California is Burning (Again)

[stalefish3169]

Pretty cool story map that was created with some lidar base layer data I worked on a few years ago. http://sonomavegmap.org/firestory/index.html

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[Meadow Skipper]

https://www.theonion.com/california-...source=Twitter

[old goat]

California is burdened with a balkanized political system--thousands of jurisdictions such as cities and towns, counties, fire districts, park districts, etc. Outside of the parks the state itself owns very little land. Zoning--allowing building in the urban/wildland interface is up to local jurisdictions. Cal Fire controls fire on private lands but preventative management of private lands is up to the owner--although better laws to compel preventative management should be passed. While California is as a whole a liberal state, much of the area at risk for wildfire is politically conservative or outright libertarian--there was bitter opposition a couple of years ago when the state imposed fees on areas where Cal Fire is the primary fire fighting organization.

[bodywhomper]

Pretty cool story map that was created with some lidar base layer data I worked on a few years ago. http://sonomavegmap.org/firestory/index.html

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That's cool! We may know some of the same people...

healthy canopy/vegetation assessment 1 year post-fire, don't some of the affected trees take a few years to die? this is currently coming up from the Camp Fire. there's a current debate about hazardous tree removal, where retired licensed arborists are questioning the assessment made by the county on tree health. the retired guys are saying that some of the trees tagged by the county contractors are not currently hazardous nor will become hazardous in the future as a result of the fire.

[SumJongGuy]

https://www.theonion.com/california-...source=Twitter

Breathtakingly funny

[hercule33]

It should be mentioned that I don't think that the solution to the wildfires is going to be clear cut (pun intended). I believe that no matter what the final solution will be, like most complex problems, it will be ripe for criticism. However, what seems obvious to me is that the current solution/treatment of the problem is not defensible. At a minimum, I would like the state government to have acknowledged a while back that although wildfires are normal in California, there is a high probability that they will increase both in intensity and frequency in the future. Then a few years ago, they should have said to counteract this problem, we will propose XXX, YYY and ZZZ fully understanding that the "perfect" solution doesn't exist. Alerting the public, even if the state fails to pass anything meaningful, would have given me some confidence in the state government. Instead the response from the state government seems more reactionary than anything else.

[LightRanger]

BW, you hear Arax interviewed on Ruyak's show? They ran it again this morning. He talked about the "4x4ing" in Paradise that you touched on upthread a bit with the comment about no sewage system. It was a method of subdividing that avoided the regulations that come with true subdivision development. Here's the audio:
http://www.capradio.org/news/insight...the-camp-fire/

And then here's his article in California Sunday (which I still need to finish):
https://story.californiasunday.com/gone-paradise-fire

[LightRanger]

It should be mentioned that I don't think that the solution to the wildfires is going to be clear cut (pun intended). I believe that no matter what the final solution will be, like most complex problems, it will be ripe for criticism. However, what seems obvious to me is that the current solution/treatment of the problem is not defensible. At a minimum, I would like the state government to have acknowledged a while back that although wildfires are normal in California, there is a high probability that they will increase both in intensity and frequency in the future. Then a few years ago, they should have said to counteract this problem, we will propose XXX, YYY and ZZZ fully understanding that the "perfect" solution doesn't exist. Alerting the public, even if the state fails to pass anything meaningful, would have given me some confidence in the state government. Instead the response from the state government seems more reactionary than anything else.

Umm... they've done what you're describing there. Apparently you missed it. And, more recently, did you notice that there were no deaths in the Kincaid Fire and relatively few structures lost compared to its size and location? Perhaps you should read up on why this was. Because it likely would've gone elsewise were it not for proactive planning and funding from the state government. Individual FFs have said this, outright. Including, anecdotally, a buddy of mine who was on duty and fighting fires in Contra Costa County on 10/27 when all of those things broke out. They're definitely learning and improving. I don't agree with everything the state is doing, but it's not nothing. And it's certainly more than you have made it out to be in this thread. Carry on, though.

