The Rake

As someone who actually lives near Paradise and the fire zone, part of the problem is that the Cali greens have this wrong idea about forests. They put out all the fires, allowing a massive build up of biomass. They prevented the harvesting of deadwood - not just tree thinning. The tree density is around 40 trees per acre* instead of a much more healthy 15 or so. They ignored the devastation of an invasive beetle that made that dense forest have many dead trees, refusing to use pesticides to kill the beetle or remove the dead trees.

"It's natural, don't you see" said the greens. Yet the prevented the summer wildfires for years. Decades. They couldn't see the forest for the trees. The dense, dying trees.

So...

40 trees per acre, many of them dead. The ground piled with decades of leaf litter, dry brush, and deadwood. Think about that, my Nordic chums.

Now in California we have a Mediterranean climate. That means during the winter months we get rain and cold, and the three other seasons are dry with very hot summers. My Nordic friends this is NOT a taiga forest.

I mean it's not like a lot of Californians did not point out the problem. Yell and scream about it even, especially those of us who live near those forests in the less fashionable parts of the state. But our politics are weighted by population and the two vast cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles have nearly all the votes in our legislature. They don't live near forests. They visit them to protest loggers and hug trees. So they stopped any harvests, any clearings, and any new roads through the forests. They shot down the logging industries in all the small, unfashionable towns far away from them.

One spark. A downed power line, or the hot exhaust pipe of a car pulled on the road side. All that wood. Dry wood built up after years. Whoosh. No firebreaks. No roads to get to the fires. The dry autumn winds of a California autumn.

78 confirmed dead so far. The lucky asphyxiated before they burned to death. The unlucky didn't. 300+ still missing. My friends and family are the lucky ones - a house can be rebuilt.

I hope that maybe, just maybe, the rest of my fellow Californians change their minds and their legislators minds about forest management. Maybe allow some, I dunno, logging? Clearing out reasonable amounts of deadwood? Creating service roads to access the deep forest? It's not like we don't know how to manage a forest.

*An acre is one chain by one furlong for you metric people out there, AKA the rest of the world ;-)

@ZilWerks Finland have much more forests roads per forest square kilometer than Sweden which is partly why my dear neighbors handled the forest fires better than us this summer. As a bonus they are also good for the tourism industry. But is a road density like Finlands practically possible in Sweden and California? It must be cheaper to make roads around the lakes of Finland than in the mountains of California.

'@Rogers'' #9801339' Finland has a dense road network close to Russian border, and that place is nothing but a forest growing out of granite. To do anything in that place you'll have to cut and blast.

Obvious solutions are to have non-critical part of network as dirt-only roads and optimize pathing in a way that makes you do only enough blasting to supply rubble for leveling the rest of the way with embankment. Plus, utility roads probably have different safety standards, so they can turn harder and go up and down much more than what is usually acceptable for civilian transport.

@comrade_Comrade Roads almost always go around hills and mountains, even where there is a strong logging industry. Why should the Californians invest in expensive mountain roads for the logging industry when it's cheaper to do so in flatter parts of the world? And even if they could afford it I doubt it would be enough to stop forest fires with Finnish methods. California is just too hot and dry.

'@Rogers' "Roads almost always go around hills and mountains, even where there is a strong logging industry."
I'm pretty sure that someone in Finland figured out how to lay a passable road in terrain like theirs, it will be possible in California too.

"Why should the Californians invest in expensive mountain roads for the logging industry when it's cheaper to do so in flatter parts of the world?"
Because for some reason Californians want to live in a state that catches so much fire that Japanese wanted to use it as a weapon during WWII.

"And even if they could afford"
Well, apparently they can afford $10 billion loss from the fire just in this year alone.

"it I doubt it would be enough to stop forest fires with Finnish methods."
Last time I've checked, Finland and California had approximately same laws of physics.
Unless something has changed, fire needs fuel and oxidizer. While plenty of people would like to remove oxygen from at least the most obnoxious parts of California, selective removal of fuel would probably be the most practical way to reduce the spread of fires.

"California is just too hot and dry."
And Hawaii just had too much of a volcano. People have three choices: 1) live somewhere safer, 2) live in places like that and make an effort to mitigate the risk sufficiently, 3) die a horrible burning death and/or lose all possessions once in a while.

