Hell freezes over
SF paper: Trump’s forest raking “rings true– to a degree”
Today’s Guest Post is brought to you by Perry Gaskill.
Just when you think the news media’s anti-Trump hysteria is to the point of needing a soaking down with a cold water hose, they can surprise you. In a story updated on Sunday, Phil Matier and Andy Ross, two writers who have long shared a column at the San Francisco Chronicle said that although President Trump might not have presented all the facts, he’s generally correct in calling bad forest management a big part of the recent California fires.
The smoking gun, so to speak, is from California’s Little Hoover Commission in the form of a forest management report which considered not only drought conditions, but also a broad range of other issues. It’s called Fire on the Mountain:
The report outlines factors that have led to the current forest crisis, including years of poor or nonexistent management policies, and the recent drought and a beetle infestation that killed an estimated 129 million trees across the state — trees that could go up in flames.
It being California, the Little Hoover report has obviously found detractors. Among them have been both the John Muir Project and the Sierra Club. Their main argument appears to be, without putting too fine a point on it, that loggers are meanies and poopie heads.
The Matier & Ross story can be found here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Trump-s-claim-of-poor-California-forest-13400503.php
Here’s the report link: https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-management-sierra-nevada
Category: Guest Post
Thanks for the find. We have a liberal Arkansas Times blog in Little Rock where the same band of snow flakes parrot anything anti-Trump as Gospel. This subject among them so I will use copy and paste. The sad thing is regardless of the truth, they and their ilk across the country don’t care what the truth is and get pissed because others express a view that conflicts with theirs.
I hope the report’s authors gave credit…
Class song.
Classic
Fucking iPhone…
Grateful Dead
Holy crap!
First, a freshman Congress critter just tramples on her colleagues so much that they have started quarreling.
And now Nancy Pelosi wants her gavel back but is getting strong opposition for that request.
And now this? What else is going to happen?
You’re right. Hell is freezing over.
I’m going to listen to some Willy Nelson now, and sniffle.
Hey EX… I have a really neat story to send on a retired Marine that was awarded the Navy Cross recently. Who do I need to send it to?
I will find out.
Nope, can’t make this stuff up. 129 MILLION trees eat up by beetles. Down here if a landowner or forest ranger sees evidence of beetle infestation, they get busy immediately to isolate and get rid of same. We do have a “burn ban” from May to Sep, but it is fairly easy to get a permit. Typical gubmit, let’s point fingers and pass the blame around without getting anything done. Why don’t the ask TOW and NHSparky what they think? Aren’t they on the front lines of forest fire fighting?
I remember back when in FRG the woods were kept like parks with no undergrowth at all to speak of. We played hell trying to find enough deadfall, scrub ect, to make a fire big enough to warm up a c rat coffee. Dairies from early Americans have shown that the forests were kept clean by gathering up deadfall and controlled burns. Be one of the first problems we’ll fix under the new administration.
Me? Firefighter? Nope.
But having lived in CA for a number of years, I can certainly verify what the idiot tree huggers have accomplished, which is turning every little problem into a full-blown catastrophe.
OK lived there, knew there was a connection from previous posts. That second flat tire I had on the brain bucket has affected some short term memory banks. Got a semi step son caught behind enemy lines in San Diego and a niece, nephew with 3 babies in San Fran. Bless their hearts; they are surrounded by the moon bats. Jon was watching the fires from their deck in SD; Tiffany and the children were wearing the masks outside in SF. I did remember that we had some TAHellcats deployed fighting some of the fires.
But.. but… it’s to save the Ruby Throated Sap Sucker!!!
that beetle wood makes beautiful flooring. unusual purple stripes bring a premium.
