Environmentalists Block Fire Management in Yosemite

Locker wrote:

So many of these fires could be avoided if they would just rake the ground below the trees...

I think it’s actually mandatory to rake around your house in California.

Defensible space (100ft or to your property line) is required by law in CA if you live in a SRA/FRA. 

They could always just require houses be built differently. I believe Malibu eventually did this after repeated fires.

Yes code could be so stringent only multi-millionare celebrities and con artists can afford to live there. A handful of them can even afford to hire private fire fighting contractors to protect their property and watch their neighbors burn! But strict code is the same net net as insurance companies refusing to underwrite risky properties - all but the rich end up leaving, over time.  

But if you look at the highest at-risk foothill communities in the Sierra Nevada for example, a lot of them are lower income. Many of them cannot afford what they have, let alone more strict and therefore expensive cost of living.

So yeah, a two-pronged approach to depopulate the wildfire zones.

^^^ Todd, do you know anything about these? Sorry for the shit picture but some big stones out there.

Todd Berlier wrote:

the prescribed burn was the caples fire from 2019. about 3000 acres. i climb a bunch in that general area and was stupidly within the perimeter after it spread but before it was declared a wildfire--that was really spooky.

Yes Todd, that was it - Caples fire.  Thanks.

Zeke talks ahout it in one of his videos, I just don't remember which one. Here's the play list if anyone is interested:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhM9lgdfXk1roXPcpXBBR6MAyGsGxtOfi

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

...The earth could warm up a whole degree but if every house was in LA, wildfire destruction would be near 0....

depends on where you live in LA...

Todd Berlier wrote:

yes i do! thats really close to the area im working in. those boulders in the pic are 15 to 30 feet tall with some good looking lines on them. unfortunately the manzanita and scrub is returning with a vengance and a ton of work to develop. down and up canyon theres more boulders with less work than this field. there is also a few short cliffs that could be developed for the route climbers.

this pic looks like the view from government meadows...?

Yeah government meadows area, was doing some work in Caples. I walked past some boulders just north-ish that had some chalk on them. I didn't get a close look at the ones in the photo but yeah, the scrub looked like it could be nasty.

Todd Berlier wrote:

if you came down the hayflat trail off cody meadows--thats where ive been developing for the last few years.

Nice, that's what I saw

Edit: sorry to derail this otherwise fine thread

Salamanizer Skiwrote:

That’s not what I’m saying.  Nobody said you don’t need need firefighters or government entities. The point is you can’t just do nothing and hand over the keys when the time comes and expect them to protect your assets. Forested communities need to be more proactive, and that starts with taking responsibility to clean and fire harden your own home/property on an individual level. That doesn’t mean fighting the fire yourself lol.

Do you have evidence that fire hardening your own home makes it more wildfire proof? In the datasets I have, the recorded protection classification of your home is not a predictive factor for wildfire loss experience. Neither is the construction type of your own beyond the actual building costs. The state of California has been consistently asked to provide any form of data that personal mitigation strategies are effective, yet they have yet to come up with evidence of this working. So I ask, do you have actual data to support this belief?

I don't think that if one person fire proofs their house that has any impact on wildfire loss. I don't even think if a whole block does it, it would work that well. I think the local community has to be on the same page, therefore a delegation of responsibility to the local city or county government makes the most sense. Or you just let the state of California mow down any tree they want. At the end of the day most the fuel sources are not even on peoples personal property. I agree no one wants to take responsibility, but individual people really are limited in the total impact they could make. 

Right now, insurance companies want to give premium decreases to individuals/communities that can reduce wildfire risk, we have just yet to see it actually work. 

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

Do you have evidence that fire hardening your own home makes it more wildfire proof? In the datasets I have, the recorded protection classification of your home is not a predictive factor for wildfire loss experience. Neither is the construction type of your own beyond the actual building costs. The state of California has been consistently asked to provide any form of data that personal mitigation strategies are effective, yet they have yet to come up with evidence of this working. So I ask, do you have actual data to support this belief?

I don't think that if one person fire proofs their house that has any impact on wildfire loss. I don't even think if a whole block does it, it would work that well. I think the local community has to be on the same page, therefore a delegation of responsibility to the local city or county government makes the most sense. Or you just let the state of California mow down any tree they want. At the end of the day most the fuel sources are not even on peoples personal property. I agree no one wants to take responsibility, but individual people really are limited in the total impact they could make. 

Right now, insurance companies want to give premium decreases to individuals/communities that can reduce wildfire risk, we have just yet to see it actually work. 

Isn't a "defensive space" proven to work? Clearing a certain number of feet around your house of flammables and dry vegetation?

FrankPSwrote:

Isn't a "defensive space" proven to work? Clearing a certain number of feet around your house of flammables and dry vegetation?