[SumJongGuy]

My grandmother was the first in her southwestern OK HOA to say GTFU to their required WOOD shingle roofs ordinance. And, they actually owned the lumber yard that sold the wood shingles, along with other stuff. I think she went clay instead but nobody challenged her and they changed it after she told them how stupid that was..

[hercule33]

Umm... they've done what you're describing there. Apparently you missed it. And, more recently, did you notice that there were no deaths in the Kincaid Fire and relatively few structures lost compared to its size and location? Perhaps you should read up on why this was. Because it likely would've gone elsewise were it not for proactive planning and funding from the state government. Individual FFs have said this, outright. Including, anecdotally, a buddy of mine who was on duty and fighting fires in Contra Costa County on 10/27 when all of those things broke out. They're definitely learning and improving. I don't agree with everything the state is doing, but it's not nothing. And it's certainly more than you have made it out to be in this thread. Carry on, though.

I think I have not been clear enough with my comments. When I talk about the state, I am not talking about the first responders and firefighters, whom are state employees and have done an absolutely amazing job with dealing with these fires. In my opinion, they have not gotten the praise that they deserve and I am guilty of not praising them enough in this thread. This goes without saying, but they are no in way responsible for these fires or for creating policy that prevents them. As I said before, they have done amazing job with cards that they have been dealt and I imagine many tried to persuade our leaders to do more.

When I talk about the state, I am talking about our leaders. The governor, the California state senate and the California State assembly. Their main job is not tactical, fighting fires when they break out and saving lives and buildings. Their job is strategic looking ahead at threats and making sure we have the correct resources to mitigate and deal with future threats. I don't think that they did a great job. They didn't predict the higher fire danger and warn the public. They didn't come up with a strategic plan to deal with the fires and try to sell it to the public.

And it should be said that coming up with the strategic plan is their responsibility, not the job of the first responders. The first responders don't have the power to allocate money, our leaders do. The first responders don't have the power to pass laws, our leaders do.

So when I talk about the gridlock in the state, I am not talking about the first responders, police, sheriffs of whom the vast majority are doing an amazing job, despite the crappy leadership in our state. I am talking about our leaders who are all to quick to take credit for the great first response but don't want to talk about their responsibilities.

[hutash]

The problem with California is also its blessing. We are a huge, diverse state. We have so many different environments to mitig ate that there is no one or even a few solutions. As OG mentioned we are made up of so many jurisdictions that mostly don't agree with each other. It is easy in hindsight to say say why didn't we fix , Y or Z because it is so obvious (now). Not to mention the politics of the whole issue. While we now have a firmly set democrat led government, the republicans (and the anti climate contingent was/is) fairly strong.

Things are changing, new codes, strategies are being placed, but it is a slow process. My house had been through a few fires in its 60 plus years and did just fine even with its poor fire qualities from its original build. We had a wood shake roof (replaced two years before the Thomas fire). At least it was under the asphalt singles, and we replaced the old vents with the new state of the art vents (fat good it did us.) The Thomas fire was just a perfect storm of problems, that if any one of which wasn't present might have left our house standing. Planning for such a set of circumstances twenty years ago just highly unlikely. I have lived my entire life here and have seen the firescape change drastically in that time. As as undergrad in biology I was fully aware of that firescape, and have been more aware then the politicians, have tried to mitigate the chances over time, but it is almost a losing battle with the rapid change we are seeing.

[hutash]

https://www.theonion.com/california-...source=Twitter

A simple solution to a complex problem, but still not as simple as raking the forests.

[Meadow Skipper]

The problem with California is also its blessing...We have so many different environments to mitig ate that there is no one or even a few solutions.

I have lived my entire life here and have seen the firescape change drastically in that time…it is almost a losing battle with the rapid change we are seeing.

These two points are worth contemplating and retaining for any student of fires and/or would-be problem solvers.

[old goat]

great job. They didn't predict the higher fire danger and warn the public. They didn't come up with a strategic plan to deal with the fires and try to sell it to the public.

And it should be said that coming up with the strategic plan is their responsibility, not the job of the first responders. The first responders don't have the power to allocate money, our leaders do. The first responders don't have the power to pass laws, our leaders do..