Obvious issue that people pretend to pick 2, but do a shit job at it and go straight to 3.

Also:
https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-dpt-me-lb-utility-undergrounding-20160927-story.html
Republican proposing a government intervention in private business, Democratic governor of Commiefornia fighting against excessive regulation. Inconceivable!

@comrade_Comrade Finland is cold an wet and have a network of forest roads and that still don't stop forest fires to spread now and then. Forest roads up in the hot, dry Californian mountains would not stop the firestorms that have always been a part of the Californian climate. Obviously the Californians have not considered roads built for just that purpose cost effective thus far.

If you choose to live close to a volcano or dry forest you risk getting burned.

Don't be surprised if Democrats and Republicans don't act as you expect them to. Like most political parties in the world they are opportunists above all.

'@Rogers' cold and wet is irrelevant, once fire starts it dries up fuel in it's path. Russia's Far East lies in temperate climate zone, forest fires got much worse there thanks to increasingly dysfunctional forestry and firefighting efforts.

"If you choose to live close to a volcano or dry forest you risk getting burned."
If you live in temperate climate, you risk freezing to death in winter. If you live in tropical climate, you risk dying to poisonous insects and animals or parasites. If you live outside of the city you risk being killed by wild animals. If you live in a city, you risk being killed by people.
Risks can and should be managed.

"Forest roads up in the hot, dry Californian mountains would not stop the firestorms"
In case of Anthony Hopkins' house, it looks like a well-maintained lawn was fairly effective at stopping the fire. That was a joke. Maybe.

If local climate makes 10-meter wide gap in vegetation insufficient, it doesn't mean that this gap won't work. It means that you might need to make that gap 20-meter wide. If that's done, making a road of compacted dirt in the middle of that gap is a trivial additional expense where terrain allows it.

"Obviously the Californians have not considered roads built for just that purpose cost effective thus far."
Cost effectiveness doesn't seem to stand in the way of California's state legislation.
If you want to make an argument that bulldozing a fire-break lines through the forest and clearing vegetation near power lines and populated areas is more expensive than taking billions of dollars of property damage every year, I'd like to see some numbers on that.
Don't forget that California already has cap-and-trade legislation in place.

Right now it looks like California's governor is a moron who let his subordinates fail at their job of risk assessment and mitigation, vetoed the bill aimed at increasing safety regulation, but keeps collecting significant amount of carbon tax dollars without addressing actual issues like deficient water infrastructure or fire hazards, while blaming climate change for everything. Come think of it, it's something I expect from Californian Democrat.

@comrade_Comrade
"Finland has a dense road network close to Russian border"

Someone has been keeping an eye on things.
Just as someone else kept eyes on the Saaristomeri shipping lines.
I suppose the key is to keep the forest roads near the border mined, just in case.

'@ThorsomeTarmukas' Finland joined Ottawa treaty in 2011. Really smart move, right?

@Rogers If you do not have water, then you use sand to cut out the oxygen. And you plough safety barriers into the ground.

@ZilWerks This comic was a sort of straw for me; it made me look into what Finland actually does do WRT forest management. I found this handy page: https://mmm.fi/en/forest-management-practices
In it, there is a sequence of two very telling sentences: "Younger commercially managed forests are typically thinned out periodically, with some 25−30% of the trees removed during thinning. The increasing demand for wood for bioenergy has created new markets for the trees cut during such thinnings, and for logging residues such as branches and stumps which earlier used to be left in the forest."
That sounds an awful lot like the practices of thinning (it says so explicitly) and raking (clearing debris from the forest floor). I get that there are cultural and linguistic nuances at play here, as well as political posturing. But, really, exactly what you want in California is exactly what Finland does, even if they don't call it raking.
I live in Washington (state). Our wildfire areas have a bit more self-control than you guys do... but still not enough; we need thinning and raking as well.
And, for everyone who thinks that anyone is talking about individual citizens going out there with garden rakes and clearing the forest floor; that is not what anyone is talking about. Here's a picture from the USDA website showing a (fairly small) forest raking setup: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_MEDIA/stelprdb5177289.jpg

@merpius There are also plenty of national parks in Finland. From what some people here have been saying, it sounds like the wilderness in California is one huge national park, so forest management ought to be very limited, to keep the natural state. Of course occasional fires are also a part of the natural state. Commercial forests (tree farms) have been increasing over here lately because agriculture isn't overly profitable/competitive as far up north as Finland is. So, there are more and more forests closer to residential areas, but they aren't very combustible forests.