They should make biochar from all that old brush,
Send crews out to run everything through the chipper and truck it all to central processing. Same process as making coke. supply a little initial heat to begin, and the process yields enough volitiles to cook itself, plus heat for steam
You may note that the old FRG was only 70% the size of California alone (95,000 square miles versus 163,00+ square miles). It’s like when they say “but trains work OK in Germany, why not here?” – there is an order of magnitude difference. More forest, more deadfall (from 70 years of “Only You Can Prevent” and can you imagine disposing of the biomass from 129,000,00 trees? Not enough logging in the country to handle that fast.
Wait… don’t we have thousands of potential loggers approaching the southern border? Millions more on work-fare, I mean welfare? Hmm….
See, I told y’all we could solve the difficult immediately. We’ll take a cold beer break and then start working on the impossible.
“Dairies from early Americans have shown that the forests were kept clean by gathering up deadfall and controlled burns”
The term “by hook or by crook” comes from that practice. Dead branches are removed with a long tool that had a hook on one end and a crook on the other. Pull with the hook, lift up with the crook.
Kalif used to have a “dead or down” rule, you could take either for firewood, kept the forest clean of dead wood, but the communist, genius’s in the forest svc stopped that…they are full blown MORONS imho!
And, as further evidence that Hell is freezing over, I just got an email from one of my US Senators. Studied it carefully before opening it because it was obviously some sort of scam, or worse.
Not so! It was an actual response to an email I sent a couple of months ago. Not that there was a long delay or anything, but it was a real response, answering my major points with thoughtful replies.
Maybe we can get this Senator to support appropriate forest management in CA? Oh, wait. The federal forests already are being properly managed. It’s just those pesky state controlled forests which are not.
How’s about telling CA that we will no longer pay for their self-inflicted wounds unless they make some changes in how they manage their tree population? They create horrific fire loads on the land then wring their hand when fires occur. How much death and destruction is acceptable to these idiots anyway?
OWB I think that is what President Trump meant in his Tweet. Fix you r problem or no more federal funds. Of course everyone got in a big tizzy because it was right when the fires started.
I loved one of the comments by some liberal musician (I forget his name): “it is not poor management, its climate change and the drought (except we get plenty of water flowing to the ocean)!” Initially I just laughed because of the redundancy in his complaint, but then I looked more into what caused all the houses to burn. All the pretty dried our flowers, and bushes next to their houses that lit from the sparks, and roofs made of pretty (read highly flammable) wood shingles.
“… I think that is what President Trump meant …”
Me, too, and I knew he was correct, also.
Make a state pay for its own mistakes like bad forest management? I’m up for that!
Strange things are going on.
Several Democrats are not supporting Pelosi’s bid for Speaker again. They’re at odds with each other over the Bronx Bird’s proposed legislation to seize the American economy. And now someone is agreeing with Trump?
That’s a three-fer. Am I on the right planet? What’s that weird music?
PTL..”A house divided against itself cannot stand” and hallelujah, the dumocraps are divided…I really didn’t think any were smart enough to see through the haze! 😉
I brought this up the last time we talked about it, but this isn’t the fault of the state agencies themselves. They are made up of people with functional brains and common sense (who tend to swing a lot more conservative than you might guess, but that’s another story) who know how to do their jobs. They will be vilified and scapegoated for this, despite the fact that they’ve been begging the (mostly democrat) politicians for years to let them do what needed to be done, and warning that this would happen. Moonbeam and the other Powers That Be chose instead to pander to the never-camped-a-day-in-their-lives tree-huggers in San Francisco and kick the proverbial can down the road, thinking that the consequences wouldn’t strike until they had already moved on to higher office.
Some are trying to shift blame by saying that there’s Fed land in California too. That is true, but I also covered that last time. The Camp Fire actually started on Fed land, but it didn’t have to spread very far to reach state land, where it found much more available fuels in thicker continuity with a much-higher dead component. It was on state land that it picked up steam and took off. Just look at a map of the fire available online. Over 85% is either state land or private property subject to state environmental restrictions.
Trump spoke in generalities, as I doubt he’s ever had an S-190 class, but he was right. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom are the architects of the 2018 fire season.
