Wildfire

[Steno]

As a native Californian, I think we should all take this chance to get more involved with our Forest Service and managing our public lands. The Cachuma fires ravaged the Dick Smith Wilderness only because there had not been a burn there in probably 60 years.

Conditions like these fires are NOT NATURAL, and it is and inept Forest Service and BLM plan that brought them about in the end. Please write to your representative to try and get a more realistic management plan that advocates sustainable forestry and more frequent controlled burns.

Ok, off the soap box.

[SDSULAX]

One of the fires origin has been determined to be from a SDG&E power transmission line that came down in the high winds. One is suspected to be from an illegal campfire, and one started from a housefire, the others are suspected arson. The fires have wiped out one third of the avocado production capacity of San Diego County, that means the trees are gone, burned up.

[StrykerFSU]

http://ladsweb.nascom.nasa.gov/allData/5/MOBRGB_C00/2007/296/MOBRGB_C00.A2007296.005.2007298003029.jpg

Sorry for the large size of this image. This is a composite satellite image taken by NASA's Terra MODIS satellite. It's from Oct. 23 and you can clearly see the smoke blowing off the west coast of California.

[CPLaxGM]

As a native Californian, I think we should all take this chance to get more involved with our Forest Service and managing our public lands. The Cachuma fires ravaged the Dick Smith Wilderness only because there had not been a burn there in probably 60 years.

Conditions like these fires are NOT NATURAL, and it is and inept Forest Service and BLM plan that brought them about in the end. Please write to your representative to try and get a more realistic management plan that advocates sustainable forestry and more frequent controlled burns.

Ok, off the soap box.

I don't necessarily disagree with you Steno, but you've got to realize what a complicated mess we've created for ourselves in parts of California. As a fellow native Californian and a botanist, here's my two cents:

Most of the fires around the San Diego area are not burning down "forests" although they may be on Forest Service land; they're chaparral and coastal scrub habitats. There is no thinning or sustainable forestry that goes on in these areas, it's just thickets of dense shrubs - no one is interested in harvesting sticks. These plant communities are built to burn, and so eventually they do.

We should conduct more control burns so when the fires happen they are less severe, but that gets complicated by the neighborhoods that have sprouted up around the chaparral, the fact that chaparral fires burn extremely hot and are notoriously unpredictable, and that control burns have been known to get away. This doesn't mean these areas shouldn't have control burns, but it's going to take a lot of political will to get it done (and invariably there will be protests from many of the landowners you are designing these fires to protect).

Even in the areas that are true "forest" fires, which in this case is mostly the Lake Arrowhead area fires, things are exacerbated by drought, bark beetle infestations (which are killing the trees), and a hundred years of less than perfect land use planning decisions. In Lake Arrowhead, control fires aren't really feasible because there are houses interspersed throughout the entire forested area. Thinning helps, which they've been doing up there, but it doesn't help too much when you have a pine forest in poor health that hasn't burned in over 100 years. At some point, it's just going to burn, and when it does it's not going to be pretty.

[OAKS]

Wasn't directed at you Andy.

Just sad to think that some person might be responsible for all this tragic loss of life and property.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 6901.story

"Investigators have said that at least two of the huge wildfires, one in Orange County and the other in Temecula, were the work of arsonists"