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Originally Posted by redpoint5
What I don't get is that most campgrounds prohibit collecting dead wood for campfires, which is precisely what causes the forests to burn uncontrollably. A brush fire sans dead wood will quickly burn itself out and spare the larger trees and shrubbery.
I was camping at Breitenbush the day prior to the fires that took it out, and still haven't been back to survey the damage.
Back in the day when they permitted vehicles to gain easy access to the area, we'd burn all the dead wood around for campfires, and I bet that would have spared the area from the recent wildfire.
Perhaps I'm wrong though, and the fire spread from large tree, to large tree because drought made them too dry?
When you drive around in the dry part of Oregon, all the large pine trees have black bark at the base from the various brush fires the trees have survived.
The theory being frequent smaller fires prevent the large calamitous ones.
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People are banned from gathering firewood in campgrounds because they can't be trusted to just collect the deadwood. I've seen plenty of people cutting live wood (which of course doesn't burn well but plenty of people don't seem to know that)
Yes, frequent small fires can clear out the underbrush and protect large mature trees in a fire. That is the natural cycle for grasslands and some types of forests. However, we haven't allowed fires to burn naturally for about 120 years so those natural small intensity fire are not possible today without prep work to thin and clear the forest before fire is used to manage it. There are some forests around Bend, OR that have this treatment but it is expensive and you have to pay someone to do it because most of what comes out has no commercial value.
Commercial logging isn't a fix either as timber plantations plant trees much closer than natural and studies after fires have shown commercially managed "forest" burn faster than natural old growth.
In many of the recent large fires the flames spread treetop to treetop. Dry forests and high winds will do that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
My sense is that last month was warmer and much drier than normal here in the valley. I've had my sprinkler controller on for 2 months now, and normally I wouldn't be hooking it up until right about now... just looked out my office window while typing this and noticed some drops of rain on the porch, which is the first precip I can remember in weeks.
Already had a couple evenings of AC use, which I normally wouldn't run until July.
With regards to global warming, I readily accept that it can change precipitation patterns, but I'm very skeptical of the claims that those changes only ever cause problems for us. How does more overall precipitation exist while drought increases? More overall rainfall and more overall drought seem to be opposing ideas.
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Yes, it has been a very dry May in Oregon. We got rain today and the last rain we had in Portland was 8-June. May also had 5 days in the 90's which is pretty much unheard of (average high is 70F). Total rain for the month was 0.91 inches / average is 2.5 inches
We were out in central Oregon last weekend for a float trip and it was DRY. As dry as we normally see it in late June / early July. Campfires are banned but that didn't stop the high next to use from trying to start a campfire in a 20 mph wind, with humidity at 11%, and tinder dry grass all around.
Yes, a warming earth has more rainfall - but that rainfall is not evenly distributed. Some areas are getting significantly dryer while others are getting wetter. However, even that increased rain is not necessarily good if it drops as an atmospheric river with a foot of rain in a day or two. More droughts combined with more floods are bad for humanity.