Thanks T.O.W., knew we had a resident expert that could refresh my memory banks. When we solidify our new troika, we’ll put you in charge of BLM.
Much obliged, but I’ve hit the upper limit of my ambition as a Captain running a single station and am honestly a bit surprised I went that high. Any more and there’d be serious Peter Principle issues.
Funny how that Peter Principle always applies to the next level og management! Hey, don’t take offense. You just haven’t been in your current rank long enough to be stupid. It’s a process. It takes time.
My Battalion Chief has quoted me a long list of stupid shit I’ve successfully achieved at my current rank. I’m trying not to add to it.
The clueless Eco-Nazis, with barely enough neurons in the Autonomous Nervous System to function, and little else, strike again.
For a glimpse inside the environmental reality distortion field, it’s interesting to read some of the statements put out by the John Muir Project about the Fire on the Mountain report. Their main argument is apparently that cleaning up all the slash, brush, dead-fall, and general cruft in the forest has no effect on prevention or mitigation of wildfires. The clean-up is also harmful to “bio-diversity.”
My first thought was:
Bark beetle lives matter!
Prescribed burns for old growth and a good cleanup have worked in the past before the “ECO Nazis” got involved. Another thing is the growth near homes and wood shakes contributed to the Fire Package. I read that a home owner had cut down the growth around his home and used fire resistant exterior building materials IE, shakes and installed exterior deluge sprinklers run by a protected gas generator and pump utilizing water from a cistern. this system would keep the structure from what we call auto ignition (fire spread) from wind blown convectional and radiant heat. Anything to add to this OTW. Structural firefighting was my forte, but your the expert on brush, wild land and building fires, and fire spread is fire spread, structures or wild land.
Naybe the thing to do with the ecoNazis is drop them off in the middle of a forest fire. Just drop them off and leave.
I’m not amazed at the disconnect between reality and them. I just wonder what it takes to wake them up to it.
The Peshtigo Marsh fire in October 8, 1871, took place the same date as the Great Chicago Fire, but got less notice because fewer people were up there in the Green Bay area at the time.
It was caused by lumberjacks leaving piles of trash like wood chips, in addition to not putting out their fires. Weather conditions were perfect for it and the drought conditions added to it. 1,200,000 acres of woodland were burned, two towns destroyed and somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people died in that fire – all because some lazy lumberjacks could not be bothered to clean up after themselves.
That fire was so intense that the wind it generated helped it leap across Green Bay to the peninsula.
https://www.weather.gov/grb/peshtigofire
Is it just me, or is the phrase ‘Hell freezes over’ written in some funkyass italic font?
It is for me, too.
It’s apparently a CSS issue. The post was submitted with suggested HTML markup. The intent on my part was to have the “Hell freezes over” act as a kicker to the main headline of “SF paper: Trump’s forest raking ‘rings true– to a degree.'” The funky-ass italic font evidently happens when you try to use both an underline and italic markup at the same time. Or something. My bad.
It all started with the blue! Give a kid some crayons and you never know what’s gonna happen.
Nope. It’s Italian. Want some pizza with that?
Oh, yeah. Chicago deep-dish; so deep, people will think it’s casserole.
With cold beer…Stout. AW1Ed borrowed the bottle opener from 26Limabeans the other day. It was when the FGS got all squiggly. charles w may have it in the basement.
Okay, who messed with the typeface and made it bold???
If I want bold, it had better have some muscles on it like Doc Savage and a big gun.
I do not take bold lightly.
Now that’s a bold statement!
I miss real people like John Wayne.
I thought I was the only one seeing that. I was about to start messing with computer settings.
We don’t have forest fires in Maine.
We have a “working forest” and protect it.
Call it raking if you like. Works for us.
Your blog post is clearly intended to defend Trump for his “raking the forest” nonsense by supporting his uniformed claim that the fires should be blamed on poor forest management.
