Agreed on “raking” (and I saw what you did there) around roads. Careful use of herbicide on main road corridors should also become the norm, not the exception. There is no excuse for every major federal, state, and county highway to have a ~5’ piece of bare dirt off the paved shoulder, to prevent hot brakes, a trailer chain, or a blown tire from causing a Carr Fire type event.
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Minimum wage… Please one of my crew foreman is 19 years old making $30 an hour.
He is well qualified and extremely motivated.
I don’t know any contractors paid minimum wage for this type of work.
Our equipment operators are making $45 an hour minimum.
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Getting back on course here a bit though…. Where do you see us as fire suppression agencies modifying our strategies and tactics moving forward from here? How will resource orders change? How will hiring be different, how are WE going to talk and discuss our craft at the dinner table with the 1st year seasonals in 5-10 years?
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The top of the photo is of the property pre forest mastication.
The middle is the day of mastication.
The bottom is after the fire burned up to the property and … went out.
Thinning the Forest works!
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With more frequent, higher intensity fires, and little to no moisture rebound, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we see fuel type conversions. Thicker to thinner over the next 10 years. Look at areas that have had this happen already. One that pops to mind is Ft Hunter Liggett. Certain areas of that base have undergone type conversions, due to higher frequency controlled and uncontrolled fires.
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Well to fill in the the gap I think this conversation is the future of our job. Although there will always be fire suppression. The future is in fuels management, it has to be and I think our conversations with our seasonals in the future will be based around the shift from a suppression culture to a pre-suppression culture. I don’t really know how tactics can deal with what is going on in region 5 right now. people are insisting on wider dozer lines well 1.5 mile spotting doesn’t care about your 10 blades, spots that go 100 acres in a half an hour don’t care about your burn show or how many crews you have holding. The only way to stop this is fuels and forest management.
As far as resource ordering we are starting to shift in the west to ordering for prescribed fire. which has been long established in the East. I want to see teams pulling off 10000 of acre of burns with as many resources as are on fires. Massive thinning with overtime approved.
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Yes, and I’d like to have a Type I helicopter available for trickier WUI rx fires. Nobody bats an eye if we spend $500k on aviation in the first three hours of a WUI fire in NEU, why would it be too much to ask to spend $100k on aviation for a big wintertime burn here?
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Amen
We need to be bold it will a lot easier to catch those spots in March than now
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The biggest factors for the lack of prescribed burning along the western sierra outside of the weather is air pollution control districts, you can have 2 weeks of crystal clear sky where I can see from auberry to Monterey and everyday will be a no burn day. Then when you can burn it’s to wet. These are agencies we have to work with and we need some way to do prescribed burning during no burn days, unfortunately the general public will never go for calfire, feds, or whatever agency setting burns on no burn days. They may see it as rules for thee not for me and we know how that goes. Large scale burning 700- 10000 is an answer to that because you set it on a burn day and are allowed to continue through a no burn period because it’s a multi day burn as long you don’t any more ignitions.
A question i have for those that plan fuel breaks. Why is it that we have studies to reopen fuel breaks that have in place for 120 years but weren’t being maintained after the 80s.
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Getting NEPA through on thinning and salvage projects on Fed land is way easier now than a lot of folks think. It ain’t the 90s anymore. Problem now is there’s no money in it, no money for it.
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Liability is the largest reason for lack of rx fire on large private landowners, hands down. Both the state and feds have quickly jumped on the cost recovery band wagon, and that scares anyone that has a few bucks or acres to their name.
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I can remember sitting down one non eventful seasonal morning at the Nevada City Station eating breakfast alongside the AA Captain from Grass Valley AAB. He mentioned an article he read about these “Russians” using heavy lift jets as air tankers. This was in the early 90’s. I could also remember how much more bucket work would be effective in the middle of the night wondering when egg beaters will be able to fly night ops. In Northern California we are on the cusp of firehawk pilots being able to do such tactic.
Tactics along with technology will continue to change. I believe heavy lift drones will become a tool. Automated flight wave points are becoming more efficient with collision avoidance systems being updated every year along with battery life and lift capacity.
I could see enhancements in automated fire detection. Wildfire cam network could be used with spatial smoke detection where automated alerts are sent to the local ECC.
