http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qqxjO5nr8k

Wow. It’s beyond huge. Looks like it will engulf the entire LA valley.

tell them how dangerous the scrub can be for the fighters. by letting things go that long, you get situations where your fighting a fire, and suddenly a fire is behind you. why? because the fire burned under the brush under you…

“After that occurs however, in places like we are discussing now, where you have such a huge fire eating up massive amounts of real estate with dry tinder, would it be reasonable to thereafter maintain a regular schedule of controlled burns as the area recovers?”

I sure think so. What I think matters very little. To explain a bit, after a fire there is a regular succession of vegetation that replaces what was burned, depending on fire intensity, soils, slope, climate, seed-source proximity, and time. Burn off a tall-grass prairie, it will come back relatively quickly (under a life-time) in the same species that were there (if you have a seed-source, you don’t damage the soil or get a spate of high intensity summer rainfall that starts a cycle of gully-cutting, and you have a supply of the fauna that fosters that vegetative association). Now take a mature ponderosa forest. Burn it regularly and lightly, you will note very little visible change even a few years after a burn. Let it accumulate huge volumes of down fuel and burn it intensely, killing off the great trees, and it will be 500 – 1000 years before you have a visibly-identical forest on the site. You may have to go through grasses, forbs, bushes, junipers, douglas-fir, small stands of repeatedly-replaced ponderosas, before some really big ones can start to mature. (When you see ponderosa whose bark has turned from blackish to orange, that tree is over 100.)

Now suppose that at certain points in the succession, animal and avian species that we affect are favored by the vegetation. Say, turkeys if you are a Basketmaker indian. Elk if you are a modern hunter. Spotted owls if you are charged with enforcing the endangered species act. Hereford and Angus cows if you’re a rancher. If you reburn the vegetation at some point to safeguard houses, you are also selecting a particular suite of fauna for the area, the fauna that go with that stage of vegetation. The sugarbush-chaparral association east of San Diego, which reminds me of gasoline in its response to fire, has a particularly rich avian assemblage (and, to an easterner, a fairly depauperate mammalian grouping). If you burn that association as often as it needs to hold down fire in the wildland/urban interface, you aren’t going to see as much birdlife or as rich a species grouping. And you’re going to see increased, spasmodic, turbid runoff. (Which will end up in someone’s yard, and for which you will be sued.)

Now you may think, “BS. These are people’s houses we’re talking about. Human life. Burn it as often as it needs to be burned.” That’s what I think. But a land manager cannot overlook the counter-concerns.

Thanks for the input. Glad to see it from someone who actually knows what they are talking about here.

It sounds like they end up with the mother of all (un)controlled burns after suppressing the natural cycle for so many decades.

After that occurs however, in places like we are discussing now, where you have such a huge fire eating up massive amounts of real estate with dry tinder, would it be reasonable to thereafter maintain a regular schedule of controlled burns as the area recovers?

I have no idea what kind of intervals of controlled burns the forestry service would like to perform, but it would seem an ideal time to implement such a strategy after such a disaster.

I would think a fire of this magnitude would definitely clear out decades worth of dead wood, allowing future decades of fire control to be handled more rationally.

“Do they not do controlled burns in California? 60 years is a long time to pile up dead wood.”

Wildland firefighter here. The mature ponderosa woodland is what I know best. Those forests under pre-Columbian conditions burnt on average every 17 years. This meant a low, creeping pine-needle fire that killed seedlings, opened cones to start more seedlings, converted deadfall to fertilizer, lightly scorched the bark of the mature trees and removed their lower branches, encouraged grasses and forbs (elk browse). You can see what happened if you didn’t encourage those little fires by googling the Los Alamos fire down in New Mexico. They lost about 400 houses. It was supposed to be a controlled burn.

Controlled burns in California. Not likely. There’s too much accumulated fuel in most places (60 years is WAY too much). And you’re liable if one gets away from you. Even if the government defends you legally it’s career-limiting. And how would you feel about losing all those houses, and perhaps some lives? People resigned after the Los Alamos fire. Now there have been some genuinely stupid moves, like the Forest Service and County people collaborating to avoid mitigating (removing brush and excess trees, limbing the trees that remain) up near Lake Tahoe, to avoid discoloring the lake with runoff; this is just guaranteeing the eventual and inevitable fire will do the most possible damage to structures, forests, and the Lake. Look at what happened after decades of successful fire suppression in Mesa Verde – the eventual fires were uncontrollable, and affected even archaeological resources almost 1000 years old. But in most of CA, nobody’s going to do controlled burns because you can’t do the ‘control’ part. A real wildfire can just go off the human scale so quickly: you’re walking along with a drip torch setting a line of fire about a foot high that’s cleaning out the brush when the humidity drops, the wind comes up, the fire starts sucking air in from every direction, it ladders up into the trees, and suddenly you are releasing gigawatts of energy. Like the guy said, stand in front of a tornado and tell it to behave. It’ll be your fault.

There won’t be controlled burns in CA, but there’ll be human ignitions once the fires are actually going. Then it’s accepted procedure, if you have the right conditions, to backfire and burn-out unburned pockets. In fact, it can be the only thing that can save you when it starts coming your way, they haven’t pulled you out in time, and you can’t run. It can also be the only thing that will keep the fire from working back through areas it has already passed through, or getting close enough to leap a break.

If the Santa Ana’s are blowing and the temp is over 100, there WILL be fire.