Reporter grills LA mayor over handling of wildfires.Donald Trump blames Gavin Newsom for‘apocalyptic’ Los Angeles fires-'All his fault!!! Yeah-'So little water'.
HOW CAN WE PREVENT FIRES? 5 Strategies on How to Prevent Wildfires in California . Regions with mediterranean-type climates, i.e. the growing season in winter and hot dry summers, typically have woodland and scrub vegetation with fire as an essential part of its life cycle. The trees have evolved to regenerate from stump shoots or seed after burning every decade or two; without the fires they would be slowly replaced by fire-sensitive species that form a denser shading canopy.
In Australia it’s eucalypts and others in the family Myrtaceae with lots of oil in the foliage. In the northern hemisphere it’s the equally inflammable pines and species like the olives in wonderful Croatia, Italy and Greece.
Generation after generation, people keep on building houses in this fire-dependent vegetation, and each time express amazement when they get burned out. As if bushfires are one-off events that will never happen again.( Don't forget about climate change.) There is a clear link between climate change and the more frequent dry falls and winters that provide fuel for fires- Read More.
I recall not so many years ago LA registering 119 degrees F in the same week as the September equinox.
It might sound obvious to some. But the first thing that needs to be done is to look a the trees that remain without fire damage after this all passes over. Then replant only those species.
If you want to live amongst the trees, then pick ones that naturally resist fire. Eucalypts, olives, most pines, junipers, etc are NOT going to be on that list.
It might be wiser to select deciduous trees in that environment. In winter, (now), the leaves have all gone. Damned hard to light up a tree without leaves. And exclude any with stringy bark. It’s just a wick to the canopy.
I’d love to see the look on the face of any council i**** who thought my tree plantings were out of alignment with the native vegetation. Now what is that look? Is it disgust? Is it shock? Is it the face you make when you realise you are too close to some imminent danger?
Eucalypts drop a lot of litter, at the rate of around 8.5 tonnes per hectare. But only 29% of this litter decomposes annually. So it doesn’t take long before the litter builds up to the 20-plus tonnes/ha level that means that once a bushfire starts, it’s impossible to control. An earlier CSIRO division has done a lot of research and tests on how many tonnes of litter is required to make a bushfire basically impossible to control – it’s an interesting read.
Apart from invasive Aussie eucalyptus trees (highly inflammable) I understand that part of the problem is that anti-environmentalists won’t allow fuel reduction burns, just as in Australia, and so fuel just builds up on the forest floor.
Apart from that, there’s also the possibility of pyroterrorism by a certain demographic. We don't just have a bushfire crisis. We have an arson ...
The Palisades fire a few years ago was arson.
Loads of arson arrests in LA, including recently in December. The high fire risk warnings just act as a cue for the evil and demented. A Tribute to Firefighters.
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