On the other hand there are also lots of mismanaged forests owned by estates (progeny of dead people) that pay no attention to them. They can be completely lacking thinning and look quite miserable, and won't produce prime lumber, although they would obviously still produce biomass of variable quality, good enough for pulp or future biofuels, I guess.

@Louhikaarme Yes, 57% of California's 33 Million Acres of forest is owned by the federal government and thus not managed by California. It is instead managed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), or National Park Service depending on the area. Literally only 3% is managed by local and State government. https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2018/3798/fig2.png
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3798

The original commenter seems really pissed at the State Legislation when they don't even control that land.

@ZilWerks

I thought that sort of mentality in terms of 'protecting' the forests and natural habitats had gone out the window in the 60's or 70's! Surprising that some people are still stuck in such an outdated and frankly stupid mindset. As you say fires happen naturally so if you just stop small ones then your will get bigger ones sooner or later.

@stevep59 Nope. Was definitely still going strong in the '80s and '90s when I was growing up.

Every summer, the news would be full of stories about California going up in flames. I finally asked Dad why we only hear about California and sometimes Texas but not anywhere else, like where we live.

Dad said it was basically two things. First, that California is a lot drier and so fires are easier to start. Second, people aren't allowed to protect their homes against fire. There was even a news bit around that time that said a neighborhood was prevented from building a fire break because they'd disturb *gophers.*

It's the sort of micro-focused stupidity that seriously turned me off of conservation for years. So many of these groups, certainly the ones that are loud enough to affect public policy, cry and scream for actions that are counter-productive to the end goal.

By the way, if you want to get involved in conservation, I highly recommend you find a local group of hunters. These are people who have a personal stake in not just preserving, but maintaining wild spaces and animal populations. Even trophy hunting, those photos of people posing next to a lion or some other large, exotic animal they killed, helps conservation when done legally. The fees help fund parks and security for the locals against damage to their crops and livestock. The animals themselves are specifically tagged as problem animals. A rhino that's gone mad and killed half a dozen other rhinos, for instance, or a lion that's been kicked out of his pride and has started making trouble for a local village. *Much* better than letting things get out of control and having a bunch of angry villagers shoot anything that gets close.

@Brigid

Damn that's stupid. Wwen I was a child in the late 60's we would occasionally get a programme on BBC, from Canada but can't remember what it was called, about forest rangers and their efforts to stop even small fires. Then about a decade later that was actually reference in a documentary where they were pointing out it was realised this allowed the build up of a lot of deadwood and meant that large, uncontrolled fires were inevitable eventually, so they were now moving to allow such small fires to prevent this.

Not into hunting myself and no real scope in Britain. It can, if done properly have some valuable benefits for the locals and local conservation but its also vulnerable to exploitation with important animals that should be protected being killed. The old problem of human corruptibility that always plagues us.

@stevep59 Definitely stupid, but that's the state of conservation in the USA.

I don't hunt, either. Fish, yeah, but I don't think I'd be able to shoot anything warm-blooded. My brother-in-law, most of my uncles, and just about every other male in this area does, though. *Not* allowing hunting is just as prone to abuse and mismanagement. The correct course of action depends a lot on local factors like culture, religion, and resources. Big game hunting in Africa has *helped* conservation in some countries (largely by providing income for the locals, thus giving them an incentive to protect their resources) and seriously hurt in others (mostly in what are called 'kleptocracies,' of which there are far too many).

Point is, having a bunch of folks in Europe and America dictate conservation policy for an entire *continent* that they aren't even familiar with is not just profoundly conceited, but smacks of colonialism.