If you don't think that the state hasn't predicted the higher fire danger and warned the public you've been asleep.

In Truckee, it is the job of the first responders--ie the Truckee Fire Protection District, in conjunction with the Town Council--to develop and implement a community fire plan, per state law, to enforce the plan through defensible space and other mechanisms, and to propose taxes and develop other financing to support enforcement.

There is more the state could do--for example mandate zoning on a statewide basis that decreases the risk from the urban/wildlands interface. Given local opposition to SB50, the currently suspended bill which would limit the ability of local governments to block denser development (in order to provide more affordable housing) it seems that any state action to prevent building in the brush and the woods would meet fierce opposition. Besides, county and local control of zoning is in the CA constitution. The state could also increase funding available for fire prevention.

The problem in CA is us, not our elected leaders. Our refusal to pay for the services we want. Our insistence on ignoring risk on where and how we build. (In this respect we are no different that people who keep rebuilding in areas prone to flooding, which is the most expensive natural disaster in this country). Our intolerance of any change. An example--the fierce opposition to the Big Jack East project in the Tahoe NF (a federal, not a state project). This is a thinning and fuel removal project east of 89 just south of Truckee that would protect subdivisions east and north of it. The project has been delayed by locals protesting the number of trees to be removed and other aspects of the project---apparently everyone is an expert amateur forester who knows better than the professionals.

One encouraging trend--area mayors are starting to clamor for a public takeover of PGE.

[LightRanger]

I think I have not been clear enough with my comments. When I talk about the state, I am not talking about the first responders and firefighters, whom are state employees and have done an absolutely amazing job with dealing with these fires. In my opinion, they have not gotten the praise that they deserve and I am guilty of not praising them enough in this thread. This goes without saying, but they are no in way responsible for these fires or for creating policy that prevents them. As I said before, they have done amazing job with cards that they have been dealt and I imagine many tried to persuade our leaders to do more.

When I talk about the state, I am talking about our leaders. The governor, the California state senate and the California State assembly. Their main job is not tactical, fighting fires when they break out and saving lives and buildings. Their job is strategic looking ahead at threats and making sure we have the correct resources to mitigate and deal with future threats. I don't think that they did a great job. They didn't predict the higher fire danger and warn the public. They didn't come up with a strategic plan to deal with the fires and try to sell it to the public.

And it should be said that coming up with the strategic plan is their responsibility, not the job of the first responders. The first responders don't have the power to allocate money, our leaders do. The first responders don't have the power to pass laws, our leaders do.

So when I talk about the gridlock in the state, I am not talking about the first responders, police, sheriffs of whom the vast majority are doing an amazing job, despite the crappy leadership in our state. I am talking about our leaders who are all to quick to take credit for the great first response but don't want to talk about their responsibilities.

JFC. I understood what you were saying. And I'm still saying that you're fucking wrong.

You omitted the tens of millions of dollars appropriated by the legislature in the last two years to preposition resources. The seven new C-130s purchased by CalFire this year--with money appropriated by the legislature. (Hell, CalFire operates more aircraft than most small countries--and that's not even counting the resources they have on contract.) The immediate emergency declaration by Newsom in January to work on several dozen shaded fuel break projects around the state in critical areas. And a whole damn bunch of other stuff.

Like I said, my buddy who was on the line a week and a half ago specifically credited all the money appropriated to preposition extra resources as the main reason they were able to knock everything down so quickly with minimal loss of structures and no lives lost.

If firefighters felt like they weren't getting sufficient resources, the public would hear about it.

[LightRanger]

Ditto what OG said.

Hell, this isn't hard to read up on. Google "california wildfire bills" and there are a ton of articles on the host of bills signed this year to deal with wildland fire issues. There are a whole bunch enacted in 2018 and signed by Governor Brown as well.

[bodywhomper]

BW, you hear Arax interviewed on Ruyak's show? They ran it again this morning. He talked about the "4x4ing" in Paradise that you touched on upthread a bit with the comment about no sewage system. It was a method of subdividing that avoided the regulations that come with true subdivision development. Here's the audio:
http://www.capradio.org/news/insight...the-camp-fire/

And then here's his article in California Sunday (which I still need to finish):
https://story.californiasunday.com/gone-paradise-fire

Thanks. Will these out!

