“The Sunday Morning Bray”, by Bray!
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Galatians 5:1
Oregon is used to two to five hundred square mile forest fires with their blast furnace heat, but it has never had one race through a community like the Paradise CA fire. Oregon is the American Outback where there are only four million people living in over a hundred thousand square miles. Most of the state except the western one third is barely populated so forest fires only destroy forests not people and houses.
When the Paradise fire is fully revealed there is likely to be between 500-1000 or more people burned to death and nearly 9,000 homes destroyed. It has made over 35,000 people homeless as it burned an entire town full of people to the ground. The roads leaving the town were clogged as they were one lane windy roads leading out of the community with only a couple leading out.
Many of the people were elderly and either had no knowledge of the fire or if they did were to slow to escape. Some of the more rural areas of the town had no path out and there are going to be hundreds found in their cars incinerated. Emergency responders are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best which can go up to perhaps 2-3,000 killed making this one of the deadliest natural disaster in America and certainly the deadliest fire in modern times.
The entire town of 35,000 has been destroyed in a matter of hours as a small fire fed by strong winds turned it into a deadly fire storm creating fire tornadoes which swept through the forested canyons. These fires are no longer the cleansing fires you would find in the pre-spotted owl fires, these are fourteen hundred degree blast furnaces that melt metal and houses explode from the heat. These fires are hot enough to melt lead as they travel at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour leapfrogging in front of itself looking for more abundant fuel these forests are filled with.
This town is devastated both physically and mentally. There is no place for them to live as tens of thousands who were living in their houses two weeks ago are now living in tents as the winter closes in around them. There is nowhere for them to live as the apartments have been taken in the surrounding hundred miles so people are camping out in any yard or garage they can find to take shelter. Unlike a hurricane, there is nothing to go back to, it is all burned.
This would have never happened thirty years ago when the forests were properly managed and cared for. Now the forests are churches to worship in and not to manage. The dirt worshipers have taken over the forests and now they are dead and dying as a result leaving nothing more than a devastating fire waiting to happen. The deer, elk and wildlife are all dead now thanks to the Sierra Club and their partner groups who have made the forests off limits to real forestry management.
Prior to 1965 and the Endangered Species Act which was passed to destroy the lumber industry and did, the forests were producing bountiful amounts of lumber and was the healthiest they ever had been. The forests were rotated and healthy as the new growth was thinned and trimmed to make for the healthiest trees possible while the wildlife thrived. The waters and soils were clean as the trees held the water and filtered it with a sustainable yield as the main goal of the forest service. Fire damage has grown every year since the Act was passed.
Forest fires were maintained as there were fire breaks as well as tree spacing so if a fire did go through it could be stopped or slowed while the trees were spaced to not give the fires a chance to slow and be fought. The undergrowth and down trees were removed to prevent what we have now which is downed logs creating fuel for the fire making a monstrous campfire. The forest service now has an oil field spilling on the ground waiting for a match.
When they took the forest industry out of the forests they eliminated the only entity with the power to properly manage such a large area. There is no way to thin and manage millions of square miles without the heavy machinery to remove dead and dying trees to keep the healthy ones growing. Now you cannot walk through the forest do to dense growth and fallen trees lying everywhere, becoming fuel for the next fire. At this rate the forests will be gone in twenty years.
The answer to this problem is to get rid of the Endangered Species Act which is nothing more than a political tool to promote a Marxist country and sell the land. There is no reason for the Federal Gummit to own over fifty percent of the West. This is just another example like the VA, Medicare, Obamacare and every other DC central planned boondoggle only worse. The gummit is the problem and private ownership is the solution.
If people could come in and take care of their corner of the forest the way it should be managed the forests would be healthier than ever within ten years. Selling large tracks to the forest industry would not only clean up these forests of the dead trees on the ground and begin rotating forests it would bring badly needed revenues to the schools and roads in the rural areas. These forests could provide building products for not only America but worldwide as these are the best construction woods in the world. The forests are an oil field which is not allowed to be drilled due to the worship of the forests. Not only is it an oil field it is an oil reserve that refills every twenty to thirty years. During the heaviest harvesting prior to the Spotted Owl fraud Oregon was on a 500 year sustainability cycle and now we have better forest science than we did then.
If America had proper forest management these fires would never happen. The fires would be the lower heat variety, which are not devastating and easier to extinguish. There would be fire blocks around cities and towns and would be fuel management inside those communities. Now the REOs require more trees not less and it takes an act of Congress to remove one thanks to the tree huggers which complicated the Paradise fire.
If the Fed was serious about the Western fires they would be turning these forests over to the states to be sold or given to people to manage them properly. The ownership would lend itself to immediate improvement and the forests would be on the path to better health. The states would begin receiving revenues on land they are forced to spend resources on with no return. This would turn the revenue streams from outgoing to incoming and giving hundreds of thousands of people jobs and lifestyles they only dreamed of.
America has to choose if they want to continue to worship the forests or do they want to manage them. Do they want to be good stewards of God’s creation or are they going to continue to worship it. America is now worshiping the forests since it is part of Mother Earth and people and wildlife are dying from their worship. Which is it America walking deeper into the darkness or turn back to the Light?
Pray for America
Note: The above opinion is not necessarily my own, but FReeper Bray’s. If you wish to discuss this, please ping Bray.
This would have never happened thirty years ago when the forests were properly managed and cared for. Now the forests are churches to worship in and not to manage. The dirt worshipers have taken over the forests and now they are dead and dying as a result leaving nothing more than a devastating fire waiting to happen. The deer, elk and wildlife are all dead now thanks to the Sierra Club and their partner groups who have made the forests off limits to real forestry management.
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Ironically, the state of California has a gas tax that yields between 700 and a billion bucks per year.A paltry 30 million is thrown at the environment. A trickle of what is taken in.
Show me a more important place for the money than removing brush from trees that create what bray has so eloquently shown happens with no forest mgmt. the overall solution however is as bray suggests get the mgmt. out of all forests nation wide out of the hands of govt. and into the hands of private enterprise. when i was in college in the 60's even back then companies like weyerhauser https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/ in the tree business at the time planted ten trees for everyone they harvested.They were managed impeccably and the world was a better place for it.
Gov. moonbeam is to blame for these fires and the death of countless Californians.
Ironically, moonbeam will undoubtedly ask the federal govt. for money to rebuild what he tore down! And even more ironically he will probably get it!!
Just another warning for those who have half a brain this is what happens when liberals run anything! Pure chaos from top to bottom. People are harmed or worse yet as in this case killed.
Endangered Species Act This particular piece of legislation, used to "protect" things like the snail darter or some grouse, took productive land out of use and imposed almost a Soviet Style Aral sea level of destruction.
Funny how the Lefties wish to protect snail darters, birds like the Osprey but are more than willing to set up concentration camp like bird killing machines called Wind Farms and Solar Panel farms.
Once again doubling down on Aral Sea / Chernobyl level of destruction
There have to be some memes made with Smokey the Bear with appropriate messages of the culprits of the fires (libs, Sierra Club, Moonbeam, et al)...
I have heard memes are incredibly effective and escape NSA data tracking.
Thanks for that comprehensive description of the power of these fires. They are like a hurricane with that speed but instead of rain it’s lethal flames. The MSM won’t define it that way as it would heighten the reality of a need for a managed approach as you describe with a high degree of private not governmental bureaucracy.
The other question to the Dirt Worshipers is how much Carbon went up into the atmosphere from forest fires?
Where is Algore on that one, course they really don’t care about Global Warming other than moving their Marxist agenda.