In 2016, California watched the Blue Cut Fire quickly become a massive inferno. Reportedly, it burned with an intensity greater than many firefighters had ever seen. At the time, one fire commander told the Associated Press, “In my 40 years of fighting fires, I’ve never seen fire behavior so extreme.”
In 2017, the Tubbs Fire was even more destructive. By the time it was contained, that fire alone burned an estimated 36,810 acres and killed 22 people.
Today, in 2018, 19 fires are currently raging throughout the state. And among these, just one alone — the Camp Fire — has now been recognized as the largest such catastrophe to ever occur in the state’s history. In all, over 45 people have died throughout the state so far, over 200 people remain unaccounted for, and over 6,700 homes and other structures have been destroyed. And that’s before mentioning all the celebrity homes that have been burned in Malibu.
This is a devastating trend that must be reversed, not only in California but throughout the Western states that have been made to suffer the consequences of such catastrophic wildfires due to mismanagement.
However, to do so will require both our government officials and the public whom they serve to jointly acknowledge the existence of not one — or even two — but three elephants in the room:
2. Environmentalist litigation coupled with concurrent mismanagement by government officials have caused unreasonably excessive forest and brush overgrowth and deadfall to accumulate in recent decades that results in many fires — once started — becoming both explosive and virtually unstoppable; and;
3. The cause of a catastrophic fire’s ignition — whether it be an untended campfire, a match, a cigarette, lightning or even “global warming” — is not nearly as important as the need to remove the inexcusably negligent accumulation of combustible fuel load that cause that fire, once ignited, to explode.
