I know exactly what I'm talking about. We've had huge fires here in the Canadian prairies- as big as anything in the US. Towns have been evacuated and allowed to burn to the ground.
If and when fires get too big and out of control, everyone is moved out of harms way and the fires are watched from a safe distance, and contained on the periphery.
That's all well and good on the prairies. In the mountains things are a bit different. My town has burnt to the ground on at least two occasions with huge loss of life both times. It almost happened a third time in 1987 when a dozen small fires suddenly merged into a monster fire that went screaming up the Tuolumne River canyon faster than a car can drive. We were caught with our pants down, too late to evacuate we were told to hunker down in place and pray. Knowing the situation was so desperate an Australian fire fighting crew, one part of over 10,000 firefighters that fought the fire, stood up on a ridge just under a mile from my house and decided to make that their last stand.
With only shovels, pick axes and chainsaws they hastily cut out a fire line then called in air drops practically on top of them. This went on all through the night.
But by morning the worst was over. They held the fire at bay but at a terrible cost. One of them died when a tree fell on him and dozens of others were injured. However they saved my town and several thousand lives. Needless to say we now hold great respect for Australian fire crews.
And that is how chaotic these things are. When the fires get as big as that one was they create their own weather and any notion they can just be observed from a safe distance is rather unrealistic.
Raging fires have been around a lot longer than there have been people. As a matter of fact, there are people, many of them scientists, who are for allowing forest fires to burn themselves out.
That is a true but you forget that conditions need to be right for it. For a hundred years the Forest Service put out all fires immediately allowing a huge amount of underbrush to accumulate. We now have vast groves of manzanita. Do you have any idea what happens when a grove of manzanita goes up in flames?
It is pretty terrible. The stuff burns so hot you would melt a wood stove if you threw some in it. And we now have millions of acres of the stuff.
The result is that when one of these fires burn through
nothing survives. Trees disappear completely leaving smoldering pits as the fire gets down into their root system even. There is no post fire germination as all seeds are incinerated. Twenty five years after the 1987 fire its scars are still easily seen as vast swaths of the forest remain completely bare, stripped of all life.
That's what happens when a monster fire turns into a firestorm. No forest is evolved to survive such a calamity.
Contrary to hoopla, raging fires of all types don't go on forever and burn up everything, everywhere.
Wrong. A monster fire, as I point out above, will burn up everything. Even seeds. Leaving nothing alive behind.
In the case of forests, forests have evolved to burn. Yes, you read that right- forests have evolved to burn. Trees in forested areas have evolved to burn in such a way that they can be terrifically burnt but still alive. The fires, meanwhile, release nutrients while allowing light in.
Something I am well aware of. But they evolved to endure small fires that happen more frequently. They are not evolved to survive the types of fire super storms that happen when you let a hundred years of brush to accumulate.
Reforestation after a forest fire is not about reforestation. If you've ever lived in an area where there has been a forest fire, and nature has been allowed to take its course (Salmon Arm in British Columbia, Canada, for example), you'll see for yourself that in the aftermath of a forest fire, what looks as bad as the dark side of the Moon comes back with a vengeance.
Except that the hottest burning fires, as I already explained, do not allow this.
They burn so hot the forest is completely destroyed.
Another monster fire, the Cherry Fire, burned 100,000 acres down in the early seventies. The forest never regrew over most of the area it devastated. Forty years later what was once a lush forest is still a barren scab land.
Reforestation is a matter of greed and stupidity. Baby evergreen trees are planted where a conifer forest once was. Problem is, planet Earth evolved in such a way that Alder and Ash trees follow a forest fire, and their remains, over many years, provide nutrients to the evergreens that gradually choke them out as the new conifer forest grows back.
We have never had Alder or Ash trees locally. We have oak trees and conifers. And lots of brush.
Fires are part of Nature, and Nature doesn't need us to manage it.
Great. Get a time machine so you can stop a hundred years of management policy that ignored that. Leaving us in the dire situation we currently have.
The rest of the equation is priorities, and the top priority is life. The value we place on life is the value from which all our values (and priorities) evolved.
There is a certain mentality that wants to push the envelope and take charge of what Nature throws at us. Some people see them as heroes, others see them as fools. I fall into the latter camp. I wept when Terry Fox died, but when some storm chasers recently died I didn't bother to so much as take note of their names.
That's the difference.
You are completely misguided in your attempt to belittle their deaths. The situation in the southwest USA is dire. They are literally the only thing standing in the way of even larger disasters.
Yes the situation is largely of our own making but that is not the point. Mistakes were made and today firefighters die as a result. And, despite what you assert, they die as heroes.
