Fire Season
by Josh K-sky on Sep.01, 2009, under Los Angeles
View from P & M's balcony
Not two months after we started going out, HJ took me to a friend’s wedding in the Angeles National Forest. The forest gets most of its views from the return to Los Angeles through the Antelope Valley, where from the 5 freeway it appears brown and scrubby, but the wedding was in a hilltop grove, medium-close and green with pine trees. We danced on a big carpet set next to a generator-powered sound system and her friends scoped me out. I asked, “How many sentences can I start with ‘At my wedding…’” and she said “As many as you like as long as you’re open to another one,” and thus we got the ball rolling.
The forest will be considerably less green for a while. By Tuesday morning, the Station Fire had grown to 122,000 acres. The friends who got married there reported that their home in Big Tujunga Canyon was one of two remaining on their block, and they weren’t sure how remaining it was.
A giant pyrocumulus cloud has been standing over the basin, visible from just about everywhere:
Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo. (via LAObserved)
It’s cloudy today, and when HJ left for work it was raining ash. Last night we sat with friends on their balcony with a good view of the flames and tried to figure out why California can’t prevent catastrophic forest fires. Would controlled burns help? If so, why aren’t they happening? My sense is that local property owners would not be enthusiastic about controlled burns — after all, the second google hit for “controlled burn California” returns an instance in which a controlled burn took 23 homes. The Angeles National Forest page on fuel management says that “Although the window for using prescribed fire (broadcast burning) is very narrow in southern California (winds, humidity and a variety of other factors have to be just right for this to be done safely), this method is sometimes used to remove hazardous fuels and improve habitat conditions for wildlife.” It may be the case that the technology of fire control is not the problem so much as the pattern of human settlement. And it may be that, counter-intuitively, the aftermath of a devastating fire may not be the best time to address that pattern.
Since I’m just starting in on the question and don’t have too much light to shine yet, policy-wise, here’s another time-lapse video. With more flames!
Station File Time Lapse #4 from Dan Finnerty on Vimeo.
BLAST FROM THE PAST: Followers of this blog’s prehistory will know that Bush tried to sell off fuels management to the timber industry.
READING LIST: Let Malibu Burn, Mike Davis.
September 1st, 2009 on 12:36 pm
why California can’t prevent catastrophic forest fires.
It depends on how you define “catastrophic.” If you mean “fires that burn a lot of acres of forest,” you can’t and you shouldn’t try, especially in the chaparral scrublands along the coast. Those areas are going to burn. You can reduce the intensity of those in pine forests fires by increasing their frequency and cutting down a lot of small trees, so that you have a more open, grassy forest floor, the way it was when Native Americans were managing their lands with regular burns. But if you mean “fires that burn a lot of homes,” as Mike Davis has discussed elsewhere, a good place to start would be to stop giving fabulously wealthy homeowners massive subsidies for fire insurance when they build in known fire-prone areas.
September 1st, 2009 on 1:12 pm
You can reduce the intensity of those in pine forests fires by increasing their frequency and cutting down a lot of small trees, so that you have a more open, grassy forest floor, the way it was when Native Americans were managing their lands with regular burns.
This is what I’m talking about. What’s the political pressure against this? Is it that increasing frequency is perceived by property owners as increased risk?
September 1st, 2009 on 1:46 pm
Mainly that it costs a lot, I think. What you have now are pine forests with lots of small trees close together. What you want are big trees far apart. To get from A to B you have to go in and cut a lot of those small trees. Then you can burn to maintain state B. The small trees have basically zero economic value and they’re a pain in the ass to cart out.