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I worked for the USFS in fire for 29 years and retired at 24$ and change. The pay sucks…
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I wasn’t working for the agency in the 90s, but NEPA is still a huge obstacle. between lack of staff, environmental regs, wildlife/heritage issues, then facing objections that hold up the process its a huge hurdle. Then when we finally get a signed document we allow the loggers 5 years(minimum) to remove the timber. We have multiple sales on my forest that aren’t closed because we are waiting for the purchaser to chip/remove a few piles. So no burning until the sale is closed. and most of those projects still need some type of post logging treatment, mainly mastication to remove the small diameter material, before you can go in and pull off a successful burn.
There is plenty of money for implementation, its getting the opportunity to spend it thats the challenge.
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It’s going to take an act of Congress or a Presidential mandate to override NEPA and other environmental lock-downs and to put a stop to having every federal timber salvage sale litigated until the timber rots on the stump. Some people just don’t get the fact that you can’t fight fire in a snag patch and have to back off miles into the green to find another ridge that has potential to hold, ergo making the fires even larger. We tried using feller bunchers along snag filled roads and they were too rotten even for those machines as they kept breaking off so a no-go. Current situation all around is lose/lose. Even for burning and all the AQMD restrictions; They don’t get it either. It’s pay me now, or pay me later-with interest…
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If there is no significant change in funding, strategy and also human behavior, I feel that the million acre megafire is here to stay. The urban-wildland interface problem in rural areas will ultimately be solved the hard way, with the inevitable destruction of entire towns. Critical infrastructure will also be destroyed when it could potentially have been protected or better yet, hardened. This assumes same old, same old with only incremental changes - “ten thousand acres Rx burned” and “one new crew per unit / forest”, “ten percent budget increase,” ad nauseum.
(Before I say more, I should probably emphasize that this is uninformed personal opinion and that I do not speak for any agency, etc., before I continue kicking many sacred cows at length and with vigor.)
There are many questions and the answer is always, always ALWAYS “money”, as a short hand for where we invest our effort and our priorities.
The easy choices were twenty years ago. In long-term planning, this has always been true.
For example not at random, house is a fuel type. Trees don’t vote. Homeowners do. Trees don’t self-ignite. Houses, if rarely, do self-ignite - this is the entire purpose of having structural firefighters. Yet when I look at some of these rural towns, what I see is worse than any choked second-growth forest - house, barn, flammable landscaping, house, shed, more flammable landscaping - and in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer’s song by this title: “We will all go together when we go.” I could make a list of destroyed towns, and won’t out of respect for people’s feelings, but that list is going to get longer, and longer, and longer…
Planning in the incremental “build it and they will come” sense is far too little, far too slow, to fit the urgency of this crisis. A holistic approach is needed - individual homes in the WUI need to be self-defending, hardened homes with not just the legal minimum of ‘defensible space’ but the much higher standard of ‘self defending.’ Rural clusters of houses, the four to forty homes, need to be designed as a community to have not only hardened homes but thinning, fuel breaks, adequate internal spacing and a solid water supply for defensibility. Fire doesn’t recognize property lines, never has, never will.
Or we go the other way and say, “Nice cabin / hood / town, bro, enjoy it while you can, when it burns it’s gone forever, because you don’t get to rebuild.” One alternative might be, “This area is zoned for sacrificial vacation cabins only. No insurance, no fire protection.” Any fire regulations are cheap and minimal, like a battery powered smoke detector and an address and a signed “Living With Fire In Doomtown” waiver.
Now imagine being the mayor of one of these - to be frank, doomed towns - and saying, “We can save Sacklunchville, but in order to do this, we’re going to have to get 100% SimCity up in this and ‘Dozer’ is the tool selected. If you harden your home, you can keep your home - and we’ll loan you the money to do it. If your barn, your shed, or your house has the wooden shake roof and the knot-size holes in the walls, we’re going to buy you an ugly cheap fireproof roof and staple 1/8” mesh over the holes in your walls. Or we’re going to exercise eminent domain, take it away from you and either fix it or bulldoze it. Often it’s going to be the bulldozer, because it never should have been built in that spot. That’s also how we maintain your landscaping, if you don’t after warnings. We’ll doze it for you and send you a bill." I do not think the mayor will be re-elected, and would be lucky not to be lynched!
