Credit: McClatchy/Sacramento Bee, Producer - Melanie Hogue
The Legislature, galvanized by the Camp Fire and a 2017 wine country disaster that burned 200,000 acres, approved hundreds of millions of dollars this year for new engines and aircraft, more firefighters, remote cameras and improved emergency-alert systems. Story continuesWhile state and federal agencies have scrambled to thin out California’s vast forests, drought and disease left a staggering backlog of 147 million dead trees — tinder waiting to ignite.
“But that’s not actually risk-reduction,” Wara said. “We have not actually reduced the scale of the problem.” The reason? Relatively mild weather. Natasha Stavros, a fire ecologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the late-spring snowfalls kept extra moisture in the ground and made “the fuels less flammable.”“Basically what you saw out there is the moderate weather,” said Capt. Scott McLean, a spokesman for the state’s firefighting agency. “You don’t have that blast furnace we had to deal with in 2017 and 2018 that dried everything out.
But at the current rate, hardening the grid could take a decade. “Do we need to pick up the pace, do we need to accelerate the pace?” he said. “As soon as we get out of the fire season, those are exactly the kinds of things we’ll be looking at.” Just east of Colfax, Cal Fire is wrapping up a fuel break on 850 acres along the North Fork of the American River. The other day about 100 private workers and National Guardsmen were removing Ponderosa pines, Douglas firs and oaks in a steep canyon.
Still, progress comes slowly — about 30 acres a week. The work is the first phase of a multi-year program aimed at treating 4,300 acres. Hundreds of thousands of Californians have lost their homeowners’ insurance in recent years as the industry recoils from more than $20 billion in wildfire losses. Replacement coverage is usually two or three times more expensive. It’s become a crisis as real estate values fall in areas that are already struggling and rely heavily on wealthy transplants moving in.
For a billion dollars I would have built 2 fire walls around Paradise and ran all their electricity wires underground for at least 30 miles.
It will never be safer until these liberals start having controlled burns. If these tree huggers won’t manage the forest, Mother Nature will.
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