Smoke
- Thread starter MOPARMAGA
- Start date
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Our lungs are all taking a beating from those fires.
Yeah, atleast so far this summer they're just timber & not people's home, buisness, chemicals & toxic stuff over by my area.
Last year was brutal it really was painful to inhale. How are they by you ?
All I can say is it makes beautiful sunset pictures. We are getting some smoke from out west and probably more from Canada. I wish states would learn and study forest management. More lumber at better prices and forest fires easier to manage.
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That's very true, I don't want to even try to guess how many acres of forests there are in our country but management would create alot more jobs & those jobs are MAGA jobs, the more healthy trees we have the better the air, the cooler the air, on & on.
I remember back in the 80s in Washington state, save the spotted owls. I get taking care of critters but they took it to the extreme here & California. No clearing the floors, hell my buddy lost a cabin because the state wouldn't let him get rid of a dying tree.
If they could figure out how to get rid of the undergrowth or if they are clear cutting.....take the under growth with it and re-plant. Selective cutting is expensive, but probably not as expensive as a huge fire. It the 'kindling' that get it started and guessing but....20% of the continued fuel source? Do they integrate a large gap in the trees during a re-plant so the fire has a tougher time to 'jump' to the next batch? I wonder what kind of consequences cloud seeding would have over the long term.
Good points & questions.
We have alot of wind in my area, so last week there were burnt pine needles on my truck & the fire is atleast 40 miles as the crow flies. That tells me it could be impossible to stop a fire from jumping.
Maybe adding water resiviors so these helicopters don't have along way to fill up.
There's plenty of rivers around here & snow melt offs. I don't think anything negative could come from cloud seeding, but I'm sure there's consequences of every action
Maybe adding water resiviors so these helicopters don't have along way to fill up.
There's plenty of rivers around here & snow melt offs. I don't think anything negative could come from cloud seeding, but I'm sure there's consequences of every action
DJC
Well-Known Member
This was our sky this morning at 8:00, BC Canada
pishta
I know I'm right....
I think the healthy tree per acre in a ponderosa forest is like 25, its 1000 today! Thin it! Talk about shovel (saw) ready jobs!!!
"...A century ago a ponderosa pine forest may have had some 25 mature trees per acre and be easily traversed on horseback or by a horse-drawn wagon. Today the same forest may have more than 1.000 trees on the same acre, creating conditions that are much too thick for the passage of a hiker. These tightly packed trees are smaller, weaker, more disease prone and more susceptible to insect attack than their ancestors. Such forests form huge reservoirs of fuel awaiting ignition, and pose a particularly significant threat when drought is also a factor..."
bcschief
Well-Known Member
They need to do forest management controlled burns is part of this and it clears the under brush send them to Florida we learned this a long time ago. The last time we had a major fire in the central Florida area was 1998. My oldest son is a Florida Parks employee and a woodlands firefighter.
The treehuggers would fight this to the end out west. They aren’t to bright
mopowers
Well-Known Member
Yep - Decades of forest mismanagement coming to a head. Bark beetles and drought aren't helping things either.
Ponderosa's are the guilty party by my place as well, my buddy lives 35 miles closer to the fire in the town of Naches, I guess they're on level 2 evacuation.
bcschief
Well-Known Member
Prescribed burns would probably kill those beetles too.
Yep
This
And This.
I've got the inside scoop and I'm here to tell you guys that it's going to be a long road to hoe. We are finally getting on track in the US Forest Service since only a few years ago.
The problem begins with an old policy of putting every fire out by the next day. Back in the 1920's or 30's the USFS came out and declared wildfires a bad thing and every fire needed to be put out as quickly as humanly possible. Smokey the Bear played his part in the propaganda by letting everyone know wildfire is evil.
They didn't have a good fix on what we call, today, Fire Ecology. Wildfire is a good thing IF it isn't suppressed for so long that the forests get choked out with too many trees per acre and seas of brush that isn't managed. Management can come by mechanical means, prescribed fire, and natural fire. In regards to Fire Ecology, nature really knows what's best for itself. Certain cones need fire to seed, like Giant Sequoias. They have found that in the 100% fire suppression years we had no new growth of the big trees.
In a healthy tree stand density, like Pishta mentions, fire will simply clean up the forest floor whereas a stand density that is too thick fire can decimate the whole landscape. When fire burns too intense in an area it can neutralize the soil and trees will not regrow, only invasives and brush that becomes too thick and created the fuel density problem all over again. We call this Type Conversion and it's happened all over the place out here in the West.
The cycle has gone like this: Fire is evil and since the Industrial Revolution more and more people have been moving into the forests and building communities, Those people love to have their homes nestled in the trees or don't understand the concept of defensible space. Smokey the Bear told us to put every fire out as fast as possible. The forest becomes too dense because of this and fires in turn became more difficult to control. Fires have become unmanageable and burn too intensely. Entire stands and communities burn. More voluminous smoke creates a worse air quality issue than a fire that burns in a healthy forest.
Remember, there was no forest management at all before the early 1900's. Mother nature managed the forests. Look at the pictures and read the accounts. The land was amazing before man started managing it. It has only gotten worse and worse. The blame rests on all Federal and State Foresters (not the wildland firefighters) of the past.
