Government BS. They close roads, don't allow access for firewood harvesting or logging so many places. They have mass quantities of fuel, cubic miles of the stuff, sit there and die, then you have constant forest fires. They could use all this dry dead wood in coal burning electrical plants with some modifications. They could set up via tax incentives, cost them not a penny of taxpayer money, mass biochar facilities, allowing entrepeneurs to put a lot more people back to work, and provide low cost long term great farmland subsoil fertilizer, any number of things. But nope, just let it accumulate and then catch fire, then cobjob and lowball any response because all the major taxpayer loot goes to fight wall street wars of aquisition and other sorts of obvious corporate welfare.
Freaking EPA forces manufacturers to ship two stroke tools with carbs that are guaranteed to destroy that tool without modifications that most people don't know about, yet let all these western lands burn up year after year after decade after genertation, billions of tons of smoke/particles/gasses into the atmosphere, with nothing to show for it, except for expense and forcing unnecessary danger on the guys tasked with fighting these fires!
Ya'all remember some years back they let those firefighters burn up because they wouldn't allow the tanker helos to suck water from a stream with some endangered minnow?
That's the government people are working for. I wouldn't do it, not with policies like that.
If you ain't a globalist fatcat, you ain't squat to them people. They don't care.
I am not anti government at all, but I am for sure anti stupid bloated wasteful criminal crooked corrupt riddled with junk science and crony fatcat welfare brand government.
OK, what is your plan? Lodgepole pine lives about 80 years, and then it attracts beetles, which kill the tree, then lightning hits the tree, a fire starts, and it burns up. The cones need heat to open up and disperse seed. Then the lodgepole cycle starts all over. That's how nature has been growing that particular tree for centuries.
We don't have the facilities--mills or pellet plants or anything else in much of the west anymore. Who would build the new mills? Most private investors are too smart to invest in a business that relies on timber off federal lands. They've been burned by shutdowns, forest planning, lawsuits and even fires.
The forests are governed by whatever political parties are in charge. Not by foresters.
I closed roads. It was in the contract to tear up and close those roads. We couldn't allow firewood cutting while the timber sale was going, unless the timber sale buyer agreed to it. Agreeing to let folks into cut the slash piles placed liability on the purchaser. So, 99% would not agree to that.
There were lots of rumors about the Thirty Mile fire. We don't have "minnows" in those waters. We have salmon, trout, and steelhead. In those creeks ( I lived in that area for a few years) there would be trout.
The creeks feed into the Methow River, which feeds into the Columbia. The latter two have trout, steelhead, and a few salmon. No minnows that I know of. There were other rumors going around too.
Also, in our part of the country, we have plenty of electricity. This year they were shutting off the wind generators because we had a surplus of hydro power. Any biomass plant would have to be govt. subsidized because it isn't needed here. There was an attempt to put one in Shelton, WA, but some of the residents protested and about then the power surplus was mentioned.
Times have changed. Oh, and we had some big fires in past years. Look up Entiat and 1970. That was when there were mills and logging and roads. 1986, 1987. I was on the firelines those two years. Logging and roads were still going pretty good too. 1977 was another good year to make overtime on fires.
That's all I can remember. There is no easy solution. I think part of the reason we have more big fires is that we don't have as many eyes in the woods. When there were loggers all over, and FS folks, smokes were more apt to be spotted by somebody. Sometimes those got away too.
We also did more salvage logging of bug kill but now those mills are gone. The planning that is now required to put up such timber for sale can cost more than the value of the timber.
I'm open to hearing solutions. But we hear the same rhetoric every fire season, then all the promises are forgotten over the winter, and then we have a repeat. It is Groundhog Day.
Good on that crew for pulling out. And good on their people for supporting their decision.
We could use a fire in our huckleberry fields. But that doesn't happen. Oh well....and I'd be complaining about the smoke.
