“CALIFORNIA BURNING”

Better pour yourselves another cup of decaf, before you read this, California.

AOC wouldn’t recognize climate change if it were staring her straight in the face.

The real cause underlying California’s annual spate of fires is the dearth of workable forestry management practices in Sacramento. That is added to the failure of local government officials to enact and enforce effective zoning restrictions on residential development in fire-prone areas. Sprawling subdivisions built in a brushy canyon will sooner or later erupt into flame and be fanned into an inferno by the Santa Ana wind around Los Angeles or the Diablo winds in the north.

Homeowners in vulnerable settings, that encompass significant portions of the state, are discouraged or prevented by law from clearing adequate firebreaks that would reduce the likelihood of a nearby brush-fire setting their homes afire.

The anti-forest management crowd should ask themselves how many endangered birds and rare plants are being destroyed—from too much environmental love—the next time wildfire races across thousands of acres of critical habitat where land owners are refused a permit to thin brush or trim branches overhanging service lines by bureaucrats? Birds may escape to safety but slower-footed animals and the plants cannot. Precious habitat is destroyed for no good reason.

A proactive program of trimming trees near power lines and agency controlled (prescribed) burns (often restricted under current policy) after sufficient rainfall and during suitable low wind would permit destruction of unwanted tinder that waits to be ignited during fall drought.

California has been dry and subject to regular periods of extreme drought and massive wildfires throughout its long history.

It is now Thursday morning and the California wildfire story has not gone away. Still the LA Times and the AP cannot be relied on to tell Paul Harvey’s “rest of the story.” Instead they focus on a hapless scapegoat. Pacific Gas & Electric’s outmoded transmission equipment is being blamed for setting the fires, where strong winds may topple a utility pole or cause falling branches to rip down a power-line. The resultant sparking ignites the combustible materials it comes into contact with.  

More than two billion dollars of PG&E revenues have been siphoned into solar and wind power generation to meet California’s green energy goals for 2045. The utility’s cutting off electric power to millions of its customers is a self-defeating strategy even if it avoids more lawsuits like the ones that drove it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018.

Readers may be aware there is a fresh set of wildfires burning even now. Late autumn is the time that a persistent high pressure dome settles down over the western third of the United States blocking onshore flow of moist air from the Pacific. A dry dense air mass slides west toward the Bay Area and the coastal region of southern California. As it moves down slope the air warms and gains speed taking the form of the strong Santa Ana wind in the south and the Diablo winds in the north. Both are notorious for fanning grass and brush fires into major conflagrations as happened last year and again in 2019.

Meanwhile the mainstream media is having a heyday advancing the idea that climate change is the primary factor responsible for the abnormally dry conditions leading to the fires.

Here’s a different take. There is nothing new about drought in California. The major difference that I see is the deterioration of forestry management. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is increasingly hindered from applying former management practices that included controlled burns in rotation cycles of 5 to 10 years. Controlled burns prevent buildup of excess combustibles on the forest floor and under chaparral that feed a fire that may propagate into the crown, then races up the canyons and over the ridge lines destroying California’s magnificent forests (redwoods and ponderosa pine) in addition to thousands of homes in its path.

Once a fire is laid, all required is the “match” which can be a carelessly tossed cigarette, an unattended campfire, a lightning strike or a disrupted power line broken by the Santa Anna winds. PG&E was never responsible for creating the nexus for these fires and should not have been forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Last year’s Camp Fire near Paradise, with a death toll exceeding 50, was a given with the circumstances created by derelict California politicians and bureaucrats, egged on by their Luddite supporters. The credit goes where it is due.