Posted on 09/22/2020 7:26:18 PM PDT by artichokegrower
How to manage forest to prevent fires is known. They just don’t do it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/22/science/how-a-forest-stopped-a-fire-in-its-tracks.html
How a Forest Stopped a Fire in Its Tracks
By JAMES GORMAN
Published: July 22, 2003
SUSANVILLE, Calif.— Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the base of some of the charred trunks — the leavings of bark beetles — and flecks of green where new growth pokes above the ash.
Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living forest, they come to an abrupt transition.
September’s blaze was named the Cone Fire, for the hill where it was first thought to have begun. It burned 2,000 acres of Lassen National Forest, and 1,600 of those were in Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest, a 10,000-acre area within Lassen set up in 1934 for ecological study by the Forest Service.
When the Cone Fire swept through these woods it came to a patch of forest that was different from the rest, and stopped dead, like a mime at an invisible wall. What stopped the fire was an experimental plot that had been selectively logged to thin it, and had been burned in controlled fashion. The result was an open forest, much the way it might have been 500 years ago when regular forest fires swept through the high dry country and no one tried to stop them.
‘’It just stopped,’’ Carl N. Skinner said, looking satisfied but almost surprised. Mr. Skinner, a geographer with the Forest Service at the Redding Silviculture Laboratory in Redding, Calif., and Dr. Steve Zack, a conservation scientist with the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, along with other Forest Service colleagues, are showing a reporter the results of an accidental experiment that still impresses them each time they visit it.
‘’Night and day,’’ Dr. Zack said.
‘’If we hadn’t treated this it would have just blown right through this area,’’ Mr. Skinner said.
Excerpt more at link
Piles of slash do not add to the forest fires and are usually burned the following year after they dry out.
2003 - that was way back when you could still publish truth in a US newspaper without 10,000 Twitterbots screaming for your head.
I know, it’s quite amazing - the NYT had a truthful article. I used to have another article a bit more scientific but have lost it (on a usb someplace?), maybe I’ll try some searching again.
They know exactly what to do. And President Trump ordered the BLM, in his first year, to make reducing fuel loads in the national forests top priority. Nothing done around my area. Foot dragging environazi embeds? laziness? passing the buck? Who knows.
But they can lop and lay, I believe is the correct term. Or chipper shred. They don’t want to do it because they it costs more money. Residents asked about it.
Ours is a very high fire danger area and I am 3 miles from the Slater fire and just got off of 2 weeks of Evac level 2. Piles of slash do indeed burn very nicely and the kinds of fuels that help forest fires spread and get bad, along with bushes, dead fallen limbs/trees, weeds and grass.
Slash piles are normally burned in a controlled burn with no debris around them. This is the proper way to manage forests and replant the clear cut.
These forests are much healthier than the dead and dying ones you have in most Western forests. Look up sustainable forests.
Did you see the article I posted? I have been reading up on what’s wrong with forest management since the Biscuit Fire in 2002. I’ve seen what happens with slash piles around here; I am surrounded by timberland on all sides. Sometimes slash piles burn out of control and FF are called in. Lop and lay is another very good way, a nearby friend used to work for the USFS and we’ve discussed a lot of stuff.
Logging in June or July as was done here, and leaving the drying slash all summer, was a bad idea. It was Boise Cascade, not BLM. Down the road a bit BLM left their big piles of slash and neighbor asked for a (can’t remember the exact word) to extract fire wood, type of permit. Not that he really needed firewood, but he wanted to reduce huge piles of fuel next to his property. USFS used to issue permits to people to cut firewood. They refused his request as they didn’t want to have to pay a USFS employee to deal with it.
Even the natives managed forest better than that “genius Governor”
According this article, the Natives were quite apt to manage the forests to great results. Unfortunately they caught European diseases and mostly died out well before US settlers ever show up in the West. So, when the settlers finally showed up, the forests were already unmanaged for a while (like for 200 years)!
I guess the fires are caused by smallpox!?
When I was doing a bunch of research on this topic (which I can’t do again right now sadly, as it is a lively current topic, and I wish I’d saved it all carefully), I found an account from the early 1900s, in IIRC WA state, of an old Native woman who came back to the area she had grown up in. She was shocked to see it was all overgrown with bushes, small trees, etc. She described that when she was a girl and young adult, they burned the area every few years to burn out the undesirable plants and keep the forest healthy.
So I’m not sure about no Natives on the west coast. It’s a fascinating topic and I will look into it again when I can. I remember finding maps of where the western forests had been burned by Ma Nature from lightning, and areas where Natives had managed them.
This article contains a picture of the Old Forest 1905.
Not too many trees, wide open grassland. No underbrush. No dead wood on the ground (some recently died tree is still standing there).
Large, healthy trees usually do not catch fire in this kind of forest so fire here is just cleaning the grass and the deadwood.
Thank you for your research.
Last year(?) I did some research on Forest Management on the interwebs. The SE USA has VERY few forest fires in spite of having large amounts of forests.
It wasn’t always like that, they used to have huge amounts of fires as well years ago. Then they figured out how to manage their forests.
Yes,
SE forests are mostly private.
So they can be scientifically managed.
SW forests are managed by good feelings.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.