@Brigid

I think you hit the nail on the head with the problem of corruption being the key issue, plus that in many states too many rulers/leaders have little concern for the needs of their own people - which unfortunately speaking as a Brit isn't just a problem in Africa. Properly managed hunting can help if there are decent returns for the locals and its kept fairly limited, especially not too many of the big males being killed off it weakens the local herds/packs and their social structure too much. Unfortunately they do be the preferred targets of many game hunters. However killing more of the older and infirmed could actually be done with minimal damage to the overall conservation rates.

@stevep59 Exactly. I read a National Geographic article recently that did a pretty good job showing both sides even though the writer clearly favored the 'no hunting ever' option. The oddest thing was that he specifically mentioned that the particular hunting party he was following had local trackers who specifically picked out male elephants that were within a year of dying from old age. This is odd because much later in the article he talks about how all elephant groups, not just families headed by a matriarch, rely on the knowledge of their elders to find water, food, and avoid danger, thus making the practices of these hunting groups bad, apparently.

Except the old elephant that was shot was *dying.* The herd would need a new elder in a few months, anyway. Also, old and infirm members of *any* species are prime targets for predators besides us (plus juveniles, which generally aren't targeted by human hunters). The whole issue is seriously skewed by focusing on abuses and what I often call 'big city hick' mentality. Basically, that near total separation between their everyday lives and what nature is actually *like* that causes so many to freak out at the very *idea* of hunting. Or keeping livestock. Or... ugh, I could go on for *days.*

@Brigid

That is a good sign that there are hunting parties that target those who would normally be killed by nature anyway.

I think in the west especially many people are increasingly divorced from real life in terms of the realities of even where food comes from. I'm the son of a smallholder farmer and a farm labourer but very much a 'townie' myself.

@stevep59 And that divorce started a long time ago. Grandpa had a story of some city-slicker asking 'who milks the cows' while pointing at a field full of pigs.

I technically count as a 'townie,' too, since I grew up in town. A small town where it's not unusual for large farm equipment to roll down the streets, but still a town. We'd also visit a couple of Mom's friends on their farm during the summer. We lovingly harassed so many animals.

@Brigid

Very true, I've heard stories like that as well, especially in recent years as education standards decline and people have got more divorced from the real world. I could have a go at milking a cow if necessary, although I would pity the cow but I would definitely know not to try it with a bull, let alone a pig. ;)

@stevep59 It's not just education standards. A lot of urbanites just don't *leave* their concrete and manicured lawn enclaves. On the rare occasions that they do, it's to some resort with carefully maintained beaches and 'nature trails' that are all within sight of a coffee shop. And then they go on about how sensitive they are to nature. It's not enough to get wood flooring, it has to be 'sustainable' wood flooring. Really? It's *wood!* It literally grows on trees!

@stevep59 it's not so much that it's been kept going stong, it's more that it's been codified into law.

@ZilWerks "*An acre is one chain by one furlong for you metric people out there" That absolutely doesn't help at all XD Furlongs? Chains? :P

15 trees per 4047 square meters... do you even call that a forest I wonder. It sounds more like a meadow with the occasional tree.
Our forest industry seems to think that for a mature managed forest(pine) there'd be about a tree every 20 square meters, so about 200 trees per acre, thous would vary of course depending on what type of trees your forest have obviously, but I'm assuming coniferous here since they're typically the ones that go up like dry tinders.

@Drazahir Depends on the size of the tree. Redwoods are BIG trees - 200 of them in a single acre would be a solid chunk of lumber with leaves on the top. (Yes, the pictures of people driving cars through tunnels cut in the middle of living trees are real)

@Kin Let's assume Lodgepole pines since that is the beetles' favorite snack and Paradise is much more inland than most the California redwood aka the Coastal redwood likes

@Drazahir Square measure is a bit weird, and hard to process. And don't feel too bad, I've only a rough idea what the hell a chain or a furlong are either, and I live in the U.S. ... That's an area about two thirds-ish the size of a football field. Of either sort, it's a square 63m and a bit to a side. Stuff fifteen trees in that area, and even small to moderate sized ones are going to be pretty close to forest. Get the big damn pines like you see in California, and that's gonna be choked. It will be the opposite of a meadow.

Now take that same space and stuff 40 trees into it.

