Meanwhile, wildfires are only getting worse across the West. It’s a foreboding trend: 2015 and 2012 were the only seasons with more acreage burned. Since the 1970’s, the number of large fires greater than 10,000 acres in size has increased seven-fold, and the official fire season has jumped from four to seven months long. In the Pacific Northwest alone, the area burned by uncontrolled wildfires each summer has grown by 5,000 percent over the last 40 years. But a spark by itself is not enough to burn millions of acres - a wildfire needs fuel. And that is precisely what the US’s ineffective approach to forest management has provided. The US Forest Service approaches fire prevention with a tactic known as “fuels reduction” – essentially, thinning out forests so that any wildfires that do start are not able to spread or intensify beyond firefighters’ ability to control it. This involves clearing dry brush that allow sparks to jump, cutting small trees that burn readily, and pruning low-hanging branches that enable fire to expand upwards into forest canopies. But while fuels reduction works in theory, its effectiveness is negated in practice by the sheer size of the West. The US Forest Service is responsible for more than 190 million acres of land, and fuels reduction efforts are targeted, tree-specific, and almost entirely manual. They are performed on an acre-by-acre basis, and they must be repeated every 10 years to deal with new forest growth. The result is that only a tiny fraction of forests categorized as “high-risk” - with little documentation of the logic behind that designation - sees fuels reduction. Additionally, it is impossible to predict whether these patches will coincide with the location of next summer’s heat waves, the primary driver of annual wildfire geography.It turns out that only 1 percent of wildfires each year actually burn forest lands directly adjacent to areas where fuels reduction was carried out. That means that the more than $350 million spent annually on fuels reduction results in virtually no difference in the destructive capacity of wildfires...more
1 comment:
"These intentional fires are set during the wettest part of the year," It is obvious the author of the article knows little about wildfire or prescribed fire. Fine fuels are what burn and vigorously spread a wild fire. Prescribed fires set during the wettest part of the year is the result of "greenies" running the USFS. They know little about fighting fire, bring the troops in at night, say it is too dangerous to be on the line and all the rest of the stuff that" know nothings" are made of.
Post a Comment