Now, Sacklunchville as a community has to go to the neighboring landowners - public, private, doesn’t matter - and say, “We like Sacklunchville and we’d like to keep it. Your land is essential for the shaded fuel break, fuel thinning, fuel reduction zone, etc. that we need to keep our town. That means maybe spending some money you don’t want to spend, or don’t have - or that conflicts with your planned use, your ‘ecological preserve’ or land bank for future development or military training use or agency policies or whatever. Again, we love our town. So get on board or hit the road, Jack.” And if the land uses are that incompatible, maybe it’s Sacklunchville that will have to dry up and go away.
We know how to keep homes from igniting. We know how to design defensible communities, and evacuable communities. What we often lack is the will to present the hard choices to the people with the power to make the hard decisions. When we hint at, let alone talk about condemning entire communities and spending many, many millions of dollars with no economic base to ever repay, it goes beyond hard and starts to approach impossible.
If this is unpalatable, and I find it as unpalatable as I think others will, I can offer another approach. Right now, a good number per the NFPA for preventing starts in the wildland is 98%. In other words, the fire service catches 49 out of 50 dropped eggs, in Initial Attack. Go backwards in time, go back to the 10 AM rule, catch 50 out of 50 eggs any way we can at whatever cost. No chain shall drag, no campfire shall smoke, fireworks are a felony to possess, Smokey is putting on his night vision goggles and sharpening his shovel.
Quadruple the number of fire stations. Equip and staff all of them during extreme fire conditions. Require that people who live in remote areas take firefighter training. Reinstate the ‘fire draft’ that Montana still has and turn out the residents for emergency fire duty. Many more cameras, many more aircraft, more ground and air and space sensing. Sell skid kits at cost - or issue them! - to local residents in remote areas. Expand the cell network to universal coverage. Aggressive anti-arson patrols and forest visitor surveillance. Install outdoor lightning arresters in key locations, not just to protect infrastructure but to prevent starts.
I will warn however that getting from an efficient 98% to that extreme 99.9% is going to be incredibly costly, and not just in money. At a rough estimate, DOUBLE what we spend on fire protection now, not to mention the human and social costs of Declaring Fire War Forever. We will have to re-write the fabric of rural life around Initial Attack - because the consequences of a dropped egg will be worse and worse every year we don’t manage fuels.
Forest fuels management is the elephant in the room.
Even if we harden our WUI homes and towns - and we won’t - and we pump up our Initial Attack to ridiculous levels - which we also won’t, the forest is still doing what the forest is doing. Accumulating denser fuel and waiting for that gentle out of season burn that didn’t happen twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago. Someone will have to make the hardest choice of all - which parts of California we can save, through fuel breaks and prescribed fire and other costly forms of fuel management - and which parts we will have to write off, outside the effective control zone.
None of this is intended to discourage the people reading this. Your task today is essential. The complexity of the chaos will increase and life safety will always have to come first. Be safe and watch each other’s backs whether you are red, green, blue, yellow, khaki, olive drab or any other flavor of serving your communities. This is a hard, hard problem. We can, and we will, prevail. But we need to be realistic about the magnitude of what we face.
I really don’t want us to stand in the 2040s, look back at the 2020s and say, “We could have done all the things then, if we had only known.” Well, we know.
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The difficulty in getting salvage projects off the ground is extremely frustrating. The opposition knows they just have to delay the process and the value will rot away and nothing will be done. We also need to dramatically change our thinning prescriptions. we aren’t taking any where near enough to make a dramatic difference from a fire behavior alteration stand point. I get needing to maintain wildlife habitat. But thinning a stand to 80% canopy cover doesn’t do any good. If a fire goes through there its a loss.
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Keywords : lack of staff, contractors not wanting to remove valueless material. As said above, that all comes down to money. As you said, the sales are there, but they sit for 5+ years, nobody’s in any hurry to get that wood off the land. There’s little profit in it, and the politics hasn’t been eager to pay.
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We ve got salvage projects sitting no one wants to bid on. We’re almost giving them away free, but if it’s not very close to a mill…
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Back to YUMing again…
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