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crixus

Huge Wildfires In California

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Fire in Paradise, California (90 miles north of Sacramento).

ss-181109-paradise-fire-update-03_6b41362a29e57ffa41605fa866ecfaaa.fit-760w.jpg

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4 minutes ago, Joe from WY said:

Like it or not, he's right. The huge fires are a direct result of the state's failure to manage the forests in an appropriate and coherent fashion. 

The vast majority of forests in the state are in national forests and are managed by the US Forest Service. Most of the rest are private or BLM land. With the exception of a few small demonstration plots, there aren’t any state forests. 

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8 minutes ago, Old_SD_Dude said:

The vast majority of forests in the state are in national forests and are managed by the US Forest Service. Most of the rest are private or BLM land. With the exception of a few small demonstration plots, there aren’t any state forests. 

Yeah. 45% of loggable timber in the state is on private land, but those private landowners are subject to a bevy of state-imposed restrictions which prevent them from proper management of the forests. Yeah though, I'm sure all the state, local, and county egulations which make logging among the most restricted industries in California have nothing to do with the problem of giant fires in the forests. The state has clean hands in all of this, clearly. 

There's a reason California imports the majority of its timber, and it isn't because there's a shortage of loggable trees. 

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5 minutes ago, Joe from WY said:

Yeah. 45% of loggable timber in the state is on private land, but those private landowners are subject to a bevy of state-imposed restrictions which prevent them from proper management of the forests. Yeah though, I'm sure all the state, local, and county egulations which make logging among the most restricted industries in California have nothing to do with the problem of giant fires in the forests. The state has clean hands in all of this, clearly. 

There's a reason California imports the majority of its timber, and it isn't because there's a shortage of loggable trees. 

County and local regulations aren’t the state. The state has environmental laws, and even those are almost completely the responsibility of localities to implement. And it’s not a forest burning in Ventura. It’s chaparral. 

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3 minutes ago, Old_SD_Dude said:

County and local regulations aren’t the state. The state has environmental laws, and even those are almost completely the responsibility of localities to implement. And it’s not a forest burning in Ventura. It’s chaparral. 

County and Local Regulations derive their power from the state Constitution. They're all part of the same apparatus. It's obtuse to suggest otherwise. 

My post was generally directed at the forest fire problems of Northern California. As far as the chaparral goes, you still have to manage deserts/grasslands. What we are seeing there is just another failure on the part of the California environmental authorities. That and a lack of personal responsibility; people shouldn't build their houses in risky areas then howl when something bad happens to them. It's hard to have any sympathy for those people.  

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The Woolsey fire in SoCal (Ventura and Los Angeles counties) has now burned more than 70,000 acres and is very close to Pepperdine University in Malibu. And the Camp fire (that's what they're calling it) in NorCal (Butte county) has burned more than 100,000 acres and has destroyed more than 7,000 structures, killed 9 people and dozens are missing. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/10/butte-county-deadly-camp-fire-consumes-100000-acres/

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PG&E is apparently implicated in the Camp (Paradise) Fire

https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/11/09/pge-could-be-to-blame-camp-fire/

If true, you'd have to wonder when all these events are going to catch up with them. They were implicated in the Sonoma fires last year. Among other ones. Then there was that gas line explosion in San Bruno a few years back. 

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State logging regs are one ingredient in a shit soup that is resulting in these destructive fires. Trumps a moron and a child, so I don't blame him for not knowing any better and throwing a tantrum. But these wise use guys who have been whispering in his ears have blood on their hands too as they've been benefiting from this political narrative when they could have been prioritizomg a way to fix the biomass problem in a way that works for everyone in the past 15 years. But they don't actually want that. 

Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

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12 minutes ago, Joe from WY said:

PG&E is apparently implicated in the Camp (Paradise) Fire

https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/11/09/pge-could-be-to-blame-camp-fire/

If true, you'd have to wonder when all these events are going to catch up with them. They were implicated in the Sonoma fires last year. Among other ones. Then there was that gas line explosion in San Bruno a few years back. 

