Hair on fire headline.
Lots of words that say little.
Ah, here we go.
CLICKBAIT! SEE IF SOMETHING HAPPENS!!
(Excerpt) Read more at strange....
It is an excellent article. You may wish to actually read it.
Did you actually read the article. I have followed western fires for a few years and this is a well written piece. Good info. So, either you do not or are incapable of comprehending or simply did not read this “clickbait.” Well, it could also be you are a......
I found the article enlightening on how the science behind fighting fires developed and how the bombing of Dresden figures into today’s fire science.
Since I live here in Butte County where Paradise disappeared off the face of the Earth and this summer the community of Berry Creek the same—I have a bit of an insight into local fires around this neck of the woods. I read the whole article and have shared it among our rural community members for their files. Your mileage may vary...
You and humblegunner deserve to be in spa together.
Pulling each others back hairs out with tweezers.
I concur that worthy article excerpts should at least be 300 words (or perhaps less than 10% of the whole), while this one does have much to offer, Such as,
It is hard for us moderns to accept—conditioned, as we are, by Smokey Bear—but fire is every bit as natural and inevitable in the American West as flooding in the Mississippi River Basin and hurricanes in Florida. Fire is not only guaranteed by climate and ecology; it is vital to the health of many ecosystems. The 20th century, in fact, during which large wildfires were far less common in the West than they are today, should properly be seen as the unnatural outlier. Prior to that, and especially before Anglo-American conquest, wildfire burned an estimated 6 million to 13 million acres each year in California, according to one study, far more than even the current record-setting season....
The Forest Service, which currently controls about 20 million acres of California, put a well-meaning end to this kind of land management almost from the founding of the agency in 1905.... The wrongheadedness of this approach became obvious to the agency itself by the 1940s, when its researchers began to catch on to the fact that the longer a forest goes without fire, the more fuel will pile up and the worse the blaze will be....
CalFire’s straightforward mandate, for which it spends upward of $2 billion a year and operates more than 700 fire engines and 75 aircraft, is to extinguish every blaze, fast—a job it does extraordinarily well on about 6,400 wildland fires annually. CalFire chief Brian Estes, who commands firefighting operations for just three of California’s 58 counties, says, “We’re running 400 to 500 fires a year. In the heat of summer, five or six a day—and most you’ll never see. Anytime I have a 911 dispatch to a vegetation fire”—a grass fire, say, on somebody’s lawn—“you’re going to get seven engines, a battalion chief, two bulldozers, two air tankers, an air attack, and two hand crews. They’re going to roll out the barn. But if you do that for a hundred years, and you don’t allow people to do prescribed fire, the fuel just gets more and more dense.”...
The Dresden firestorm famously produced hurricane-force winds powerful enough to uproot giant trees and snap them in half, suck up roof gables and furniture, and send countless humans flying like fallen leaves into the whirling fire tornado. Before it was done, that firestorm wholly incinerated several square miles of city.
Finney also unearthed a stack of obscure research reports, published during the Cold War, that analyzed the Dresden firestorm and a similar one above Hiroshima after the detonation of the atomic bomb (yet again, roughly 30 minutes after)....Yet another of these reports, titled Mass Fire and Fire Behavior and published by the Forest Service in 1964, looked at what might happen if a national forest got hit by a nuclear weapon....
“I realized, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re creating the conditions for mass fires,’” he says. “These fires aren’t just big because of, say, climate change or some accident. They’re big because we have a landscape full of long-burning heavy fuels, just like cities.”...
The collapse of commercial logging, meanwhile, mostly due to environmental regulation, has combined with our collective intolerance for prescribed burns (nobody likes smoky air) to let forests grow unnaturally dense with young trees.