Julia Rosen @ 17

Throwing on my Courage/Calitics hat on for a second here. A local award winning journalist in SD just put up a piece on Calitics. She interviewed a Blackwater spokesman [snippety snoo]

I don’t care if Blackwater promises to strew rose petals everywhere. I DO NOT WANT THEM IN MY STATE. FULL STOP. GET OUT.

Gah! I am not shocked by DiFi’s silence on this matter, but I am deeply deeply disappointed at Boxer’s silence.

Hey Blackwater’s from NC, my home state…how do ya think I feel? Those bastards are fucking up the landscape in a really beautiful part of the state….schmucks!
didja hear about the PR memo blackwater sent out about their interest in cali? Try to spin the situation to make them look better, and didn’t say a damn thing about HELPING fight the fires, or help the people affected by the fires…

… referring to a Christian Science Monitor article that gets right to the heart of the story:

California’s age of megafires

Megafires, also called “siege fires,” are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more – 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.

The trend to more superhot fires, experts say, has been driven by a century-long policy of the US Forest Service to stop wildfires as quickly as possible. The unintentional consequence was to halt the natural eradication of underbrush, now the primary fuel for megafires.

Three other factors contribute to the trend, they add. First is climate change marked by a 1-degree F. rise in average yearly temperature across the West. Second is a fire season that on average is 78 days longer than in the late 1980s. Third is increased building of homes and other structures in wooded areas.

“We are increasingly building our homes … in fire-prone ecosystems,” says Dominik Kulakowski, adjunct professor of biology at Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Worcester, Mass. Doing that “in many of the forests of the Western US … is like building homes on the side of an active volcano.”

In California, where population growth has averaged more than 600,000 a year for at least a decade, housing has pushed into such areas.

“What once was open space is now residential homes providing fuel to make fires burn with greater intensity,” says Terry McHale of the California Department of Forestry firefighters union. “With so much dryness, so many communities to catch fire, so many fronts to fight, it becomes an almost incredible job.”

CSM seems to give Schwarzenegger too much credit for improvements to the emergency response system, but they got the core story right.

Thanks–flattered here.

Biologists’ understanding of these ecological systems have long been established. Urban planners have likewise documented and established the impact of suburban land use patterns on watersheds, vegetative cover, and the cost to taxpayers for extending municipal (& county) services out to the hinterlands. (the next FDL post on teh fire deals with underfunded firefighting agencies at the county level—were they built closer to the urban core, this would at least be less of a problem, though it’s an issue there too)

. . .
Imagine that.

But then, California ecologists have known this for decades.

http://www.fireecology.net/pages/55

Good Scientific Spanky, thanks for your post, that was magnificent.

I still wanna know why all the MSM’s with BOOTS ON THE GROUND AT THE SCENES, all 15 or so FIRES, REPORTING LIVE, and they reported winds grounded fixed wing planes on day one . . . and up until what, late Wednesday?

And others who LIVE THERE on site in their places, continue to castigate those reports in this forum, and comments in general do so to, and they all decry a lack of equipment as to being the devil that wreacked this fuckery.

And I salute SombreroFallout person for the science. Able bodied and willing to report. Nice work, nice science.

Harumph.

And again, best to all down there, this is and will continue to be, hell for all involved.

My money (as little as it is) went to a member’s list of dobro players, and we’ve got more than a few down there need our help.

There were 14-15 ugly fires, all with gusting Santa Anna’s which overwhelmed ANY local resources on hand . . after that, it’s scramble and struggle and as our Aussie Persiflage said:

“Hold yer ground and prepare in advance.”

After that, it’s bhudda’s fated right hand that determines who survives and who doesn’t.

The real story’s of this issue lie in mama nature, and not in man’s hands. Don’t blame man. Other than for BEING there . . .

But for the incompetence, let’s wait and see how THAT reportage turns out . . at least until the rainy season passes, which if even average, is gonna cause MUCH more damage to come.

Hydro seeding and erosion prevention at this level is not possible by mankind.

Nor were the fires, or the winds.

And it ain’t over yet. Let’s save some humanity for the suffering.

