The fires of the last decade have left us with a mess on both public and private land from low to high elevations. If we don’t find a way to reduce the fuels… the snags, the standing dead brush the intrusive species, we will have stood by and watched the creation of the greatest fire hazard since the Big Burn in 1910.
A snag patch increases the difficulty of control immeasurably. There is not only the obvious addition of hundreds of tons of available fuel per acre, but the danger of falling snags and long distance spotting makes these fires incredibly difficult to handle. Don’t forget or minimize the fact many of the acres burned in this years fires are on Federal Land…with Wilderness or Roadless area restriction that have special rules for land use… no wheeled vehicles, no mechanized equipment etc.
Fire killed timber loses all of its value as sawlogs in 2 or 3 years due to bugs, stain and rot. In California we no longer have the mill capacity to handle any increase in production, so most of the timber and almost all of the oaks and brush will simply rot in place and add to the load of available fuel.
We have the technology and the capability to utilize much of this standing dead fuel…its called biomass harvest. Dead trees and brush are chopped and ground on site and hauled to Co Gen electric plants where they are burned to produce electricity. Biomass harvest is expensive and not economically viable…therefore it must be subsidized in many cases. Grant funding from California Climate Initiative money is available to communities and organizations.
Biomass harvest could be used to reduce fuel volume around targeted communities, like Paradise or Weaverville.
I’d like to see small Co Gen plants that could be moved in 10 years if the available fuel ran out…if we could set one up in the Fresno area to handle bug and fire kill…one in Greenville and one in Lake Pillsbury with ties into the electric grid layed on the ground in pipes like the Alaska pipeline everybody would benefit…We would have to get legislature to remove wilderness protection from some areas…but if the wilderness is a recognized fire hazard its more danger than benefit.
Perhaps some of the money in the Fienstien Dantes Emergency Wildfire Protection Act could be used to startup one or more of those mobile Go Gen plants.
CalFire and USFS has made much of their promise of more prescribed fire. Rx fire with no followup just increases the hazard. I propose the Agencies look toward rehab of the 4 million acres we’ve burned so far this fire season.
