“There’s no economic value to it and thinning it over the hundreds of thousands of acres of the San Gabriels, with it’s steep hillsides, would be hugely expensive, dangerous and difficult.”
Every heard of GOATS!
Yes. The private outifts that use goats to clear land for government agencies, as is done on a small scale around San Diego and a more extensive scale around Laguna, charge $750 an acre. In this fire, 145,000 acres have burned. To have cleared that land using goats would have cost north of 100 million dollars. What has been spent to fight the fire is about a quarter of that.
To have the entire 650,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest cleared by goats would cost half a billion dollars. And then there's the Cleveland National Forest, the Los Padres National Forest and the San Bernardino National forest, just within a hundred miles, all with pretty similar vegetation. It takes 70 goats four days to go through one acre. That's 180 million goat days to cover the Angeles National Forest.
How many goats do you envision the federal government contracting with?