Those of you down there who are safe, it’s a bit early to be accusing who’s to blame for those who are suffering.

Harumph.

raven @ 85

“Fourth Tower of Inverness”

That’s not Firesign is it?

I thought it was….

http://drakhan.com/4tower.html

Hmmmm….that was, then, one awfully convenient fire. Who benefits? I don’t remember the Latin for it, but it’s an attorney’s term. I mean, hell, if you could stop a recall election with one match, and you were a blackwater kind a guy (shoot em and they don’t cause problems), what would you do? Just a little too good to be true, methinks.

Cui Bonno . . . ‘for whom the benefit’

as quoted in past by Al The Spook. Whom I miss . . .

Matt Stoller does us all a disservice if he’s really so patronizing as to a) police environmental groups, b) offer them advice or remark upon their restraint.

Enviromental policy gurus have been playing in the Western-rural political arena for a couple generations, minimum.

It’s incomprehensible that Stoller should be ‘congratulating’ enviros for “refusing to demagogue excessively on climate change as the cause of these fires.”

Excessively?? Don’t know how one demagogues “excessively”—but that aside, it requires zero restraint and zero demagoguery to point out the basic ecological facts.

These ecosystems are fire-adapted. Some plant species in Southern California actually exude petrochemical compounds. So–Suppress the natural fire regime, and eventually, inevitably, you get conflagration.

Seee?? NO demagoguery required.

Note that w/o prescribed burns, the fires were likely to occur whether global warming was a factor or not.

Lack of rainfall and increased temps may’ve compounded the problem, increasing the scale of the fire, but the effects of El Nina (secondary driver) and global warming (tertiary driver) can’t be cited when the main issue—fire suppression in a fire-adapted ecosystem defined by a strong fire regime—is clearly the obvious, proximate cause.

Note also that the suburban land use patterns (sprawl) has an “urban heat island” effect that increases temps, exacerbating both local risk of wildfires and global warming.

Stating the ecological facts can’t be defined as “demagoguing.” And if political junkies had not pretended that environmental issues should take a back seat, politically, to their own pet causes, Stoller’s patronizing and unhelpful commentary wouldn’t be an issue.

The guys he mentions have been negotiating the politics of forests, settlements and wildfires for multiple decades. No demagoguery needed.

Geez, this sounds almost like . . . SCIENCE! *G*

Great post.

Here’s a big fat lie from today’s gaggle:

MS. PERINO: Let me just add couple points on that. …

Number one, these aren’t forests. Number two, if you “clear out the brush” then you have massive mudslides. …
Liars.

But what’s new? Yesterday there was this:

Q And one more. You mentioned that there are health benefits to climate change. Could you describe some of those?

MS. PERINO: Sure. In some cases, there are — look, this is an issue where I’m sure lots of people would love to ridicule me …

Health benefits from Global Warming: not as many people will die from the cold. Ooooooh-kay then.

——–

The Republicans have their own kind of Chinatown:

“It’s tough being good with that sum bitch Bush as president.” Slap!

Reagan. Slap!

Nixon. Slap!

If Bush could blame it on Al Qaeda, he could immediately begin bombing them in their various hide-outs along the CA coast.
It would be years before the people would be allowed to return to their homes because George was “keeping them safe” from terrists.
One question: Isn’t CA coastal real estate awfully expensive to turn into a Blackwater killer college?

sombrerofallout @ 148

However, “backfires” and “preventive” fires mean nothing, as they are not synonymous with prescribed burns of a fire-adapted ecosystem defined by a fire regime.

Well. I was after description, not necessarily technical words. But I will stand corrected. However…

A prescribed burn or controlled burn–carries out the naturally occurring fire regime, which will inevitably happen, so as to maintain native vegetation and ecosystems AND to prevent catastrophic wildfires that are driven primarily by fire suppression.