Then you wanna provide a study? I have yet to see a study, I just hear a ton of anecdotes. 

In the case of paradise, a lot of homes burned that didn't even have trees in their backyards burned down. I really don't know what a homeowner on a 5,000 sq lot of grass could really do. 

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

Then you wanna provide a study? I have yet to see a study, I just hear a ton of anecdotes. 

In the case of paradise, a lot of homes burned that didn't even have trees in their backyards burned down. I really don't know what a homeowner on a 5,000 sq lot of grass could really do. 

I don't think common sense measures need to be proven with a "study." Cal Fire recommends it, so that's good enough for me.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/communications/defensible-space-prc-4291/

Ryan Never climbs wrote:

hey trever you ever been around paradise? 

No, however I would guess I have looked at 1,000 pictures before and after the fire. There are a ton of burnable features in the town itself, but there were plenty of property owners who would have complied with the defensible space metric of Calfire that lost their homes. 

FrankPS wrote:

I don't think common sense measures need to be proven with a "study." Cal Fire recommends it, so that's good enough for me.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/communications/defensible-space-prc-4291/

Fine, lets go with common sense. Every homeowner clears their property perfectly, do wildfires still ravage through california? Who cleans the parks? The actual forests? Homeowners are responsible for almost an immaterial amount of land in California. I recall the government is responsible for almost 50% of the land in California. I would imagine natural resource industry makes up a large chunk as well. It seems a bit insane to try to manage fires, by regulating homeowners. 

Princess Puppy Lovrwrote:

No, however I would guess I have looked at 1,000 pictures before and after the fire. There are a ton of burnable features in the town itself, but there were plenty of property owners who would have complied with the defensible space metric of Calfire that lost their homes. 

Fine, lets go with common sense. Every homeowner clears their property perfectly, do wildfires still ravage through california? Who cleans the parks? The actual forests? Homeowners are responsible for almost an immaterial amount of land in California. I recall the government is responsible for almost 50% of the land in California. I would imagine natural resource industry makes up a large chunk as well. It seems a bit insane to try to manage fires, by regulating homeowners. 

We were talking about protecting homes. Now, you've changed to talking about stopping/preventing wildfires. Different subject.

Post limit!

Edit: I don't think anyone claimed "defensible space" stops 100% of home fires. But it gives you a better chance, increases your odds and allows firefighters to possibly defend your home. Of course it won't stop some conflagrations from destroying your home. Tell Cal Fire it doesn't help. Ha ha.

During the Eagle Creek fire in 2017 embers crossed 2 miles across the Columbia River to start fires in WA, so I wouldn't expect the Cal Fire's 5-foot "Ember Resistant Zone" to do anything.

That said, I can easily imagine a house that's resistant to embers, but will catch fire if a burning tree falls on it. Trimming trees seems like solid advice for personal home defense.

The thing to remember about defensible space around your property is the defense part. It's supposed to provide space and time to those who may be defending your home from wildfire, whether that's you with a garden hose or a team of firefighters making a last stand to save your neighborhood.

There's no promise, much less a guarantee, that maintaining a defensible space around your home will prevent your home from catching fire. But itnshould be part of a fire defense system, as should back up power, water availability, irrigation, fire-resistant building design and materials, etc. 

And even in the Paradise area, there were well defended homes that were saved. But those homes were not packed into tiny lots next to dozens of other homes that had little to no defensible space around them.

Ryan Never climbs wrote:

the wind that day in paradise was insane and how fast the fire moved was truly scary. i don’t think with those variables defensible space would work in the slightest. 

same thing happen in the big fire in colorado. my coworker was there and said you could see the ember balls flying in the air hit a house and instantly ignite the house.  

I have some friends whose house burned up in Napa a number of years ago.  They rebuilt a wood house using insurance money, yet constantly worry about the same thing happening again, though they maintain "defensible space". I agree with Zeke Lunder about a need for different construction methods and material, underground utilities, and the concept of "fire permeable communities". This video is worth watching in it's entirety, but I've set the start time to where he's talking about this point:

https://youtu.be/v-R6GcxD2Ts?t=2829

Tradibanwrote:

Instead of calling on firefighters only in fire season why not keep them employed year round as fire suppression artists? 

Because they can get away with using prison labor on a seasonal ad hoc basis. 

en·vi·ron·men·tal·ist a person who is concerned with or advocates the protection of the environment.

Somehow the media/politicians on the right have made many people think that "Environmentalists" are far left earth first types. Like so many things it's not black and white and there's a spectrum of beliefs from preservation, to conservation, to development. 

Also it sounds like people are not blocking "fire management", some are encouraging burning instead of harvesting. As mentioned up thread a balance between selective harvesting (so you don't over harvest) and burning (which removes the ground fuel, which is probably the biggest problem) is probably best.