How to prevent wild fires.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Rookie numbers. Canada had 15 250 fires start simutaneously.

Surely a coincidence.

[freebeard]

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.

When was that? IIRC the Thorpe brothers (my nemesis[es] at the time) were caretaking the Breitenbush Lodge when it burnt in the 1970s. The current news has flushed the story [if true?] from the hive mind.

Surely a coincidence.

We saw what Antifa could do with propane torches and leaf blowers until the Forest Serrvice got onto their game. It makes the 'directed energy from LEO' seem plausible.

[JSH]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

When was that? IIRC the Thorpe brothers (my nemesis[es] at the time) were caretaking the Breitenbush Lodge when it burnt in the 1970s.

I view the area as 4 distinct parts.
There's the private lodge, which I believe is mostly patronaged by nudists.
There's the developed and managed campground that charges a fee.
There's undeveloped and free camping all along the roadside.
There's an undeveloped/free campground a little past the managed campground.

The latter is where we camped. Used to be able to drive a car to each campsite, but forest management moved boulders and logs around to prevent that. Now there's a parking lot and campsites are reached by a short walk.

Fire was Sept 2020

Here's the parking lot July 2020


Here's boiling water for coffee because I forgot to bring a pot


Here's floating on the Breit where it enters Detroit lake, the day before the fire. Was supposed to be a sunny 95 degree day and ended up somewhere around 75 due to the smoke.


Here's the town of Detroit a couple weeks later, my friend's Mom's house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9l0JvHWiT0

[freebeard]

Nice bus.

The Thorpe brothers came up from California in a '55 Chevy four-door with the windows painted out on the inside and predated on cooperative movements in the Eugene area. They broke everything their sticky fingers touched.

Back then (if true) it burnt from the inside out. Maybe it was somewhere up the McKenzie.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Nice bus.

Here's the better side.


These were posted before in your sorry, not sorry thread.

As for predators of communes go, that's the reason why when everybody owns something, nobody owns it. It becomes a race to the bottom to leech the last out of system before it collapses.

Educated morons of communistic leaning convince themselves that most people aren't lazy, and that if their environment was just so, they would stop behaving as savages.

[oil pan 4]

Sounds like a threat.
Keep your grass short, your saws sharp, shovels ready.
I'm starting to think the problem can only be solved by stretching ropes.

[JSH]

Sounds like reality to me.

I don’t know if you have been to Maui recently but the environment has radically changed in that past decade. When I visited at the age of 13 the entire interior of the island lush green fields of sugar cane or pineapple fields. These were growing in a naturally dry area due to an extensive irrigation system that bought water down from the rainforests. When I visited a few years ago I was shocked by the view from the airplane. Those lush green irrigated fields were replaced by dry fallow fields because the sugar mill closed in 2016 and 36,000 acres of land was just allowed to sit and repopulate with invasive African grasses like Molasses Grass.

Molasses grass grows 3 to 6 feet tall and goes dormant in the summer. Molasses grass is also adapted to fire cycles were it rapidly grows back after a fire and outcompetes native grasses. So you have tens of thousands of acres of tinder dry grass combined with steady winds. Once a fire starts it is very hard to put out and Hawaii has seen an ever increasing numbers of wildfires. This is compounded by the fact that these fallow fields stretch right up to the edge of cities and towns without any sort of fire break.

The Lahaina disaster was not a surprise. People have been warning about the risk for years but they were ignored because fixing the problem takes money.

[redpoint5]

This boy pushed me on the swing in Lahaina a couple months ago.


We took family photos at Baby Beach, and it's completely destroyed.


I don't specifically recollect large dry grassy areas, but my guess is it pretty well covers most of the land below the mountains. Likely a field of grass just behind the fence to this park.

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

This boy pushed me on the swing in Lahaina a couple months ago.


We took family photos at Baby Beach, and it's completely destroyed.


I don't specifically recollect large dry grassy areas, but my guess is it pretty well covers most of the land below the mountains. Likely a field of grass just behind the fence to this park.

Did it look like a tinder box? I have heard it referred to as a tinder box by people from California.