OK, as I understand this description, we do indeed have prescribed burns in this area. It’s entirely possible that these have been reduced in number which would be due to factors such as …

Such as management policies that veer from working with the local ecosystem in order to “get out the cut” and otherwise deliver dollars to timber interests, AND/OR developer interests.

peanutbutter @ 164

sombrerofallout @ 148So, YES, the Forest Service, as the original poster pointed out, has moved away from prescribed/controlled burns and towards the Bush (mal)Admin’s ideological adherence to timber profits.

You totally lost me here. WHAT FORESTS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

I can tell you that there are NO TREES… NO TIMBER…along here in these wildfires.

I didn’t mention any forests–the poster you’d referred to had mentioned the Forest Service.

The principle is the same whether you’re talking about the BLM, USFS, the Park Service–or County land managers.

In fact, fire-adapted ecosystems are MORE likely to have fewer trees–for obvious reasons. They burn. Tallgrass (wet) prairies in Wisconsin, Prairie Savannas in Iowa, and Shortgrass Prairies in Nebraska are MORE fire-prone than ecosystems ’strong’/’friendly’ enough to support trees.

California’s Coastal Sagebrush and Chaparral ecosystems are EVEN MORE fire-prone–and yes, I’m aware these systems lack trees. Thanks, though. Forests are obviously less at risk–and less at issue–than the SoCal ecosystems now burning.

Why?

These ecosystems require regular burning to exist. That’s what fire-adapted means. Some plants require burning in order to for their seeds to germinate:

Many have heat-resistant seeds that break their dormancy after long intervals between fires. Many species of Ceanothus for example, have leaves that are coated with flammable resins that fuel a fire. This adaptation benefits the species because ceanothus seeds require intense heat for germination. “Fire-resistant” roots also enable the plant to resprout quickly in recently burned areas.

Trees got nothin’ to do with it; my comments apply in spades for the ecosystems we’re dealing with here.

peanutbutter @ 164

sombrerofallout @ 148

Second, urbanized landscapes and suburbanizing land use patterns DO, in fact, raise ambient temperatures and lower the water table. It is a plain fact that recent residential development DID contribute (significantly) to the fire risk,

The stresses of the population here do indeed contribute to the lowered water availability here, that’s quite true, and among the complexity of factors here. But this is in regarding the population here in southern California as a whole, NOT in with respect to the outlying develepments that have burned, some of which have been in place for over 100 years.

(I hear too much screaming about “recent developments” being “so careless” as to contribute to this problem — when in fact they are often much better built and placed than developments in the 70’s for example — I want to quash this now, because it muddies the understanding of what is going on here…)

Good luck with that. The County land manager from San Diego-area just announced seconds ago on the NewsHour (PBS) that zoning, residential location, and land use patterns have if not everything, then a lot to do with it. Even “better-built,” more recent developments aren’t terribly ecologically-sound (usually) and settle for a half-measure. Though this has been changing, it hasn’t gone far enough. Figuratively, that is, b/c location does make an obvious difference, as newer residential patterns have literally ‘gone too far’. “We’re built-out,” in the words of another CA interviewee.

Further, site-specific impacts of even relatively ‘green,’ dispersed, recent developments raise local temps and affect water regimes (varies by ecosystem). Cumulatively, these are significant–and can compromise critical water regimes, tipping the balance toward wildfires.

peanutbutter @ 164

AND placed homeowners and families directly in the path of (& in the midst of) wildfires that were going to happen whether homes were built there or not.

Not necessarily. The hotter winds …have multiplied fires which are reaching into areas not before burned. Again people are assuming that new developments are burning down …most are not realizing that particularly in OC the burnt areas include many very old developments that have so far escaped fires.

I have no doubt this varies greatly. And “old,” medium-aged housing, and newer developments are and will be affected.

BUT “areas not before burned”? Extremely unlikely. For example:

Under natural conditions, a stand of chaparral tends to be burnt every 30 to 40 years. The largest fires occur in late fall and early winter in connection with hot, dry santa Ana winds. Fire protection by humans produces stands with excessive flammable material and, accordingly, more severe fires when they finally occur.

—Brewer, The Science of Ecology, 1994

Imagine that.

But then, California ecologists have known this for decades.

http://www.fireecology.net/pages/55