Wildfires in Oregon block out the Sun

pishta said
I don't think everyone does! If they knew what a properly managed forest required, they would ****! It's called logging....big burly people with huge chainsaws and miles of semi trucks hauling precious trees to their demise, a new coffee table or house frame up at about 10,000 new jobs. Who's gonna pay them? We are..by buying US lumber! Thanks Canada, but we got our own wood for the taking, and we need to start taking it big time unless it burns first. You know they used to use low risk incarcerated people to assist in forestry duties. How would that be for a work detail, 2-3 weeks at a logging camp away from the iron bar hotel? Sign me up.....if I were there... because I did something stupid. Down here in So Cal, I have not seen the sunshine in 3 days myself. We got local fires too, but that is nothing new here. All my wifes moms cousins live in Oregon and they are getting chased by these monsters again. One of them lost their house in a huge fire 7 years ago and now they have been evacuated from their new home built log house. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Managing a forest properly with respect to fire risk is much more involved than simply harvesting trees. In California anyway, it involves clearing the understory and ladder fuels - albeit including some smaller more tightly concentrated trees, but this material typically has little to no marketable value once processed. The US Forest Service has fuels management teams and firefighters that work on these types of clearing projects constantly - when not on fires, obviously. When I fought fires for the Forest Service in the summers during college, we focused on areas adjacent to natural fire breaks, like roads, etc. in order to help the roads and streams to maintain their integrity as fire lines, should an active fire blow through. What's funny, is the enviros still freak out over this type of forest management, because the debris that is cleared is almost always burned. I guess they'd rather see the whole forest destroyed in massive fires??

My point is, considering the millions of acres and over 100 million dead trees in CA forests, there is absolutely no way the USFS could afford the resources to actively manage all of their forested lands in this way, even though it's what's needed to avoid these catastrophic fires. It's not as simple as allowing logging business to come in and cherry pick truck loads of trees. I wish it was.

You make an interesting point about convict crews. They actually still use convict crews on fires - at least in California. I've even seen them on fuels management projects. Not sure about in other states, but in CA, they pull inmates from the CA State prison system. I'm sure they're not free either if the fires or lands their working is owned by the USFS. The point is, tax payers are still footing the bill for administering the use of those crews. Maybe they should consider utilizing federal inmates? Who knows, maybe they do???