With recent events in Paradise with the inferno ravaging the wooded town of Paradise where officials discovered the remains of 13 people, bringing the death toll to 42, the World is asking why does California have so many forest fires?
The first is California’s climate.
Fire is a very simple thing as long as the forest material is dry enough and there’s a spark then it will burn.
California, like much of the West, gets most of its moisture in autumn and winter. Its vegetation then spends much of the summer slowly drying out because of a lack of moisture and warmer temperatures. That vegetation then serves as kindling for fires.
California’s Climate has always been fire prone, it has become warmer with temperatures that are about two to three degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they would have been without global warming. Once the vegetation has dried out it makes it more likely to burn.
2) People
Dr Williams a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said. “People are always creating possible sparks, and as the dry season wears on and stuff is drying out more and more, the chance that a spark comes off a person at the wrong time just goes up. And that’s putting aside arson.”
While fires are caused by lightning strikes the vast majority of fires are caused by people. From fallen power lines to people throwing away used cigarettes. Another major problem is people camping in the wilderness lighting fires or barbecues.
A fire can be started with used charcoal being thrown away with the person not realising that it can slowly start a fire over the next 48 hours after they have left the camping area.
Traditional methods of forest management have been abandoned. Tribes regularly burned California’s oak woodlands, for instance, to remove underbrush and fight pests. It helped them spot prey more easily, keep weevils out of the acorns they gathered for food, and safeguard their homes from wildfire.
One of the most successful tools of fighting forest fires is controlled forest fires called burn out operations which removes much of the dead vegetation and waste material within the forests. While practising the forestry services prefers “fuel removal” especially the removal of the material which is expensive and slow.
The other problem is that in In recent years the Forest Service has tried to rectify its past forest-management practices by conducting more prescribed or “controlled” burns to get rid of dead vegetation that could fuel future wildfires. But its budget has been overwhelmed by firefighting costs.
3) Fire suppression
For the last century, California was extremely successful at fighting fires which meant that every time they successfully fought a fire there was a whole bunch of vegetation’s that did not burn. And so over the last hundred years, it has accumulated a mass of dead and dried out material for fuel stocks for fires.
4) Deadwood
It is true that California has a lot of dead timber — 129 million trees spread across 8.9 million acres, according to a Forest Service estimate.
But the dead trees themselves do not catch fire easily, because they are too big, said Chad T. Hanson, the principal ecologist at the John Muir Project of the non-profit Earth Island Institute.
“It’s like starting a campfire,” he said. “You don’t put a big log on the fire and put a match to it and expect it to burn — it’s not going to happen. Fires are driven by Kindle.”
Logging gets rid of trees, but it does not get rid of the kindling — brush, bushes and twigs. Logging does, however, enable the spread of cheatgrass, a highly combustible weed, which makes a forest more likely to burn.
5) The Santa Ana winds
Winds notorious for fuelling some of southern California's most dangerous wildfires are expected to kick-up for the first time this year - putting the region on alert. The Santa Ana winds may reach gusts of up to 75mph up in the mountains, setting the conditions for possible new fires.
6) Poor Forestry Management.
All forests need fire breaks and area of land that has been cleared of trees and vegetation that prevent the spread of fires. While there are fire breaks in the forests there not nearly enough and many are poorly managed with the trees being removed but there is plenty of bush wood that has not been cleared. A ready source fire material.
Forestry Management has been slow to start using satellite technology to monitor forests and has relied on spotter plans and feet on the ground. The problem is that once a forest fire has started you need to put it out as soon as possible to stop it spreading because it becomes much more difficult to put the fire out.
The US Forest Service approaches to fire prevention with a tactic known as “fuels reduction” – essentially, thinning out forests so that any wildfires that do start are not able to spread or intensify beyond firefighters’ ability to control it. This involves clearing dry brush that allows sparks to jump, cutting small trees that burn readily and pruning low-hanging branches that enable the fire to expand upwards into forest canopies.
But while fuels reduction works in theory, its effectiveness is negated in practice by the sheer size of the West. The US Forest Service is responsible for more than 190 million acres of land, and fuels reduction efforts are targeted, tree-specific, and almost entirely manual. They are performed on an acre-by-acre basis, and they must be repeated every 10 years to deal with new forest growth. The result is that only a tiny fraction of forests categorized as “high-risk” - with little documentation of the logic behind that designation - see fuels reduction. Additionally, it is impossible to predict whether these patches will coincide with the location of next summer’s heat waves, the primary driver of annual wildfire geography.
It turns out that only 1 per cent of wildfires each year actually burn forest lands directly adjacent to areas where fuels reduction was carried out. That means that the more than $350 million spent annually on fuels reduction results in virtually no difference in the destructive capacity of wildfires.
In an opinion piece published this year in USA Today, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed California’s wildfires on environmentalists who oppose logging. He wrote:
Every year we watch our forests burn, and every year there is a call for action. Yet, when the action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.
For more informationwww.ecocropsinternational.com
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