Posted on 10/22/2007 11:29:32 AM PDT by Smogger
Best Wishes.
Any threat to Camp Pendleton?
Here is a map link. There are hills and mountains everywhere. They are very worried.
As a resident of Nevada, where we’ve had millions of acres burn as a result of BLM land management policies that are forced down upon us as the result of lawsuits by California environmentalists, many of whom are funded, aided and abetted by celebrities in Malibu, I can say forthrightly that:
1. California’s environmentalists (and their enablers) seem to have forgotten that karma (yes, that new-age hippy-dip concept they like to spout) is a two-sided coin. What goes around has come around. Boo freakin’ hoo.
2. They’ve been living under the same idiotic policies they’ve forced down on us, so it isn’t reasonable to think that they’d be exempt from the results. News flash from the Almighty: You’re no exception. Let the fuel build up and you’ve got a blow-up in your future.
3. When the number of burned acres gets to 500,000 gimme a call. I won’t shed a tear until then. We’re losing hundreds of thousands of acres almost every year thanks to these idiot environmentalists in California sticking their noses into our business over here.
Until people get their heads out of their posteriors and start shouting down the environmental community, you Californians are going to have these blow-ups. Just to remind folks in California, there’s three sides to the fire triangle: air, fuel, heat. You can’t do anything about air and heat. The only variable you can control on a landscape-wide basis is fuel. That means cutting trees, controlled burns, and (yes!) grazing to remove fine-stemmed fuels. With proper management, evil corporations and right-thinking people can be brought in to make money on two out of those three fuel removal processes.
I've said the same about my arrival at March AFB in August of 85. It was a month or so before I realized there were foothills just beyond the base.
You obviously are another that hasn't a clue here. Ya see, California, it's topography, large population, and Santa Ana winds aren't Nevada, and it has little to do with environmentalist in events such as wind blown wild brush fires that can spread and jump around for miles in different directions.
I know you'd like to blame California here, and the environmentalist, but please read below.
California has more acreage of steep, super rugged geography than many states have land. Many of these areas are totally inaccessible for most equipment, even for those on foot, add in very strong winds, with embers that can travel at 60 plus miles per hour, for *miles* into neighborhoods and other areas, that are far from the fires...
Would you suggest sending in several hundred thousand people every summer to be airlifted into hundreds of square miles, into all these super rugged steep areas to cut the brush?
Only from real estate developers thus far.
Oh wow... looking at that map, makes me wonder how safe BBL is if the winds shift at all...
Polly
Yup. It's deja vu all over again.
Crisis on our National Forests: Reducing the Threat of Catastrophic Wildfire [San Bernardino Fires]
Here's the real problem:
A Burning Desire, A Critique of the Sierra Club Public Lands Fire Management Policy (1999)
I've posted this below several times.
Would you suggest sending in several hundred thousand people every summer to be airlifted into hundreds of square miles, into all these super rugged steep areas to cut the brush every year?
Many of those hills used to be grazed and burned regularly, but the same people who never paid the owners for fuel management killed them with regulations.
Uh, I LIVE in the wildland suburban interface and have been controlling fuels on 200% slopes for eighteen years. You can tell the difference between our property and its surroundings from 20,000 feet.
Would you suggest sending in several hundred thousand people every summer to be airlifted into hundreds of square miles, into all these super rugged steep areas to cut the brush every year?
I do it myself. I've taken out two cords on steep slopes in the last week. Better is to manage the vegetative type. One can grow yerba santa, monkeyflower, buckeye, and elderberry in the same places as might otherwise grow ceanothus and manzanita. All of them are native, but the former group doesn't burn worth a damn. All it takes is commitment, money, time, and the willingness to risk my life to protect my land.
Bottom line is there is way too much remote, inaccessible rugged brush covered land, literally hundreds of square miles....And even in areas that get burned, it grows back every single year.
It's just the way it is.
I’ve seen subdivisions totally surrounded by green belts, with brush controlled well beyond the belts....But when the area is being showered by millions of burning embers, blowing in at 60 plus miles per hour, going into neighborhoods etc....Well, you get the picture.
in santa clarita those greenbelts froze last winter, and were dead brush.
The reason they're "not practical" is because the idiots in charge have let the fuel get out of control and are hamstrung by the very web of regulations that give them their power. The area residents simply don't want to pay for the risks they pose with their land management preferences.
Many are just too remote, and inaccessible, not to mention, if you did a controlled burn in these type of areas, and it gets out of control, you can't get the resources in to fight it.
Oh and it's IMPOSSIBLE for people to live there to manage it, right? The aboriginals did it for thousands of years. Nor is burning the only option; goats can handle awful terrain.
And even in areas that get burned, it grows back every single year.
According to Bonnicksen (who is the acknowledged authority on the topic of forest archaeology), there are a good many places where the Indians burned it nearly every year. Got a problem with that? I'll bet you do.
Do they have a car? Can they rent a car? I think they should drive as far inland as they can in, say, three hours and stay in a motel wherever they end up. After a couple of days, there will be more info about what options are closer to home.
Good job...
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