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Thread: California Fires

  1. #1
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    California Fires

    This is becoming an all to common occurrence in California. This time it seems really bad and deadly. I know wildfires are common out west but I do not remember so many large deadly fires occurring in such close intervals. Is it because of population growing in areas, is it because of the weather, or because of poor management or a combination of all of it. I feel terrible for the pain these folks are enduring. Fires like these eradicate the entire lives of these folks. How much is homeowner insurance in these areas it much cost a fortune. I don't know if I could live in an area like this I would be scared of my own shadow if I saw a puff of smoke. Hope they get it out with no more deaths.......
    OPINION....a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

  2. #2
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    It is certainly weird that Cali seems to be burning all of the time. I know Eric has told us several times why it is happening, but you would think they could fix at least some of the reason why it keeps happening.

  3. #3
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    I see it as a combination of all the factors you listed. It is a sad thing to see and I'm damn glad that I don't have to live facing that every year. I hope everyone there has adequate insurance and the good sense to get the hell out before being killed by fire.
    The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible - Arthur C. Clarke

  4. #4
    Wannabe is offline Nov 5, 1946 - Nov 19, 2018
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    Seems like I've seen something recently that ties the fires to seismic activity a little before or as the activity occurs. I'll get the source for you when I get time.

  5. #5
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    Tri has more of a handle on this than anyone.

    I suspect it's the I want to get out of town and have a place in the woods for some. Once there they bought or built in an area surrounded by trees.

    Homes built before the codes that required some fire protection in wilderness areas could have open roof vents and other openings which they now recognize as not a good idea. As to homes in subdivisions the old code allowed smaller separation, but as we have seen fires like this can destroy that in a matter of minutes. Thinking the old way a fire in a suburban home doesn't usually burn the next door units. Here clearly they were overrun and didn't have the fire department on site.

    I'll go farther out on a limb and suspect the fire and building codes will change to help mitigate these types of events. The driving force will be the insurance industry for those changes. Happened after the Great Chicago Fire.

    Today most of us have some kind of code we have to build to. However some areas still refuse to adopt anything but the basic. MT comes to mind as only a few major cities have any code and the rest follow some sort of relaxed code.

    Rest would be land management and not sure who to blame for that.

    As for Southern Cali, if you haven't lived there you would never know how strong the Santa Ana winds are. Brush and hills and wanting to live there are no match for mother nature in fire or rain.
    Fred

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  6. #6
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    the winds hit both northern and southern California with speeds of over 50mph. fallen power lines seen to be the cause of both big fires. as for the terrain. Southern California is chapparal all scrub brush and scrub oak. in the north it was grasslands and scrub. Trump has no clue, there is very little harvest able timber in the "Brush" Fire burn zone and none in the south. oh and the majority of the areas burning are US Forest Service lands "Managed by the Feds, California has very little to do with it. As far as the towns, most of them were settled in the gold rush. lots of wood frame construction and people like to have streets and yards full of plants and trees. You add in the ravages of 5 years of drought, high temps, high winds fuel load, and once a fire gets going it will keep going until either the wind stops or it runs out of stuff to burn. 50-100 foot high flame fronts will just consume everything in their path.
    "The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"

  7. #7
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    Sorry, I am no expert but in most of the pics I see, there are many tall pine trees smoking in the neighborhoods and the houses are burned to a crisp. Everything else in Cali is regulated, why can't they put in some regulations to clear brush or to deny permits to build in many areas. Also I know the cost is high, but putting in underground power lines, in areas where the winds are strong would help cut down on the accidental fires. The homeowners who build in those areas would carry the cost of that or not build.


    Other places have droughts, other places have scrub and west texas has miles of it. We also have high temps and power lines and the wind blows much of the time. Yes I also know 20/20 hindsight means nothing but this is getting ridiculous. It seems that that State is always burning to the ground, timber can not be cleared or brush removed because it might disturb the habitat of some particular bug or animal. I also say that having a huge fire that burns faster than any animal or bug can move also wipes out that family of things from the face of the earth. Pretty soon somebody will have to figure out that simple fact and do something about it. Sure there will still be some fires and big ones at that, but having the entire State burn to the ground, while the politicians are worried about illegals and protecting the wildlife, is doing nothing for the folks who have been there for decades.


