Please do. When we lose more acres to fire than cutting we have a problem.
That is a demo hot button that is meaningless.
I have a minor in forestry and read several pubs on the subject. My interest was rekindled after we lost a home in the Las Flores Canyon fire 11/3/93.
As I will explain, the problem is not how much acreage is burned. We have significant excess annual forest growth; much more than we harvest and burn.
In bad years, the real culprit has been the higher than normal hot dry weather and wind pattern as well as deliberately ignited fires.
The amount of acreage burned in 2003 is well below average. That is typical as we had large burns in 2000 and 2002. Following these large burns of vulnerable areas, typically we will have many more years of below average forest burns.
fs.fed.us
The real problem is how many homes are lost. I do not see that as a forest management problem. Communities must exercise development control and individuals must access the risk when they buy a home. There have been 24 major canyon fires in Malibu since 1927. That is one every three years. Los Angeles County has a similar average. Yet the construction of homes within the woodlands continues.
For example, nearly all of the homes lost in Las Flores have been rebuilt yet history shows that canyon burns every 20-30 years.
Our forests are growing much faster than they burn and are cut. That growth alone would account for even more fires.
"These are the current facts: In 1952, the U.S. had 664 million acres of forest land. In 1987 the number had climbed to 731 million acres, according to the most recent numbers available in the U.S. Statistical Abstract, 1993-1994 edition. "According to the U.S. Forest Service, annual timber growth in the U.S. now exceeds harvest by 37 percent. Annual growth has exceeded harvest every year since 1952. In 1992, just 384,000 acres -- six-tenths of 1 percent of the National Forest land open to harvesting -- were actually harvested. As a result of growth steadily exceeding harvests, the number of wooded acres in the U.S. has grown 20 percent in the past twenty years. The average annual wooded growth in the U.S. today is an amazing three times what it was in 1920. In Vermont, for example, the area covered by forests has increased from 35 percent a hundred years ago to about 76 percent today." -- Joseph Bast, Peter Hill and Richard Rue, Eco-Sanity: A Common Sense Guide to Environmentalism (Madison Books: 1994), p. 23.
The problem with thinning...
Prescribed burning attempts to recreate smaller, more frequent fires that naturally reduce the amount of fuel in the forests. However, in many areas prescribed burns can be technically difficult because of terrain, and as may not be suitable due to proximity of human habitation. In other cases, removal of trees by selective thinning can reduce the technical difficulties of a particular burn and reduce the risk of run-away fires. Finally, in some forests, the existence of intermediate age trees and a large accumulation of fuel can change the nature of the fire. Many periodic burns that occur in a more natural forest include fast moving low burns that retain the forest canopy and remove fuel from the ground. The existing fuel load that includes a large inventory of small diameter timber can cause the fire to burn too hot, which will burn established trees and scorch the soil. Again, as in some of the more technical burns, the forest is likely to require mechanical thinning or thinning and a limited prescribed burn to restore the forest to a healthy condition. Thus, mechanical thinning is rapidly becoming a critical tool for forest management.
Mechanical thinning involves physically entering the forest and removing the small diameter timber. Mechanical thinning is similar to logging, but is focussed on removing trees that have limited commercial due to the small size of the trees removed. In addition, mechanical thinning is very labor intensive due to the selective cutting that is employed. The labor costs incurred increase the investment required to remove the trees while currently providing limited payback. One approach to reducing the cost of mechanical thinning is to increase the commercial value of the trees that are removed. However, significant technical barriers currently exist to the use of these materials in high value applications |
