You’re cherry-picking. It’s been known for years that not enough is spent on forest management, thinning and clearing underbrush. The first set of fires that took out Paradise should have been a warning but nothing was done still. It’s mismanagement.
No. Other fires it might have made a difference but not what happened this winter in Southern California.
These arguments are largely incorrect, according to fire experts.
Both
county and
state rules already require individuals to maintain vegetation-free buffer zones around homes in high-risk areas.
Even these regulations, however, would not have stopped this round of fires, which spread quickly as Santa Ana winds with gusts of over 80 mph blew the blaze horizontally between houses and carried embers through the sky, touching off new blazes.
“All of the brush clearance, fuel breaks — they’re very effective on what we would consider a normal day,” Chief Brian Fennessy of the Orange County Fire Authority
toldThe Los Angeles Times. “But what you’re talking about here is probably less than 1% of all the fires that we respond to in Southern California.”
“You could have put a 10-lane freeway in front of that fire and it would not have slowed it one bit,” he added.
Making matters worse, hard-hit neighborhoods like Altadena and the Pacific Palisades are built in high-risk fire zones. In addition, 90 percent of Los Angeles County’s housing stock was constructed before 1990, prior to fire-proofing code requirements taking effect.
“The houses are perfectly aligned with the direction of the prevailing Santa Ana winds,” wildfire mapping expert Zeke Lunder
toldThe Washington Post. “It is too late after the city is built to think about this stuff.”
An analysis from the newspaper found that as of Saturday, more than 70 percent of the burned areas in L.A. County were in zones the state determined have very high fire risk.
Thus, when fast-moving winds began carrying the blaze towards these communities, the stage was set for catastrophic destruction.
“The bottom line is the winds far outweigh the fuel in terms of fire spread in a situation like this,” Jon Keeley, fire ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey,
told LAist. “When you have these winds it makes fuels less relevant. And the fuels are definitely not relevant once it gets into the urban environment, because the primary fuels are the homes.”
Moreover, clearing out brush is more effective in the ecosystems of Northern California and the Sierra Nevada mountains, where decades of total fire suppression allowed fuels to build up, ignoring both the landscape’s natural fire cycle and the
long indigenous history of controlled burns.
In these areas, controlled burns and reduction in brush can make forests both more resilient and less combustible, but these impacts are less meaningful in the dry, scrubby climate of Southern Calfornia, one of the most extreme fire climates in the world, according to the National Park Service.
In these chaparral ecosystems, controlled burns could hasten the replacement of slow-gestating native plants with faster-growing invasives which die sooner and increase fire risk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/could-more-brush-clearance-really-215747202.html
Did these and other second-guessers have a point? Scientists, wildfire specialists and firefighting officials had differing viewpoints. But several of these experts — including strong proponents of brush clearance — said that the winds fanning the flames were so fierce, and ground conditions so dry, that clearing more shrubs wouldn’t have had a significant effect.
https://www.latimes.com/environment...-helped-slow-the-spread-of-the-palisades-fire
