What's your source for the suggestion? Seriously - I'd be interested to read a reliable source supporting this suggestion. You really think the folks in CA are just sitting around waiting for the next blaze to spark? It's like suggesting that folks in southern coastal areas should have built 20ft barriers to prevent hurricane storm surge. Lazy losers! The real truth is probably that neither you nor I know shit about fire prevention measures in CA.
It apparently could have been handled much better - low pressure in fire hydrants, an empty reservoir, millions of dollars in fire dept. budget cuts - but the long drought that had hit that area was a pretty fair sign of climate change and helped make wildfires ready to happen. And at least California can pride itself in knowing it didn't vote for an anti-science president who thinks climate change will not just disappear like the Covid virus, it doesn't even exist.
I suspect there is a lot of east coast bias. People don't rilly understand the dryness, water issues, & proximity of civilization to open spaces in the west. I am 50 yards from very dry scrubby brush covered hills & fierce winds blow down from those higher altitudes. It's like life on the Fla coast in that there are inherent risks. A raging fire came within 100 yards of my condo in the mts. several years ago (summit had just spent 2m on mitigation). The guy who gave my son's dept grad address lost his house as the whole neighborhood (in Louisville, CO) burnt in a a matter of minutes. I mean, what are we're supposed to do, just pave over the world to prevent fires? They are our hurricanes.
You are being kind. I suspect that people blaming the CA gov & infrastructure for the fires are dumb as shit + susceptible to propaganda. I hear ya about uncontrollable burning. We saw the char just outside of your condo first hand. Hiked through that area w our dog and wondered if it was controlled burn or nature. Everything was flattened & black. Now we know.
There is also MASSIVE beetle kill all around that part of Colorado as there is throughout the mt west. The woods look as if you are walking through a huge game of pick up sticks.
The beetles are eating the foliage, or the foliage is being destroyed to off the beetles? Either way, the mountains are a trip. So diff from the midwest & southeast.
The beetles kill Lodgepole Pines, but they only kill the mature trees b/c the young trees produce enough sap to repel them, so it is kind of a vicious cycle. & the forest ends up full of big dead trees & large amounts of felled dead trees. 100 years from now there will prob be way more blue spruce, firs & aspen, but it is a slow transformation.
what saved us was there was another big fire on the front range, so they were able to quickly divert resources to our fire since structures were in immediate danger.
Population went down for the last 4 years. There have been tons of threads on it. Yes that stops in 2022 but it declined the last 2 as well. Los Angeles County vs. California | Population Trends over 1969-2022
Actually some residents decided to put in their own fire hydrants to be able to keep their own houses from catching fire. They knew it was a sister waiting to happen. There are no grown-ups in California From Vox, pretty critical of The powers that be in Cal. An even bigger threat is looming behind California’s fires “Water, however, is always a political issue in Los Angeles. The region has contended with water scarcity since it was founded, yet has also faced extensive flooding during intense downpours. City officials and local politicians were quick to criticize the city’s underinvestment in its water infrastructure.”
Ya were doing pretty well there until ya went off topic in the last sentence. Regardless of Trump’s stance this is an issue that rests squarely on the leadership in Cal. Didn’t they have billions in surplus tax money? Perhaps they could have spent a bit more to bolster their firs mitigation systems?
We go out to Oklahoma quite often to see the in-laws and it's such a dry landscape, seems like it would almost be impossible to stop a fire once it got going
Now that's something that could be somewhat controlled better with certain pesticides, which our government has taken off several of those products off the market
I think people just dont understand. When I visited a friend of mine in No Cal, he was doing a bit of landscaping at his home and we stopped by one of the places they sold plants to pick some up. It was insane the kind of regulations on what you could plant, and what you had to do with stuff. It was like consulting an expert when you went to these landscaping places. He was up on a mountain, he had a whole water set up, and all sorts of stuff going on to comply with regulations. In Florida I can just go to Lowe's pick up some plants I like and stick them anywhere I want anytime of year. You barely have to worry about watering them in some cases depending on when you plant.