1. Why do you all feel the need to defend him on this? It was dumb, uninformed and wrong. Would you find it even remotely defensible if Obama has said it?
2. He LIED about the Norwegian president claiming they rake the forests.
3. He never mentioned beatles. Or any actual legitimate reasons to support his claim that the fires were the fault of poor management by California agencies.
4. He seems unable to grasp the false similarity of comparing Norway to California. Nowrway is right below the artic circle and spends much MORE of the year under snow and darkness than central and southern California.
5. He ignored the fact that region of the Camp fire recieved 1/5th the rainfall over the last season than it normally gets.
6. His timing was sociopathically oblivious to the circumstances and context. Lives were being threatened and lost, and livelihoods and homes destroyed. And his first response is to blame the State for poor forest management?
There is no need to defend him on this.
There is a lot of dumb shit he says and does that this blog ignores as though they never happened. Often things much more relevant to veterans and military matters.
Clearly you are capable of ignoring something he does when it is hard to defend.
Which is much better than trying to find some insufficient scrap of evidence to justify something he said.
He lies and says stupid crap all the time. Almost daily.
Refuting it is best. Ignoring it is fine and probably the most rational thing to do. Defending it is ridiculous.
Let Sarah Sanders and Kelly Anne Conway defend it. At least they are being paid to do it.
If you limit defending him to only when he is right it makes for a much better and more informative blog to read.
In fact right now there is the controversy of Ivanka vs Hillary on the private email use.
Ivanka was wrong but she is in a MUCH MUCH more defensible position.
Right now the left media is largely highlighting the similarities between the two. But the differences are substantial.
A blog post highlighting how much WORSE Hillary’s use was would be useful today.
Although Ivanka has literally no business holding a position in the white house. Nepotism by a president in a democracy is inexcusable.
Cornholio, when TAH becomes your blog, or you are granted posting privileges, you may decide what is appropriate to to post. Right now, you’re acting like a petulant, whiny, adolescent Commissar that believes tantrums get you what you want. Apparently, your mama done fucked up in your raising. It’s best that you take your own advice and leave by the best available exit, and most ricky tick.
I do not care what you all post.
I was just asking why you feel the need to defend Trump on one of his more unusually stupid lies and ignorant claims.
And I was suggesting that defending his admninistration when they are actually right or being genuinely unfairly characterized is a better use of platform and would help maintain some credibility. I then provided an relevant current example of how the liberal sided press is misrepresenting the Ivanka/Hillary private email issue.
If you defend him when he is wrong it undermines any credibility when you defend him when he is right.
Do whatever you all want.
C’mon, you don’t believe he can ever be “right” about anything. That is the first axiomatic “truth” for you and your proglodyte ilk.
Cthulhu,
You were doing pretty well there. You knew your comments would draw fire, and you handled the incoming well without a lot backlash. I admire that.
That being said, off topic comments occur, I get that. I believe I said something about comments here are like ‘a puppy on a leash’ sometimes. And I’m pretty tolerant up to a point, mostly because I’ve been guilty too.
At least try to keep your comments in the same general vicinity of the OP. Going from wild fires to Ivanka’s emails is just a leap too far.
I’m not touching your comment. This time.
I’m wondering if anybody else has considered that Cthulhu actually is Lars making a Dingbat World Tour 2018. Changing to a new email address is easy, and you would normally get a new IP address when you change your ISP. A MAC address can also be changed by working from a different machine.
Geo locators based on an IP address, such as those coming from Berkeley, are also highly unreliable. Google, as an example, for some strange reason thinks I’m in Oregon.
There are additional flags, at least it seems to me, such as Cthulhu’s use of similar syntax, an obsessive-compulsive tendency to respond at length in order to start an argument, frequent use of straw-man arguments, child-like literal mindedness, and others.
Oh, yeah, it’s been under discussion. Telltale signs have raised their hairless heads in many places. You left out the one about how Squidheadfishblob changes the subject, just like someone else used to do. The control freak is strong with this one.
