (I guess it means pre-1700 or so) so many acres
burned, and therefore it is obviously right that so many acres burn again
today.

The problem is that this belief, even when it reaches correct conclusions, is
deeply anti-scientific and even anti-rational. There's no rational reason to
connect morality and stasis. As long as this is a tool for making choices, it
doesn't matter how often it's used for making good choices (preventative
burns); all those who use it will still be just as culpable for the damage
done on the side of bad choices (no burns).

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
We have a solid idea about about the pre-European history of fire in the US
west, including some information about native american practices during parts
of that history (they burned, at least in some areas and for some of the
time).

We have hard evidence of what the last 100 years of forest management policy
has done.

Nobody is proposing "nature can never (be) change(d)". The point is that that
we tried to do something different (fire suppression) and it manifestly did
not and has not worked.

~~~
svrb
I believe you misunderstood my comment (perhaps I worded it poorly): I
intended that it be interpreted as a statement _purely_ within the meta-
discussion. I shared a concern about the arguments used to justify _both
sides_ of the debate, and did not intend to advance one side or the other.

While you seem to believe I was arguing _against_ preventative burns, the
sibling comment seems to believe I was arguing _for_ preventative burns which
are (according to that comment) a crazy libertarian idea. This makes me wonder
whether any critique of dogma must be reinterpreted as a disagreement about
facts as a kind of memetic camouflage self-defense mechanism...

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
I don't believe you were arguing against preventative burns. You were clear
arguing against the idea that things must remain the same. My point was the
people who understand this stuff are _not_ arguing that things must remain the
same.

------
01100011
I'm not so sure this applies to much of coastal CA. Coastal sage scrub,
chaparral, and similar biomes can build up sufficient fuel mass in a couple
years. Combined with fierce, hot, dry autumn winds(aka 'Santa Ana' winds) you
have conditions where 60mph walls of flame can regularly run from the
mountains towards the sea. The solution there is to follow CalFire guidelines
for fireproofing your home, force local governments to ensure adequate
evacuation routes, and discourage living in the wild land interface.

Controlled burns can't reduce fuel because many of those plants can only
recover when burned every decade or so. Between frequent burns and non-native
plants, we could lose much of our native habitats if we do controlled burns
wrong.

[https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-
content/uploads/Homeowne...](https://www.readyforwildfire.org/wp-
content/uploads/Homeowners-Checklist.pdf)
[https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/](https://www.californiachaparral.org/fire/)

------
brudgers
_Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each
year in prehistoric California._

Even the low end of this is several times what burned this year. I’m drawing a
blank on how that level of burning would prevent “mega fires” unless the idea
is to replace them with “super mega fires” several times larger.

~~~
hinkley
There’s a difference between “had flames on it” and “burned to the ground”.

There’s also a heat point where the soil is sterilized, meaning it can take
many times longer for substantial succession to occur.

------
BurningFrog
This article is a lot more optimistic about the California/Federal plan:

[https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-
pla...](https://grist.org/climate/a-california-wildfire-response-plan-
actually-matches-the-scale-of-the-problem/)

------
pegas1
Controled burns are only a part of the solution, generally substituting for
large grazing animals that would keep the forest density and undergrowth at
bay. Also, a lot of wetland in Califormia was dried and even rivers were
straightened and deprived of the traditional meandering and inundation area.
All that makes California dryer, slowly but surely decreasing water stored in
the soil and therefore also decreasing secondary rainfall (summer
thunderstorms from local evapotransiration) that would keep forests less dry.

------
dusted
instead of controlled burns, couldn't the wood be chopped down and transported
out? I mean, wood is not free.. it's worth something right? Couldn't it be
sold cheaply for building materials and energy (a gasification boiler is super
clean compared to "natural" burning).

------
karmakatze
I'm curious how much CO2 is stuck in this backlog that should have been burned
relative to other sources...

------
k_sze
Instead of burning in place, could the plants be chopped down and used as fuel
to generate electricity?

------
beamatronic
We also know how to prevent the spread of coronavirus but we can’t seem to get
that done either

------
luckylion
Why is harvesting the trees not an option? Is the wood of such a low quality
that you can't use it at all? Are the areas not reachable?