I should note that there is a separation in the Federal Land Management Agencies between the Foresters and Firefighters. The Foresters are the biologist with degrees in forestry and recreation. Fire and Aviation Management (FAM) employees, like myself, have rolled our eyes for years at management practice that are dictated by the much higher paid Foresters. We have known for years how and why we get the kind of burning conditions we get and often have a better idea of how things should be. It's like any "Engineer / Blue Collar" dynamic. We have butterfly counters with Bachelor Degrees making 2x's what a firefighter makes. We have a guy fresh out of college telling a Fire Chief with 30 years Wildland fire experience how and when to burn prescribed fires.
For decades the Fire Management Program has relied on seasonal firefighters to help us out in the summer's fighting fire only to get laid off in the winter when all the prescribed fire takes place. We simply have not had the manpower to do as much prescribed fire in the winter and spring as we would like to do. Ask any permanent employee if they slow down in the winter and they often tell you they are busier. At the end of a long "Prescribed Fire" season I often say how I wish Fire Season would hurry up and get here so we could slow down! We are stretched thin and never burn/treat as many acres as we feel adequate or prepare enough fuel breaks.
Budget and pay are huge factors. The Foresters have gotten used to making due with inadequate budgets to correct the problem. A huge issue is letting go of half our workforce for the winter. We need 100% staffing all year to transition from fighting wildfires in the summer to burning prescribed fires in the winter. We also need better pay. People are leaving in droves to go to municipal firefighting jobs, State jobs like CalFire, or leaving the industry all together.
Our job is classed through Office of Personnel Management as 0462 - Forestry Technician. A Federal structure Firefighter is 0081 and they are akin to municipal firefighters. OPM finds equivalent civilian paying jobs and sets the payscale for a government job. Reason dictates that a 0081 - Firefighter gets paid as a city firefighter does. They drive red trucks and fight structure fires (rarely). 0462 - Forestry Technicians literally gets the equivalent wages of a landscaper yet we fight way more fire than a 0081 - Firefighter in more hazardous and remote conditions. If there is one good thing in the mega infrastructure bill it is a job series change for us Wildland Firefighters. The Forest Service has finally recognized that they are bleeding experienced staff and must pay and retain more firefighters. Entry level Federal Wildland Firefighter pay is less than minimum wage in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
Over the past 5 years the Federal Land Management Agencies have come around to doing more prescribed fire and treating more land. There has been a huge focus on it but the problem is so enormous with so much land and only 1/2 the workforce on hand when we can finally get good windows in the weather (winter). It takes the public a long time to see a benefit. Also, most forest homes are surrounded by State managed land and they are even further behind the Federal government on this shift toward doing more prescribed fire. I can relate it to the military: Troops on the ground call for new/fresh equipment or tactics due to conditions on the battlefield. The Generals in charge have to run it through the White House and the Pentagon. When it finally gets analyzed the troops on the ground either get nothing or very little of what they requested. The war is fought from the top and decisions are not allowed to be made by those with the most knowledge of the situation.
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pishta
I know I'm right....
Almost sound like we need to let Mother Nature start over...."We had to burn the village to save it..." (Peter Arnett's fake Vietnam era 'quote')
In some areas we need to go with that strategy but in areas that are too dense we need to thin by mechanical means and also burn. Then continue to let the not so intense fires burn at will. We need to educate property about wends on proper burning techniques and encourage them to burn in the good weather windows. Instead we get a lot of land owners burning illegal fires in fire weather and they sometimes turn into major fires. They just don’t know because it’s so discouraged that no officials have ever educated them on when and how to burn.
Timber harvesting is also something that needs to come back. There are actually studies now that says the spotted owl population has suffered more from wildfires than logging. Wildfires that grew to the intensities they otherwise wouldn’t have if responsible harvesting would have taken place.
bcschief
Well-Known Member
We do a lot of this in Florida also. There is good money and tax deductions in planting your rural acreage with pine trees and then allowing a company to harvest them and replant them for a future crop
Every year we send teams from the west coast to the east coast and do prescribed burning in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama, the Carolinas, and a lot in Florida. We need teams from the east coast to start coming out here to the west. There just isn't as many east coast wildland firefighters. We just need more people all around. Until (very) recently the agencies (USFS, BLM, Natl. Parks, and US Fish and Wildlife) have just told us to do more with less. People get fed up and leave so that leaves people with less experience to move up the ladder and we are starting to see some inexperience in top positions. Experience can be gained but sometimes there's some real head scratchin' with some decision making.
Sun finally came out today, my buddy is 6 miles away from the fire, him & his girlfriend still work in Seattle which is 150 miles away & come out on the weekends, today after church we brought most of their belongings over to my house, a vette z06 a harley fat boy, a Honda dirt bike & a Chevy pick-up. Boy that church stuff is really working...im letting chevy's on my property lol
Love thy enemy.
Lol, thats true... Helps he's my best friend
Professor Fate
Push the button, Max...
"Butterfly Counters". Love it. Our department was full of those. Spent their days writing thesis on bat migratory patterns, but showed up for a woodland assessment wearing shorts and sandals... How do ya like that buckthorn, sweetie? Spent tons of budget money on building owl and bat structures instead of habitat reclamation/restoration/management, mostly because it provided better photo ops for them... They're not really about the flora & fauna, they're about self-promotion and padding their resumes so they can move on...
And that inexperience remains with you, because they lack the judgement/knowledge/practical experience to move on to a private sector job. With these types now becoming entrenched in their positions, they naturally hire/promote others like themselves, so their own shortcomings don't become glaringly apparent by comparison. Now it becomes self-perpetuating, with unqualified people, many of whom haven't spent a single day in the field, managing entire departments and huge budgets. And they wonder why they can't retain qualified field personnel.
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