And for IPs, well, Google thinks I am located in Minnesota, when I’ve never been there in my life.
You have NO business changing the subject to suit yourself, squishforbrainsthuhoolahop.
The subject is forest fires and prevention. It is NOT Ivanka Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Just keep it up. Stay on subject. You’re digging your own hole.
Well, here’s one to take apart already.
Quote: “He never mentioned beatles.”
No, I’m sure he didn’t because the Beatles broke up shortly before John Lennon and Yoko Ono (the screaming artist) decided to move to New York City.
“the fires should be blamed on poor forest management”
Agreed
“Would you find it even remotely defensible if Obama has said it”
Absolutely
So who is it that you are bashing here?
Seems to me the answer is both Trump and everyone on this blog. You come here as Negative Nancy looking for an argument for the sake of arguing. Try explaining your points in concise non trashing language.
It feels like you are foaming at the mouth and splattering it all over your audience.
Lars had a knack for mispelling the wrong words and blamed a disability rather than a keyboard. Just sayin.
“Dumb, uninformed, and wrong” generally describes you pretty well, Cuntholio.
Do you really want to square off with me on wildland fire management, prevention, and suppression? The very field in which I make my living? Do you even know what an S-190 class is, let alone having taken one?
Yes, rainfall sucked. That is a contributing factor. Its effects were and are increased by the land mismanagement that has been cited. Must I explain fuel continuity, live/dead ratios, the difference between ground, surface, and aerial fuels, and the like again?
If you paid attention, you might notice that in the original discussion last week I agreed that Trump’s timing and delivery were douchey, however, his point was right.
You really wanna do this?
Why would I need to square off with you on this?
You know trump was wrong about “raking the forest”.
You know he lied about what the Norwegian president said.
You know comparing Norway to Southern and Central California with respect to fire mitigation and risk is ridiculous.
You know that poor forest management by California agencies was not the cause of these fires.
You know that any investigation of a fire will always result in contributing factors that could have been mitigated. However, in a state with as many thousands of square miles as California full mitigation is not within any current budget or even any reasonable proposed future budget and thus blaming forest management for fires is nonsense.
And you know Trump is a douchebag.
We are agreed then.
And no I do not know what an S-190 class is other than the fact that a quick Google search indicates it is a class called “Introduction to Wildland Fire Behavior.”
It is the kind of block of instruction that someone word burn through, pun intended, in a day or two.
I’ll put it on my reading list.
Wrong top to bottom, Cuntholio. I didn’t say anything about the cause (as in “origin”) of the Camp Fire. I’m talking about the manageable and avoidable factors that contributed to its incredible rate of spread, which not only made it impossible to contain, but also led to fire conditions that burned thousands of strict that should have been defensible. In simple terms, it’s not a question of what started the fire, but rather what made the fire catastrophic. Is that Barney-style enough for you, asshole? That all comes down to land management/fuels reduction, which has been criminally neglected for years. How many times must I repeat myself on this? Do you know anything about the process of combustion? Here’s an extremely basic lesson. Stuff that can burn is called “fuel.” There’s live fuels and dead fuels. Live fuels are (obviously) alive, and thus maintain a fairly high moisture content, which makes them more resistant to fire. Notice I said “resistant;” live fuels can and will burn, but do not ignite or maintain combustion as easily. Dead fuels are (again, obviously) dead. Their moisture content is entirely dependent on ambient humidity. Depending on their thickness, they are categorized as 1-, 10-, 100-, 1,000-, and 10,000-hour fuels due to the time it takes for them to achieve equilibrium with ambient conditions. 1- and 10-hour fuels fluctuate daily with short-term weather changes. 1,000- and 10,000 acre fuels are influenced by long-term trends such as drought. Dry dead fuels ignite and carry fire much more easily than equivalent live fuels. They also have a higher Energy Release Component due to none of the heat of combustion being used to evaporate moisture within the dead fuel, which means a hotter, more intense fire that ignites and burns live fuels more easily. Hence, allowing dead fuels to accumulate creates explosive fire conditions (yes, that is proper terminology). “Raking the forest” is an oversimplification, but he was referring to fuels reduction, which includes removal of dead standing trees (snags) and downed trees (slash). It includes detection and removal of bark-beetle-infested trees before those bugs spread to adjacent… Read more »
Hey Crapthulu, how many tubes of glue do you sniff before you open your cockholster?