    New building codes, like nothing flammable at all, concrete or steel only, could help. Making it mandatory to have buried lines in areas that have to be rebuilt, and then replacing all of the other lines at a certain pace, say x amount of miles per year, would also help. You have the largest ocean on the planet that runs from the top of the State to the bottom of it, desal plants could be built and used to provide water for some areas, and that would lessen the pull of water from natural storage areas. Otherwise if the area burns down, make it illegal to build there ever again.



    I hear about the costs for such remedies, but what is the cost to insurance companies, to businesses, to people and to the animals, by not doing anything. What is the cost to fuel those huge tankers and to pump water to put the fires out? How about the firefighters coming in from all over, Texas just sent a bunch out there to help, they are getting paid from somebody? SO much money spent to keep that place up so it can just burn down again a few years later.

  8. #8
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    We like to find “bad guys” to explain bad things which happen to us. Sometimes there are no bad guys just bad things happening. People who study these things are quick to tell us that cataclysmic forest and grass fires and drought are endemic to California (and much of the West) since way before human beings dominated the area and as far back as proxies allow us to peer. They are a natural event and the fires have served as a natural renewal process. Flora & fauna, if not relying upon it, certainly have evolved means to cope with it. Rather than looking for people to blame, it is more productive to join the coping & renewal process.
    ...............
    “You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution


  9. #9
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    Found this article, of course it was written right after the July 2018 fires earlier this year, but the explanation should still be relevant. The first part tells me a lot of their argument is political...
    In that vein, the Sacramento Bee editorial board blamed the Carr Fire foursquare on a man-caused buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In an editorial headlined, “The Carr Fire is a terrifying glimpse into California’s future,” they write, “This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat.”

    The Bee editorial board goes on to attack President Trump for proposing to end California’s exceptional waiver from federal law regarding auto emissions—in this case, California’s push to curtail tailpipe carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when the Clean Air Act was debated in 1970. At the time, the concern was pollution that directly harmed health rather than carbon dioxide, a naturally occurring gas exhaled by every living animal.


    The problem with the Bee’s editorial is that making a passionate argument is no substitute for the truth.
    In 2005 while a freshman California Assemblyman, I had the chance to visit Northern California and meet with the forest product industry professionals who grew, managed, and harvested trees on private and public lands. They told me of a worrisome trend started years earlier where both federal and state regulators were making it more and more difficult for them to do their jobs. As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need.

    As timber harvesting permit fees went up and environmental challenges multiplied, the people who earned a living felling and planting trees looked for other lines of work. The combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees.


    But, fire suppression efforts continued. The result was accurately forecast by my forest management industry hosts in Siskiyou County in 2005: larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape. More importantly, fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control.