@Drazahir
It makes a lot more sense if you know that acres were defined for agricultural reasons. A furlong is 1/8 of a mile (~200m) and a chain is 1/10 that. The reason it's a long rectangular strip is that when you're plowing, turning around is a lot of trouble. So a furlong is that length because that's a standardized version of the ad hoc distance of "approximately where the average plow team will want to stop to take a break anyhow." And then chains are surveying lengths which were basically set to make a nice, round number of acres fit into a square mile.

@ZilWerks Wow, it continues to amaze me how much Oregon follows California's lead. We have Little Frisco (Portland) up here dictating to the entire state with some help from Eugene and that includes trying to destroy the logging industry (basically our only source of forest management) at the expense of rural towns and increased fire risks... like with the Eagle Creek fire which burned extra hot due to charcoaled wood from old burns that weren't harvested due to environmentalists and fuel buildup from a lack of proper forest management. These ignorant people see trees as others might some kind of historic rock formation and try to protect them accordingly when they should be treating them as we would any growing plant. They don't realize that forests (and their pests) are naturally thinned by fire. Without thinning, you get a stair step effect that allows fire to reach the tallest trees that naturally would have been too tall to burn down. When we stopped the cycle, to protect ourselves, we needed to take up the duty of caring for the forest. Yet we aren't, but we still stop the fires. >_<

@ZilWerks I understand that being involved in a fire like that is rough. My grandpa and Step-grandma's house was only a mile away from the fire line of the Tubbs fire last year. I still can't believe the fire jump all 6 lanes of interstate highway 101. But remember to do your research.

1 tree per every 1089 square feet (43560 sq feet in an acre/40 trees) or ~101.17 sq m seems rather sparse to me.

Using pesticides would hurt more than just the the intended beetles and get into the watershed aka our drinking water.

It is not that they are against thinning the forest, it is that thinning the forest can mess with endangered species and there are law of which protected them and affect what you can do in those areas. Also up where you live most of the forest is owned privately or by the Federal government and thus not managed by the state of California. So getting mad at the state legislators doesn't solve the issue.

Also look at this https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3798

Also a rant about trees:
On the central coast, we have trees called Monterey pines that literally fling their flaming pine cones as part of their reproductive cycle. Serotinous trees sure are fun. Knobcone pines and Lodgepole pines are also serontinous. Lodgepole pines sure make a "lovely" combo with those mountain pine beetles you mentioned, don't they? The beetles absolutely love them.

@ZilWerks "40 trees per acre"

....I'm absolutely certain you mistyped and meant 400 tpa, because everything else checks out, but that is a healthy amount of trees.

[I removed the comment, because it had too many inaccuracies and I'm too tired to go through all of them].

@AinoKyllikki It doesn't matter either way California's forests are vastly different to Finn's. If you are going to compare forests and how they should be tended you need to know what forests to compare them to. Finn's forest are more wet so harder to burn, and California's are more dry so easier to burn.

[I removed the comment, because it had too many inaccuracies and I'm too tired to go through all of them].

@AinoKyllikki Meyers not knowing about forest floors (that's the phrasing English-speakers actually use) was silly. But intensive maintenance (forestry, not gardening in English) is not much of a solution. It isn't feasible with really extensive forest—northern Finland looks really different from southern Finland, same with northern California. Pretty enormous garden, man. Or forest that's really hard to even get people to—in California some forest is far from highways with minimal roads and trails and filled with gorges and cliffs. Or forest that naturally is filled with a heavy dry, thorny understory that would take gargantuan levels of effort to clear, and shouldn't be cleared because lots of animals live in it. Probably having some idea things might be different is why your president didn't suggest the intensive forestry techniques to Trump.

What California needs is controlled burns, because the forests there evolved around frequent fire (like a lot in North America, pretty cool really) and they've been putting out every fire for too long. Unfortunately, forests and scrub have become so flammable that any controlled fire in many places could (would) easily go out of control and no firefighters want to accidentally burn someone's house down and no governments want to evacuate people for a controlled burn...

@minnesota Actually there is another vast difference in Finish forrests cmpared to most USA Forrests.
In Finland there is many MANY forrest roads. These roads are just good enough that firetrucks can pass, althuogh that is just barely.
Therefore if there happens to become a forrest fire, even if it is in "middle of nowhere" we will get the necessary equipment and manpower there relatively swiftly. And we also get a watersupply from some neaby lake quite often, as we do have lot of lakes.
This is something that is near impossible, in most states of the USA.