I understand burning it might be faster, but it has the obvious problems that
are apparently stopping them from doing it today. But why not just allow trees
to be harvested?

~~~
dqv
I didn't really get a perfect answer except that if the logging operation is
done incorrectly it makes the fires worse. The environmentalist view is that
the trees should be burnt but not removed to return the nutrients to the
ecosystem. Basically the experts are saying logging won't get us out of this.

See [https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-
log-o...](https://www.backpacker.com/news-and-events/why-we-cant-log-our-way-
out-of-wildfires)

------
emn13
Heads up that propublica doesn't mind intentionally deceiving readers; I don't
trust them anymore.

Just a few months ago I read this:
[https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-
millions-t...](https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-to-
design-a-low-cost-ventilator-for-a-pandemic-instead-the-company-is-selling-
versions-of-it-overseas-) \- and my initial reaction was "bad, big company!" A
little digging later; turns out the piece is deceptive to the point that I
don't buy it's an accident.

So hey; maybe they're telling the truth this time. But liar, liar, pants on
fire: I'm not believing a word they say without solid external sources
anymore.

Edit: here, I found a comment by somebody (not me) that sums up the problems
with this reporting here: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-
administration-an...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-
administration-announces-489-million-ventilator-contract-with-
gm/?comments=1&post=38793881)

I get that this isn't terribly on topic for wildfires - but by linking to
sources like this we also give them a position of authority, and they don't
deserve it. Note that the ventilator article has not been retracted nor
updated; they're not willing to admit - let alone correct! - their mistakes
either, apparently.

~~~
gamblor956
There is nothing wrong with the propublica article.

It simply claims that the company received public money years ago to design a
low-cost ventilator that it never sold, and instead used that money to also
design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling...without any
inventory issues.

The company claims that the US tried to order the cheapo ventilators for COVID
use too late, and they may be true, but that wasn't the point of the article.

~~~
emn13
The article clearly implies that some or several of involved parties are
ripping off taxpayers when instead the actual costs per ventilator are quite
low, and not only that, the deal they're referring to wasn't even due now.
That's deceptive. Even your summary is deceptive when you say stuff like _"
instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it
actually started selling"_ \- there seems to be 0 evidence of that occurring
at least in any unreasonable sense.

Put it this way: what's there actually to report here? That a lowest-possible-
cost contract for a few ventilators before 2022 didn't deliver many more
before 2020? That the contract looks reasonable, and so far honestly
fulfilled?

The insinuations aren't harmless. Not only because it might lead people to
support more oversight and interventions where none are warranted, but also
because they distract from real issues - and there are _more_ than enough of
those.

Did you look at the slightly more in-depth review of the article in this
comment? [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-
an...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/04/trump-administration-
announces-489-million-ventilator-contract-with-gm/?comments=1&post=38793881)

------
trhway
Control burns look to me just like blood letting - a thing from the past when
we didn't know better.

how to prevent megafires? How about extinguishing them while they are just
fires? A fleet of 100 tanker planes is just a few $B investment with couple
hundred $M/year maintenance. Several round trips of those 100 tanker planes in
the first day when these fires have just started would have solved the issue.
They would have solved the similar issues back in 2018 and 2019 too as well as
the coming issues in 2021 and so on. Thus they would be paying for themselves
each year over and over again.

Not surprisingly, the situation is similar to covid - an initial investment
(orders of magnitude lower than the losses otherwise) and a bit of rational
thinking would have prevented the covid "megafire", yet here we're... The
current human race inability for even minimally rational system scale action
is astounding.

~~~
icegreentea2
I think what you might be missing in your analysis is that preventative
approaches that only "stop" the spread of fires only contribute to reducing
the occurrence rate of catastrophic events, but also contribute to increasing
the severity of them as well (through build up of fuel).

Robust solutions should ideally both manage occurrence and severity of
catastrophic events, and be able to scale through multiple magnitudes of risk.
With the limitations we have, we're typically stuck with really only managing
one of those levers - but we should absolutely hesitate from solutions that
increase severity.

We should be spending money scaling our ability to actively fight fires once
they start, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also spend money and resources
to try to reduce the scope and scale of fires that we do need to fight.

~~~
hinkley
I see a big overlap with Antifragility concepts here. Stopping all the fires
at all costs makes the system fragile.

