I’m interested in peoples EDUCATED thoughts on the next decade in California. While obviously there are millions of acres to go, the landscape is undoubtedly changing and so will our strategy and tactics as we move into a new era of firefighting, especially in Northern California where we are seeing entire counties and units change their fuel model overnight. Where do you think we’ll be in 10 years?
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https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/bomb/
I’m just waiting on Ol’ Elon and Bezos to Team up with Leonardo’s outfit and pull this off…
Oh dear God, wait till the crowd who thinks dropping ice blocks on the fires will put them out gets a hold of this idea.
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I was just talking about the rest of our career with a coworker if I stay on my current forest. most fires are going to be be a brush component in a snag field 2 years ago it was predominantly mixed conifer timber. It happened so fast.
Tactics are going to be different, danger will be higher due to snags. Brush component will require huge amounts of labor to even access fires once the brush matures.
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The plus side retardant will be more effective
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Fire is Mother Nature’s way of cleaning her self up… we have done a horrible job at forest and fuels management. We should be allocating funds for removing snags, mastication of the brush component, replanting and ongoing Treestand thinning projects.
We have spent the last hundred and twenty years suppressing fire and this has changed our forests in a tragic way.
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Spot on. Until we start managing the landscape better this situation will only get worse. Logging, and post fire cleanup, reopening mills, and hey maybe stop urban sprawl in fire prone areas for a start. I’m pretty sure the spotted owl would much rather live in a few trees rather than the moonscape it’s habitat is becoming.
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This is what I’m talking about. We’ve all (or at least most of us) have done the fire sieges for Santa Ana events down south, and you expect to see that grass/brush mix fighting fire on the LP. How quickly things are changing in these areas up north that have ALWAYS been known for timber fires where we talked about re-burn, crowning, etc to what will potentially be light and flashy fuels. The entire dynamic is changing.
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The Sierra Club had a motto a few yrs ago “Cow free by 93” I think it’s time to put the cows and sheep BACK into the environment. 100 yrs ago the last sheep herder out of the Yolla Bollys tossed a match. They did it every year. The Feds were putting a stop to it. He was going to be arrested so he joined the army and went to Europe for WW I. It was all forgotten when he got back. True story. May be time to do it again?
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as long as logging practices are modern and not the clearcutting of old, and the next growth is thinned not a dense stand of small firs we often see after logging. After we log we have to manage he stand density or it becomes very fire prone.
Old growth forests had very low stand density and very tall canopy height minimizing fire risk.
These 2nd and third growth forests are explosive in a way old growth never was
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I agree. However allowing the forest to grow as dense as it is is not conducive to a healthy forest. You can’t even get all through in some areas with ladder fuels higher then most people stand.
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agreed.
We need thinning but that density of small and medium trees would never have occurred without logging the old growth. Also no one wants to log small diameter trees. So logging alone will not fix this, marketable timber is not what is causing explosive fire growth it is those ladder fuels which are practically worthless that allow fire to spread unchecked.
Thinning, prescribed fire coupled with healthy sustainable logging practices as well as replanting and thinning as they mature as seen on SPI and (Formerly Collins Pines) land.
We can easily see the brush field transition to logging company transition in old fire scars the are replanting and thinning where the USFS (my employer) is not.
Logging isn’t a magic bullet especially if the land is not taken care of after.
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I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the same thing. The current health of the forests and the policies of not thinning coupled with zero prescribed burning is a disastrous policy.
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Yeah I think so, just illustrating that logging alone doesn’t fix everything some in my area think if we just logged more it would fix everything. That isn’t true.
How to fix how inefficient the federal government is at completing thinning and fuels treatment I don’t know. Yes we need more money to do it but even as an agency employee I don’t want to see it thrown away in way that accomplishes little.
I’ll say everyone wants the work done on a grand scale where I work but damn if it isn’t hard to implement. Especially relying on the wildland fire workforce who is overworked all summer to do it.
The only answer I can think of is actually well paid fuels crews, not guys and gals making minimum wage busting their humps.
Not contractors doing the bare minimum to get paid while paying their people minimum wage.
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It’s been suggested by folks with more knowledge and experience than I but what about re-opening the Co-Gen Plants? Get the Government to subsidize it, energy credits, PG&E purchasing the power. See Zeke’s comments on this at Dixie Fire – 8/15/2021 – The Lookout
Making cleaning and thinning pay, at least some.
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yeah subsidize that enough it could work, hell if its going to burn anyway its carbon neutral
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There are still functioning biomass power plants in the state, just not enough of them. As NorCal eludes to, unfortunately the feds still need an insane amount of NEPA work just to get a small diameter biomass thinning through. So a streamlining of federal environmental regs, at least for small diameter thinning, is drastically needed too.
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If you can prove that the thinning avoids larger wildfire emissions, it is potentially a carbon benefit even.
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Yes. Environmental regulation is huge, and not just at the federal level. Two or three years ago the El Dorado County Irrigation district completed an almost 500 page study just to justify the fact they didn’t need a full environmental review to do in order to do a handful of relatively small projects at a few of their facilities. We’ve ended up at a point where we’re so concerned about any minor “environmental impact” we’re willing to allow all of California’s beautiful forest lands to become nothing but brush fields. Of course all the while the “professionals” preparing all the studies and reports are making billions.
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Don’t forget to account for Conifers needing fire for germination… Forest floors could be “raked” a bit better along highways, roads, etc. They did a great job along Highway 88 and upper Omo. near where the Caldor fire is but torching and crowning isn’t going to be stopped. Carbon is good.
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