[I removed the comment, because it had too many inaccuracies and I'm too tired to go through all of them].

@minnesota I don't think size is relevant because the vast majority of Finland, about 80% or over is forest as well. Large as USA or its states are, they are not quite that large. It is party governmental in that while I do not doubt American expertise or quality, that does not translate to getting proper resources. I can't remember the details exactly but there was a study that researched how much funding is spent on different aspects of society and for Finland I think on % we spent one of the most if not the most of resources in nature management. It is not a question of knowledge or skill but that of economic focus there. Additionally weather does matter as do the species of trees.

My father who is a Biologist and Geographer knows that even dry, large and hard to traverse forests can be maintained hypothetically if they were deemed important enough to spend the required resources. Doesn't take a genious to know that of course, but for what it is worth in any case. Like I said though, that is an economic issue more than skill or information. It is also a bit cultural I think. Here we focus a lot in the importance of ecology and from what I understand from American friends I personally know, the attitude is not as universally shared there. Some states more than others, but not at the level we do from what I understand.

On a sidenote it is difficult, of course it is, even we had few cases of small fires or near fires in the last summer which was record hot and dry. It is a nightmare situation for the local Californians to have even drier and hotter with fewer resources available. At the end of the day I think everyone agrees that taking care of forests is important because while we may forget, mother nature won't and she is a force to be reckoned with.

@AinoKyllikki There are a lot of factors that contributed to this fire, none of them were bad forest management. This was an area that had a fire ten years previously, and the salvage logging had been done. While there were some brush piles left over from that, there was also extremely dry weather with over 200 days without rain. Most put the blame squarely on the weather as the reason this fire spread as quickly as it did.

Trump doesn't have a leg to stand on in this, however. Almost 60% of California's forests are managed by the federal government. Saying it was mismanaged is basically pointing the finger at himself. If he cuts federal money like he's saying he wants to because of mismanagement, he's only going to make the situation worse.

[I removed the comment, because it had too many inaccuracies and I'm too tired to go through all of them].

Yes, cold, wet Finland doesn't have as many forest fires as hot, dry California because of "rakes", that totally makes sense.

@CharlieMcGeeFan Wet is relative. We don't have any rainforests, like you guys. So, while we don't have drought forests like California, it's not like forest fires would be out of the question over here.

@Louhikaarme It also depends on the types of trees too. They just did a study to see how much deciduous growth in a forest would lessen the impact of a forest fire, and it looked like it made a pretty big impact(can't find the study right now, but believe it was from northern Alberta). However, the deciduous trees aren't as valuable, so they tend to spray herbicide to kill them off (BC in Canada has basically made it illegal to even let any deciduous trees grow in a replanted forest, so they keep getting worse and worse forest fires there).

@ModerateCanadian I find your claim about deciduous trees being replanted to be simply illegal in BC hard to believe, without knowing all the reasons. It's normally up to the forest owner to decide what to do, apart from planting foreign species. There could be laws to prevent deforestation, or some other underlying justifications that shouldn't be simplified. We aren't talking about socialist nations here. It's not uncommon to see birch trees being grown over here on purpose, even if coniferous is more common. Plywood/veneer industry always needs good birch as well. Not to mention it's better for firewood.

@Louhikaarme Forest fires happened in North Sweden this year, but it is really bloody rare that far north.

@Carewolf
We usually have a bit of fires, just that it's usually much smaller than this year: this summers fires were the worst since records started, breaking the record set the previous year...
which in turn broke the record set by the year before that...

I worked for CAL FIRE for a decade, the majority of that time in Butte Co. I have fought fire in the very areas that burned here. The area in question is primarily SRA (State Responsibility Area) and is known to have significant fire history. After the 2008 Lightning Store almost wiped out the same area plans were implemented to respond to similar fires (and it's a good thing, had they not paved and widened the road north the loss of life would have been much worse).

One factor at play here are the notorious Jarbo Jap winds, tinder-dry or not sustained winds of 20 mph with gust to 70 are going to drive a fire fast. More so when terrain and winds are aligned.

