Poor forestry management is what most contributes to wildfires. If you put out every little fire so the fuel can build up then you get an explosive and uncontrolled wildfire just like what happened all over California.
Controlled burns every year are the way to go. The native Americans used to do this and it worked great for them.
Maybe Blacktop the whole state.
You have four factors:
1. In this region, it typically doesn’t rain much from March to October, with the bulk of the 26 inches a year in the winter months.
2. There’s a high pressure system on the eastern side of the state...blowing air over the mountain in a westward fashion. When it arrives in the Napa Valley area....it bring warmer winds, thus drying out things.
3. Intense house building over the past thirty years in the valley. Anyone who had real money and worked in San Francisco....wanted a house in this region.
4. Then we come to forest management. People want to see real growth and they think that’s the beauty of forests. Well, if you consider the dry conditions for seven months out of the year....it’d make more sense to trim everything back. National Forest Service won’t do that because it frustrates people who complain about the ‘look’.
I would agree on the controlled burns but if you bring this up with folks, they get all hyper that you are causing beauty to disappear.
Or Cali could disband their air quality board, then let private companies clear out all the dead underbrush and sell it for firewood. That would help lessen the fires, too, as well as not requiring a permit to cut down every goddamn tree.
Poor forestry management is what most contributes to wildfires.
Arizona learned the same lesson the hard way back in the early 2000’s. For many years we had tree-hugging @sses in government (Ex: Governor Butchie Napolitano) and her lesbian friends in the Sierra Club running the show. We had massive build-ups of falling trees and branches on the forest floors, no thinning of very dense forests at all. The wildfire fuel building up on the forest floors was unprecedented.
We had three massive wild fires burning nearly one million acres in 2002 and 2011. Then FINALLY Arizonans rose up and demanded better forest management from our state and federal government. In all of this, the elitist lesbian @ssholes in the Arizona Sierra Club were the biggest villains. People were so angry that the Sierra Club had to shut down their Phoenix office and go into hiding for a while.
Now, thanks to two good Republican governors and to publicly shaming/attacking the Sierra Club, we now have good forest resource management. The Arizona Sierra Club was told to sit down, shut up, and stay out of the way. Things have been much better ever since then.