California Wildfires - San Diego Area

You're absolutely right. In reality the only thing that will end the West's extreme fire danger and slow down the beetle infestations is an end to the drought through sustained moisture. West of here in pinion & juniper country over 80% of the trees are already dead in some places. Mesa Verde Natl Park has had four years of successive, lightning sparked fires and the devastation is incredible.

Frankly, I'm not sure how one would go about clearing all these trees. There's a couple out West of here that have taken extreme measure to save the pinions on their B&B ranch, but its' a full time job for both of them. Not enough people or resources to do the job, so let's pray for rain.

I just read a story on one of the news pages where someone was raising hell about the lack of response by air tankers. According to the story, a police chopper spotted the Cedar fire when it was still a small outbreak. He called for an air drop but the drop was refused because the tankers had just been grounded due to winds. The implication was that the rules should have been ignored and the drop made anyway. People who think like that should have to fly with those guys on the drop runs!

Watch the videos of some of those tanker runs and see if you think those jockeys would be scared off by 'just a little wind" or poor visibility. The air tanker crews are the "real jeepers" among pilots

- talk about off-road challenges! Anytime you see accidents where the pilots pull the wings off you know they have modified the cockpits with extra room for the balls they sport. Asking them to fly when conditions are beyond what THEY consider safe would border on criminal.

OK, you can have the soap box back - rant over.

Clear cutting has not been in the logging business for a long time. They also clear out the under brush, dead trees and thin while working the area. I can show you areas in AZ that have been logged years ago next to areas that have not been logged for a long time if ever. The logged area will look more like old growth then the older growth. You are correct in that the fires used to clear an area and leave the big trees and thin the forest. To me if we can log it and help our economy and the results are pretty much the same I would rather see logging then smoke. The anti-recreationists have called for nothing over a 13" log to be cut. Did you even wonder why? This is the point where logging makes zero money. If they hold the line at 13" it about guarantees no cutting will happen as the Forest Service and Tax payers usually do not want to pay for the clearing. JMHO Jim F.

Sorry to butt in here. Robert's post was very eloquent and nails the heart of the issue. Her in Southwest Colorado we're experiencing all of the same issues that have affected Southern California and have led to this catastrophe. We had our disaster last year, the 70,000 acre Missionary Ridge fire north & east of Durango. While our fire certainly was exacerbated by the recent drought, the areas that burned were so overgrown as to be impenetrable. Hunters will tell you that even the game animals are not found there because the thicket provides no passage or forage.

Indeed, wildland interface issues, the policy of rapid suppression of any and all fires over the past 100 years, and as were beetle-killed trees, etc. are all factors, but, the fact remains these are not natural forests and the conditions under which we currently live require a solution above & beyond the environmentalists "you may not log, let it burn" mantra. Here in our area most of the forests where catastrophic fires have run wild were at one time heavily harvested, and then excessively replanted. The result is a dense canopy of skinny, unhealthy trees. Removing the little bastards to a much smaller density will permit the remaining trees to grow rapidly and will reduce the risk of massive crown fires.

To do this we have to cut the damn trees down, the enviros have used every legal maneuver they can to prevent this and many of us thus put the problem squarely at their fanciful, idealist feet.

Indeed, the goal of most environmental groups is the complete destruction of the logging industry. That's why they fight every logging proposal so vigorously, even violently. In the process they're killing the very forests they say they're trying to protect. In short, they're getting a very well deserved comeuppance. The only good that will come of the recent disasters is that common sense MAY be allowed to run the forests again, not this bunch of extremists.

After our fire here in Durango last year the community is organizing to reduce hazard fuels and thin private property adjacent to risk-prone areas of the National Forest. To our shock we've learned there is not enough logging infrastructure left in the area to accommodate even a fraction of what needs to be done on private land, much less the National Forests & BLM lands. All but a few of the logging operations that for years worked in this area are gone, just a few mom 7 pop mills remain and their capabilities are miniscule. As a result we're having to basically beg people to handle the process themselves, and you know what that's going to bring.

Right, Will. Last year we watched the tanker pilots handle for days flying right over our homes at tree top levels, buffeted all over by 30 - 40 mph winds, yet still making pin point drops. Sadly we lost two crews last year in crashes where the aging planes' wings came off. Most folks don;t know, but the newest planes in the fleet are C-130s and Orions from the mid -60's. The Privateer (single tail Navy version of the WWII Liberator) that crashed up near Estes Park rolled off the line in 1945! Expecting them to fly in that wind would have been unreasonable.

What I learned last year from the pilots fighting the Missionary Ridge fire here was that while the planes make the initial drops to mark and hold fire lines where the fires are making fast runs, the real heavy lifting in terms of suppression is done by the big Skycrane and other helicopters, which can pinpoint drop their loads.

These pilots (as well as all the firefighters) are real heroes, take your hats of to 'em!

I agree completely.

Nobody is to blame for the state of the forests. This is natures way and a good fire to kill bugs and to turn dead wood into nutrients for new trees is the way it should be. If anything is wrong it is people building houses where they should be jeepin'

Not exactly, preventing all fires for 60+ years has created huge impassable areas where the density of fuel is extremely hazardous. Instead of a light fire blasting thru and leaving the trees, we get these infernos that burn everything. After the Darby fire here, they have begun thinning the forests around the polulated areas. It looks like hell for a while, but it restores the forest to where it would have been without our "help", considerably lowers the danger of catastrophic fires, and gives convicts something to do. After 2 years, the thinned areas look great.