While the area has burn history I can also attest that this area of California is thick with Manzanita, a shrub of the Arctostaphylos genus, which grows fast when given the opportunity to receive adequate sunlight. These shrubs have a natural oil and they burn hot and fast.

I do know that salvage logging is happening in the Berry Creek and Feather Falls areas South East of the burn, but I cannot say for sure whether they have been doing salvage logging in the area that burned. I can say that when I was last up there it was pretty dense vegetation wise.

Which brings me to my last thoughts. To be completely honest we do not really do a good job of forest management in the SRA. Fire is a natural part of a healthy forest, something that we interrupted back when the UF Forest Service declared war on forest fires around the 1930's. While the US Forest Service has changed its tactics into fire management and does fire mitigation and forest floor clearing work. The SRA is a much different story. The SRA is heavy I-Zone, specifically Urban-Wildland Intermix. 1) No one is really willing to risk prescribed burning around homes. 2) There is not much funding for state mitigation work. Yes, the CCC and Prison Work Crews do some thinning, but this is typically around roads, trail systems, and publicly owned facilities. Nearly no thinning is done in the SRA that is not private or conducted as noted above.

'@Chief' as far as I know, in Soviet Union and Russia forestry service tried to maintain clearing lines 12-18 feet wide every couple of miles in managed forests or near roads, power lines, military bases and such. Counter-fire clearing lines over 30 feet wide and, possibly augmented by so-called "mineralized furrow" could be also used to separate areas of particular risks or to safely limit controlled burns. Do you know if something like that has been done in US at all?

@Chief Interesting to hear what a professional think about this issue.

@Chief I've worked for the Forest Service in California for the past few years (not in the fire division though). From what I understand, the fire suppression regime did a lot of damage to forest health and the effects are still ongoing. We had a few high intensity fires on our Forest last year and the year before. In some areas, the fire got so hot that it completely decimated entire drainages. Even two years later, there has not been any regrowth of trees in some areas. Instead, the manzanita and whitethorn (which is in the same genus as lilac) have started coming in. When these plants colonize an area, they tend to really take over, which means that tree seedlings can't really get a foothold. So the high intensity fires, which are fed by the dense understory, lead to high brush recruitment, which can fuel more high intensity fires. There are plans to clear out the brush and plant trees in these areas, but the process is moving pretty slow.

One of the most entertaining aspects of the Trump years has been getting to watch entire nations of supposedly sophisticated people gibber and caper any time Trump mentions them.

You guys are the best!

@Dorsai Orange man bad XD

@Dorsai I think you overestimate Trump and US presidents in general. Most of us outside the USA don't take them that seriously.

'@Rogers' I agree that you *shouldn't* take American presidents very seriously, because without exception they are buffoons of one stripe or another. And yet people everywhere (here at home and around the world) flip out every time Trump opens his mouth. It is beautiful. :-)

'@Rogers' except that President Drone Strike got a Nobel Peace Prize in advance.

@comrade_Comrade Yeah Norwegian Nobel committee really made us look like fools back then. But I got to admit, Obama was very good at putting a handsome face of the same old policies. For a while at least.

'@Rogers' nah, he just used words that sound smart. His new policies weren't particularly good either. Remember how he promised to be flexible for Vladimir, or sent a load of cash to Iran totally not in exchange for hostages? I wonder if there were comics drawn about that too.

@comrade_Comrade I'm sure there are many satire comics on that subject because the US right absolutely hated him. Which of course is just what he wanted them to do.

'@Rogers' true (though many right wingers would rather say they hated his politics), except that conservatives and republicans are so underrepresented in media, film industry and Silicon Valley, that most of stupid crap Obama said and done went down memory hole instantly. I mean same people who laughed at Romney when Obama quipped about Cold War politics now see Putin in every shadow.

DO IT FINLAND COME ON MAKE A CHANGE IN THE WORLD PLEASE GET RID OF HIM

For Finland, a rake is a 7 pronged Knife.

@Henlaar are you familiar with jaidenanimations?

@dvnt10301 YES, though I prefer the Odds1out. Why?

Could someone from Finland please come hit this spray-tanned shit-gibbon with a rake? You'd be doing the whole world a favor.

DO IT FINLAND