Monday, November 12, 2018

Trump Has a Point About Forest Fires

The US Forest Service has always said so:





But fixing the situation should be a private sector effort.

A selling point for homes in such a region could easily be "we have instituted preventions for serious forest fires in the area," rather than current government regulations and government efforts which clearly are not doing the job. #PPS

-RW 

8 comments:

  1. Theres a podcast called 99 % invisible which is hit ot miss but has some interesting things on it.

    one of those was about a guy who went about studying house fires in CA, i believe, in the 70s caused by forest fires to determine how to stop them. He noticed that most of the house fires occured in places that the fire didnt actually go through, but just near. I believe this guy was a scientist of some sort. Anyway, he spent the following decades pushing his ideas on how to stop these house fires, which the forest service didnt like because he basically said the fighting of forest fires was useless and their response was useless.

    Anyway, here is the private property solution to protect your own house. Most of these fires were caused by ejecta, or burning debris that shoots into the air and falls on the houses. So you want roofs that can handle this like tile, and you want to make sure any gutters or places where it can land dont have an overhang or something that can burn. Then you make sure that there is nothing really close to your house that can burn and make sure your trees arent close enough together that fires can jump crown to crown. If you want to know more about it, look up "defensible space" or something similar for details.

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    1. Or buy insurance and have a beer.

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    2. This is exactly right. A lot of homes go up because of the evacuations. No one is there to put out embers or small fires as they hit the properties. The flip side is if you don't evacuate you could die defending your home. My friend stayed home during the Thomas fire in Ventura, running around putting out embers. Always had an evacuation plan until all the roads surrounding were cut off. When the roads were cut off the escape plan was to take the car to the center of the paved road with a fire blanket and turn on only the recycled air. Fortunately that never happened. You are right though, there are protective measures private home owners can take. CalFires response to the president is that the affected area is mostly Federal land. May or may not be true. I don't know the land management strategy in northern California, but it's disgusting when people play politics over fresh corpses.

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    3. For the record, the ‘CalFire’ response was an unofficial account.

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  2. While not true all of the time, Trump often makes eminently sensible observations about things that deserve more attention (e.g., failures of foreign interventions, media bias/hypocrisy, violence coming from the left side of the political spectrum), but few people give them any credibility because of TDS. If an ordinary person raised these things, that person would be shouted down or ostracized out of regular society; luckily, Trump has a pulpit that can't be silenced. I suspect that there are many people who privately agree with some of these observations by Trump, which is why he continues to get electoral following even among groups that aren't seen as his core base. So count this as one silver lining of his presidency.

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  3. What the USFS didn't/couldn't mention is that they are constantly being thwarted by green groups suing them over every attempt to make these changes.

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  4. The power utility monopoly in CA admitted their old, poorly maintained infrastructure contributed to the intensity of the fires and may have done more damage than federal forest policies in the state. Ironic that all those leftists wanting to prevent more competition and market forces in heavily regulated industries end up with horrific environmental damage because there’s no incentive to manage their resources better to prevent this in the future.

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    1. Word.

      Last year PG&E burned down my Sonoma County.

      A few years back they straight-up detonated an entire neighborhood over on the peninsula.

      Someone should go to jail.


      A while back there was a fire at a small rock show in an old converted warehouse. Lots of people died. Pretty sure the event promoter went to prison over it.

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