[hercule33]

I really don't know where to start. Strategic planning looks many years into the future to deal with potential future issues. Any bills passed in 2018 are therefore not strategic because they are being passed in the middle of this whole wild fire crisis. They are by definition tactical. Had California passed those bills in 2015 or 2010 to combat a possible future threat then they would be strategic.

Also, I have been upset with the California state government. I did not comment on city or county governments to which OG was referring. No doubt, plenty of good work is being done Cal Fire and local areas but on a state wide level, I would not defend the politicians.

Want proof. Well I googled Jerry Brown and wildfires and got this.

https://www.politifact.com/californi...fire-legislat/

While not black and white, one thing this article shows is that wild fire prevention was not a huge priority in California prior to the horrible wild fires circa 2018.

So in conclusion, if you want to show me some proof of the California state government doing big things about wildfires pre-2017 I am listening.

[bodywhomper]

look up the california wildfire wikipage, there were many horrible fires before 2017.

small snippets off the top of my head of state government actions:
-i believe that the defensible space statute became law in 1965
-state legislature has many times amended/expanded the exemptions to the forest practice rules to allow owners of improved private property to conduct wildfire fuel reduction activities w/o needing a timber harvest plan (often local laws have still required tree removal permits)
-the recent building code updates for wildfire were made by the state government in 2008
-Calfire has implemented and funded wildfire mitigation projects for decades.
-The state government created the Tahoe Conservancy and the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, which have made wildfire mitigation a priority both in grant funding, property acquisition, and direct fuels reduction projects.

it's not enough, but it's not nothing either.

The thing that Newsom did this year is unprecedented. I've heard it many times from fire captions, fire ecologists, etc., the biggest hurdle in implementing large-scale wildfire fuel reduction mitigation at the WUI are the environmental regulations. Newsom suspended all state environmental regulations (including CEQA) for the projects that were applied for earlier this year and are now being implemented. I don't know if this type of action by the governor is sustainable. There are loud NGO's that question the efficacy of forest thinning and forest management to reduce wildfire severity.

In addition to CEQA compliance, projects that could "take" a federally listed species, such as many potential prescribed burn projects, have a large hurdle of compliance with the federal endangered species act. Any project with federal funding, federal permitting, or occurring on federal lands brings in compliance with NEPA, the endangered species act, and the federal historic preservation act.

[bodywhomper]

One of the local brew pubs just announced they are closing their restaurant doors due to the financial loss during the outage.

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[BigDaddy]

^Ok, that's not good...

Pretty cool story map that was created with some lidar base layer data I worked on a few years ago. http://sonomavegmap.org/firestory/index.html

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using TGR Forums mobile app

That is an amazing piece of work. Very informative and incredibly well presented. Nice job, thanks for posting.

[old goat]

I really don't know where to start. Strategic planning looks many years into the future to deal with potential future issues. Any bills passed in 2018 are therefore not strategic because they are being passed in the middle of this whole wild fire crisis. They are by definition tactical. Had California passed those bills in 2015 or 2010 to combat a possible future threat then they would be strategic.

Also, I have been upset with the California state government. I did not comment on city or county governments to which OG was referring. No doubt, plenty of good work is being done Cal Fire and local areas but on a state wide level, I would not defend the politicians.

Want proof. Well I googled Jerry Brown and wildfires and got this.

https://www.politifact.com/californi...fire-legislat/

While not black and white, one thing this article shows is that wild fire prevention was not a huge priority in California prior to the horrible wild fires circa 2018.

So in conclusion, if you want to show me some proof of the California state government doing big things about wildfires pre-2017 I am listening.

My point is not whether or not local jurisdictions are doing a good job, it's that much of the responsibility for strategic planning falls under the purview of local jurisdictions, not the state.
In terms of long term strategic planning, the state's efforts to reduce greenhouse gases leads the nation.
You keep talking about strategic planning--give us an example that you think the state should have done and didn't.

