Wildfires
Julie Cart and Bettina Boxall of the Los Angeles Times have written an exceptional series on the soaring costs of Western wildfires, "Big Burn." They examine the causes, including drought, shrinking snowpacks, the spread of nonnative grasses and the Forest Service's attempts to eliminate, rather than control, small blazes.
The government's long campaign to tame wildfire has, perversely, made the problem worse.
By stamping out most wildland blazes as quickly as possible, the Forest Service has stymied nature's housekeeping -- the frequent, well-behaved fires that once cleaned up the pine forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Southwest. Now, woodlands are tangled with thick growth and dead branches. When fires break out, they often explode.
Major wildfires often are fought with politically popular methods that add to the costs.
Fire commanders say they are often pressured to order planes and helicopters into action on major fires even when the aircraft won't do any good. Such pressure has resulted in needless and costly air operations, experienced fire managers said in interviews.
The reason for the interference, they say, is that aerial drops of water and retardant make good television. They're a highly visible way for political leaders to show they're doing everything possible to quell a wildfire, even if it entails overriding the judgment of incident commanders on the ground.
Firefighters have developed their own vernacular for such spectacles. They call them "CNN drops."
The series concludes with a report from Australia where a new system of fighting wildfires is saving lives.
People here live by the principle of "stay or go" during fire season. Residents who can't or won't battle an advancing fire are advised to get out early. Those who stay are expected to defend their homes….
The "stay or go" policy, adopted state by state beginning in the mid-1990s, has sharply reduced losses of life and property in wildfires, statistics show. In 1983, a year of widespread conflagrations, 60 Australians lost their lives in bushfires, not including firefighters, researcher Katharine Haynes reported. In the equally severe fire season of 2003, bushfires caused just six deaths.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fire-index,0,4857752.htmlstory