Yes and SDG&E was at fault in the 270,000 acre Cedar Fire in SD County in ‘03. Sounds like we need some more regulation...

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2 minutes ago, Old_SD_Dude said:

Yes and SDG&E was at fault in the 270,000 acre Cedar Fire in SD County in ‘03. Sounds like we need some more regulation...

There's plenty of regulation now. More regulation isn't going to help and will probably lead to continued non-compliance and confusion. 

 A lack of effective enforcement, not a lack of regulation, is the problem. They need to enforce the regs that are there. 

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1 minute ago, Joe from WY said:

There's plenty of regulation now. More regulation isn't going to help and will probably lead to continued non-compliance and confusion. 

 A lack of effective enforcement, not a lack of regulation, is the problem. They need to enforce the regs that are there. 

Actually there is definitely a need for more regulation of transmission line stability in high winds. 

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The Camp fire in Butte county has now been deemed the most destrucive in California history. And that's coming off the previous record holding fires in Sonoma and Napa counties and the Ventura and Los Angeles county fires of last year (not to be confused with the current Woolsey fire in Ventura and Los Angeles counties). *Picture from the Camp fire in Butte county below.

Californiaâs most destructive wildfire should not have come as a surprise

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I remember during the Rim Fire, when people were running out of their houses in Groveland, and the fire crews were barely holding the lines to keep the flames away from Pine Mountain Lake, SPI and had the gall to publicly grouse about the fact that their timber stands weren't the firefighting efforts' number one priority. Then they and their folks also actively propagated and supported conspiracy theories that suggested the Forest Service and state fire people fabricated and/or covered up the cause of the fire for some nefarious purpose. There are a number of instances wherein the pro-lumber people in the foothills bring a significant amount of toxicity to the table whenever these discussions happen. They're often not good-faith actors.

There really aren't many people even in scientific or environmental circles who don't agree that there is a problem in the forests when it comes to sheer mass of timber - too thick, too much fallen wood, etc. You get big fires and lots of dead trees when you have that combined with the shorter rain seasons and smaller snowpacks. These things are happening in June, November and December now, tearing through the downtowns instead of just the hinterlands. So it's a problem, with many interlocking causes, and to fix it both the Lumber people and the environmentalists, and the state and federal politicians, and the fire people, and the insurance companies, and the builders - they're all going to have to get together and figure something out. 

However, what's more likely to happen is Trump will continue to Trump, and Tom McClintock will continue to Tom McClintock, environmental groups will sue every time someone looks at a tree sideways, builders will continue to build in the forest, the SPIs of the world wills till run every county board of supervisors in the foothills, and eventually the only sensible party in the room will be the insurance companies who won't insure any more houses in the woods. 

But I'm glad we elected a sensible president who can show some restraint when people die. 

Oh, eff.

Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention.

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7 hours ago, Joe from WY said:

Like it or not, he's right. The huge fires are a direct result of the state's failure to manage the forests in an appropriate and coherent fashion. 

 

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I might be an asshole, but every year fire season kicks up in California, for whatever reason, this song plays in my head, and I have to listen to Plastic Surgery Disasters multiple times as a result to scratch the itch of having it in my head constantly. 

 

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They've got to do something with the undergrowth and dead trees. If Trump were smart he'd issue an E.O. ordering/allowing selective cutting and clearing of undergrowth via proscribed burns and the like to combat this. 

Personally, I agree with others on here that multiple stakeholders are at fault. The government, the industry itself for past bad practices, environmentalists, and the insurance companies who continue to subsidize reckless behavior of essentially encouraging people to build in risky, fire-prone areas by offering coverage to them. 

It is a huge problem, and with the climate going the way it is (heavy rain in the spring, no rain for months afterward), it's going to need a huge effort from multiple parties to solve it. That said, on the other hand, the forest has always been an ever shifting place, and people are acting as if it's a calamity for doing processes it's done since time immemorial. 

So yeah, tl;dr: there's failures across the board here and it's going to take a concerted effort by the stakeholders to fix it. 

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