[old goat]

I really don't know where to start. Strategic planning looks many years into the future to deal with potential future issues. Any bills passed in 2018 are therefore not strategic because they are being passed in the middle of this whole wild fire crisis. They are by definition tactical. Had California passed those bills in 2015 or 2010 to combat a possible future threat then they would be strategic.

Also, I have been upset with the California state government. I did not comment on city or county governments to which OG was referring. No doubt, plenty of good work is being done Cal Fire and local areas but on a state wide level, I would not defend the politicians.

Want proof. Well I googled Jerry Brown and wildfires and got this.

https://www.politifact.com/californi...fire-legislat/

While not black and white, one thing this article shows is that wild fire prevention was not a huge priority in California prior to the horrible wild fires circa 2018.

So in conclusion, if you want to show me some proof of the California state government doing big things about wildfires pre-2017 I am listening.

I read the article. It doesn't seem like you did.

[hercule33]

look up the california wildfire wikipage, there were many horrible fires before 2017.

small snippets off the top of my head of state government actions:
-i believe that the defensible space statute became law in 1965
-state legislature has many times amended/expanded the exemptions to the forest practice rules to allow owners of improved private property to conduct wildfire fuel reduction activities w/o needing a timber harvest plan (often local laws have still required tree removal permits)
-the recent building code updates for wildfire were made by the state government in 2008
-Calfire has implemented and funded wildfire mitigation projects for decades.
-The state government created the Tahoe Conservancy and the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, which have made wildfire mitigation a priority both in grant funding, property acquisition, and direct fuels reduction projects.

it's not enough, but it's not nothing either.

The thing that Newsom did this year is unprecedented. I've heard it many times from fire captions, fire ecologists, etc., the biggest hurdle in implementing large-scale wildfire fuel reduction mitigation at the WUI are the environmental regulations. Newsom suspended all state environmental regulations (including CEQA) for the projects that were applied for earlier this year and are now being implemented. I don't know if this type of action by the governor is sustainable. There are loud NGO's that question the efficacy of forest thinning and forest management to reduce wildfire severity.

In addition to CEQA compliance, projects that could "take" a federally listed species, such as many potential prescribed burn projects, have a large hurdle of compliance with the federal endangered species act. Any project with federal funding, federal permitting, or occurring on federal lands brings in compliance with NEPA, the endangered species act, and the federal historic preservation act.

Just to be clear, I did not say that the state did nothing over the years with wildfires or that bad wildfires did not exist pre-2017. Of course they were a problem but I think we can all agree that the last few years have been different.

This is what I would like to have seen and I have found no evidence of it happening. Before 2015, I would have liked to see evidence of California State officials (governor, senate, assembly) understanding that there is a high probability that the fire danger will increase over the next 5 to 10 years with potentially huge consequences for the state. Then I would have liked them to come up with a plan to address issue and try to sell to the state as well as warning Californians of the potential future danger.

If you look back at 2016, you will see Governor Brown vetoing a bill that dealt with making power lines safer. His reason for vetoing that bill was that it was redundant. Let’s assume for the sake of this argument that the bill was redundant. He should have vetoed the bill and introduced a new bigger bill to deal with the power line issue. But he didn’t do it. In fact fire danger and the power lines, arguably the biggest issues facing California today, at the time of the bill was not a big political issue. Only AFTER power lines started really bad fires did Republicans choose to make an issue of the veto for cheap political points.

And that’s my point. California’s state government seems like it is two steps behind on what has become a huge issue for the state. Kudos to the government for doing things now like CEQA compliance but even as recent as 2016, I have seen evidence of our state leaders (not local leaders, CalFire, forest service or even some folks within PGE) pretty much ignoring this issue.

[hercule33]

I read the article. It doesn't seem like you did.

Don’t really know what you mean. Of particular interest to me are the dates given as a defense of what Jerry Brown and the state did to prevent wildfires. All but one happened in 2018, AFTER the horrible fires had ravaged the state. The only pre-2018 example they gave didn’t even have fire in the title but was sold as being about tree die off. That’s been my point that the state government was being reactionary and not proactive.