As far as i can tell, california forest management essentially ended up suppressing "good fires", and didn't do enough of controlled burns, which ended up accumulating a lot of fuel to cause large fires.
Santa Cruz had huge wildfires when I was a kid in the 80s (it snowed ash even). The fire experts were pretty explicite that if the same policies were kept in place (preventing burn off) we would have those same fires 40 years later. It's 40 years later I wonder how that turned out.
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As far as i can tell, california forest management essentially ended up suppressing "good fires", and didn't do enough of controlled burns, which ended up accumulating a lot of fuel to cause large fires.
Santa Cruz had huge wildfires when I was a kid in the 80s (it snowed ash even). The fire experts were pretty explicite that if the same policies were kept in place (preventing burn off) we would have those same fires 40 years later. It's 40 years later I wonder how that turned out.
How it turned out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZU_Lightning_Complex_fires
It's probably a lot more complicated than that. For one thing, California is a place that imported eucalyptus. This is a fire hazard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37442671
If eucalyptus is now fact of the state, what needs to be done to reduce its impact?
I find chainsaws work fine
California could look to, I don’t know. Australia!? Instead of Americans again pretending that any problem they face is uniquely theirs.
That’s one piece of a larger picture, which includes climate change, snowpack, severe weather events, PG&E, etc.