Forest fires are a natural thing and except where homes or lives are at stake, should be allowed to burn. Otherwise brush can choke out tree growth. It's a fact that some trees require a fire to even germinate, fire actually encourages them to germinate. Here's just one site that briefly discusses it...

Approximately 11/2/03 08:48, Paul Calman uttered for posterity:

It isn't just the total fire prevention. It is also the rabid opposition to any and all forms of thinning because somehow someone got it in their head that doing what anyone would do to a garden is somehow morally wrong when applied to the larger garden that is a job/money/habitat producing forest. Similar policy damn near killed off the big Montana deer herds in the late 40's and 50's due to disease from overcrowding and lack of sufficient predators. And now it is killing off the forests, the domestic timber industry, and even less excuseable--the lives and properties of the folks who choose to live in and near forested lands. Not that I've ever been able to detect sentient thought in a greenie, but wonder if they ever stopped to consider that the old wildfires tended to wipe out entire state's worth of forests and inhabitants. And worse, many of the old managed fires were set deliberately by the early inhabitants of this country as hunting and/or warfare tactics. All you have to do is ask any native american who knows their own history to be able to confirm that indeed the indians here have been setting fires on purpose for centuries before the europeans arrived.

Approximately 11/2/03 08:53, Jerry Bransford uttered for posterity:

The biggest issue I have with this "natural" kick is that it is both factually inaccurate but also extremely dismissive of human and animal life. You cannot have humans living in an area where there are wildfires--the humans cannot survive them and neither can the animals. And those "natural" wildfires so beloved of the greenies were mostly set by the native americans for hunting and warfare...a fact easily verified simply by asking anyone who is native american and old enough to remember [e.g. my grandmother]. The others were typically lightning fires, spread in the underbrush until they could crown into the trees. And damned destructive, taking centuries to recover.

Yes, lodgepole pine uses fire to germinate. An alternative is selective pruning and logging. If you want big healthy trees, the only way to get them is to trim out the overcrowding. Redwoods sort of do this naturally by simply shutting out the sunlight of lower trees. Unfortunately this process takes centuries and while it is in process, the forest becomes not only impenetrable, but the number of species of other plants and animals that can live in an overcrowded juvenile redwood forest is extremely small. It is only when the taller trees manage to actually starve out most of the smaller trees [over centuries] that you end up with the postcard class redwood forests, where the trees actually have space between them, there is sunlight reaching the forest floor, and a goodly variety of other species of plant and animal living amongst the few remaining big giants. Worse, fire don't help in a juvenile redwood forest, as the trees are unable to grow big enough to build up the thick bark layers that makes them pretty much immune to fire.

And for redwoods you can substitute Douglas fir [which is actually larger than a redwood on average], Ponderosa, Cedar, Larch, etc. etc. The only healthy forests in western Montana are those where the lumber companies *used* to be able to go in with Forest Service supervision and remove a small number of the excess trees, all diseased trees, etc. and leave the remaining ones room to grow even bigger, healthier, and like any very large evergreen, pretty much immune to smaller wildfires. Some of these trimmed trees were used for pulp, the others for lumber. All it takes is timber companies that plan to be there in a generation that will trim rather than clear cut [which also ruins salmon and trout habitat]. Those companies have been out there, the timber is a bit more expensive since you have to leave lotsa trees and maneouver the cut ones around them, but the trees themselves that are left prosper,,,as do the small and game animals in those few areas where forests managed like this remain.

The other old common practice was to remove *most* of the underbrush, leaving clusters of such for habitat for animals as well as seed stock for the plants that form it.

Think about it, have you ever seen an abandoned garden, orchard, or farm? How healthy did the plants look?

Great post, Lon. Case in point, prior to 2002 the largest fire in Colorado history was the Coal Bank fire in the late 1870's, 26,000 acres. Last year the Hayman fire was over 150k acres, and the Missionary Ridge fire consumed

Indeed, fire suppression has played a significant role in the forests becoming overgrown, but the inability to log without costly delays due to green litigation has decimated forestry infrastructure, which as I mentioned previously, is really the radicals' goal. These monstrous blazes are virtually unprecedented and are only going to get worse unless people of good sense are allowed to take control of the forests again.

The Ute Tribes here in southwest Colorado say they traditionally burned overgrown areas of the San Juans in order to reduce fire danger and provide grazing areas for game. They also refute the greens "leave it untouched" thesis, claiming man actually can improve the forests through sensible management.

Approximately 11/2/03 10:47, Gerald G. McGeorge uttered for posterity:

Yeah, about the only really decent timber left around Montana is all on indian land, where they have the freedom to simply ignore misplaced city boys who have never seen a garden or a tree filing lawsuits over issues they haven't a clue about. The indian managed trees are big, healthy, disease free [which tends to happen naturally if the trees are given enough free room to grow]. The rest of the humongous timber stands that used to be so healthy even just half a century ago aren't doing too good, and worse even the logging companies that never have done clearcut in their lives aren't too healthy either...most are bankrupt due to the goddam lawsuits keeping the forestry service from allowing pruning. And Montana also has thousands of miles of burnt timber that *could* be used for commercial use and then the land replanted, but the greenies are filing lawsuits to prevent *both* activities and the result is predicted to be an ecological disaster for the wildlife of biblical proportions. None of the lawsuit filers are natives, and many aren't even legal residents.