    In 2001, George E. Gruell, a wildlife biologist with five decades of experience in California and other Western states, authored the book, “Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.” Gruell’s remarkable effort compared hundreds of landscape photographs from the dawn of photography with photos taken from the same location 100 years later or more. The difference was striking. In the 1850s and 1860s, the typical Sierra landscape was of open fields of grass punctuated by isolated pine stands and a few scattered oak trees. The first branches on the pine trees started about 20 feet up—lower branches having been burned off by low-intensity grassfires. California’s Native American population had for years shaped this landscape with fire to encourage the grasslands and boost the game animal population. As the Gold Rush remade modern California, timber was harvested and replanted. Fires were suppressed because they threatened homes as well as burned up a valuable resource. The landscape filled in with trees, but the trees were harvested every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, however, that cycle began to be disrupted with increasingly burdensome regulations. The timber harvest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped completely, especially on the almost 60% of California forest land owned by the federal government. Federal lands have not been managed for decades, threatening adjacent private forests, while federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been "borrowed" for fire suppression expenses. The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.
    Some two decades ago, California produced so much wood waste from its timber operations, including brush and small trees from thinning efforts, that the resulting renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state. But cheap, subsidized solar power, combined with air quality concerns (wood doesn’t burn as cleanly as natural gas) and a lack of fuel due to cutbacks in logging, led to the closure of many biomass generators. What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires. Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.
    The issue was summarized by the Western Governors’ Association in their 2006 Biomass Task Force Report which noted:
    …over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires, and the resulting loss of forest carbon is much greater than would occur if the forest had been thinned before fire moved through. …failing to thin leads to a greater greenhouse gas burden than the thinning created in the first place, and that doesn’t even account for the avoided fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions due to the production of energy from the forest thinnings. In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
    The Sacramento Bee editorial concludes with a stark warning: “California must plan now for these and other aspects of global warming, as more of the state becomes too hot, too dry, or too fire- or flood-prone to safely live in, and as more of the world braces for the era of climate refugees.”


    Whether global climate change is a problem that can be solved by California is a dubious proposition—one year’s worth of emission growth in China is greater than California’s total emissions. But the action needed to reduce the state’s growing forest fire threat would be the same regardless of one’s belief in any problems posed by climate change: start managing our forests again.


    Chuck DeVore is Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He was a California Assemblyman and is a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army Retired Reserve.


    https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckde...g#70f72d0c70af

  10. #10
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    "The timber harvest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped completely, especially on the almost 60% of California forest land owned by the federal government. Federal lands have not been managed for decades, threatening adjacent private forests, while federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been "borrowed" for fire suppression expenses. The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load."

    Yup Trump needs to yell at his own agencies not at the state of CA on that one
    "The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"

  11. #11
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    I agree, but it goes further than Trump if nobody for decades has changed anything. Has anybody from the State of California in the State govt, requested that something be done? Just asking because I do not have any idea. It would seem to me that the guy locally in charge of a particular section, could make proposals for forestation to happen. I would think the local govt, as they are the ones directly affected when the fires of hell come, would get with the feds and demand that something be done. If not, why the hell haven't they ?

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by TxMusky View Post
    I agree, but it goes further than Trump if nobody for decades has changed anything. Has anybody from the State of California in the State govt, requested that something be done? Just asking because I do not have any idea. It would seem to me that the guy locally in charge of a particular section, could make proposals for forestation to happen. I would think the local govt, as they are the ones directly affected when the fires of hell come, would get with the feds and demand that something be done. If not, why the hell haven't they ?

    They pay more attention to the Bundys than they do to Local Government input.
    "The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"

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  14. #14
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    Looking at this now shows that neither of the fire were in timber areas. Of those that showed some trees, remember that does not make it a forest that is managed by the state or the federal agencies.

    Most of this will have to be solved by either better zoning as to where people can build or better ways to build. Cali has hills and scrub brush and burns compared to the Gulf and Atlantic regions that are subject to hurricanes and storms. To be sure there are others that include floods and other natural disasters. We need to be able to say no to those that want to build in some of these areas.

    New Orleans comes to mind as a good example, almost wiped out with the last hurricane and yet we still allowed them to rebuild. Bet I could name a dozen more areas including Tx that allows people in flood areas to rebuild.

    It's what we do, complain until someone hears us and allows it to continue or stop it. Until then we'll waste time and money arguing about who is right.
    Fred

    "Everyday I beat my own previous record for number of consecutive days I've
    stayed alive."

    'Take care of yourself, and each other.'

  15. #15
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    this is what you get when the drift smoke from the "Brush" fire near Chico gets miked with the smoke from a 40 acre wildland fire that broke out 4-5 miles from my house this afternoon. You can feel and taste it. Visibility is less than a mile



    Last edited by TriGuy; 11-14-2018 at 10:36 PM.
    "The only thing that we learn from torture is the depths of our own moral depravity"

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