Yes, poor forest management DOES cause forest fires, you dimwitted sponge.
The Peshtigo Fire which occurred in October 1871 was caused by sloppy lumberjacks, people like you who don’t clean up after themselves, who left their trash behind and didn’t put out their fires. Drought in the summer supported it, and conditions for a firestorm were perfect. It was in OCTOBER. It was COLD. And all it took was carelessness and sloppiness – something with which you may or may not be familiar.
1,200,000 acres of woodlands burned. I blame you for it, even if you weren’t alive at the time.
Holy crap this post ^
was idiotic.
Compared to your pontification on things about which you are clearly ignorant?
Clit the Cuck is a graduate of the Commissar School of Pontification and Postulation.
Plus, he doesn’t know Jack Shit…
^^ This is true.
Chuthu-toy doesn’t know me.
Go back to bed.
Wow. You argued about forest fires with a professional firefighter.
You actually mocked his effort to suggest a basic source of knowledge.
And you, predictably, had your ass handed to you, again. Burned, you are.
This is why no one is persuaded by your postings here, and why you have zip for respect.
Well, your tantrums certainly help with the respect score, just perhaps not as intended. You do seem to be at least trying to suppress them, so a few points to the positive side, there.
Do you -want- to be an advocate for your side and views? Or do you just want the same role as the fake “Soviet Major” we met during initial entry training: something to scorn and mock, and to show how screwed up is the other side.
Because if that is -not- what you seek to be, you really need to change your ways.
“Nowrway is right below the artic circle”
I looked. I checked Google Earth.
Cannot find either the country or the circle.
Ditto. Must be on another planet, perhaps a rocky planet currently under scrutiny in the Proxima Centaur b system.
Not sure yet about oceanic square mileage on that particular little rocky planet, but there probably is a place called ‘Nowrway’ right below that planet’s ‘artic circle’.
“there probably is a place called ‘Nowrway’”
No Way!
It’s where that Squidward creature aka Cunthulu lives in its Sea of Stupidity.
Dead trees burn? Was this common knowledge somehow lost on the post-scarcity peoples of California?
Only those Californians who don’t live or work around naturally-growing trees, i.e. the city-dwelling “environmentalists” who pushed these policies in the first place.
Live trees burn as well. Once the forest floor burning sets the canopy afire it spreads from live tree to live tree.
Those videos are horrible to watch as the entire canopy burns.
The most important part of forest management is canopy preservation. That is why we leave Hemlock alone in the Northeast.
It provides great canopy from mighty trees that protect the next generation of all species.
Depends on fire intensity, which in turn depends on fuel loading, fuel continuity, and fuel moistures. Two of those three things can be managed and controlled.
I believe it. I’ve never seen any major wildland fires. The ones we’d get here with all our wetlands were limited to peat bogs firing up when some homeless guy would fall asleep smoking.
I have seen a lot of big structure fires. People don’t believe that fire will “jump”, but I’ve seen it go from one house to another or from a detached garage to a house over a considerable distance. Big house fire here and then boom, the next house goes up like a Roman candle.
I remember seeing a large burn when I was a kid up on some Potlatch Paper land. They had dug a bowl out about 150ft across, 30ft deep, and then piled it full of brush about 20ft above grade. The heat from that fire was unbearable to face from well over 100ft away. So I have a lot of respect for you guys that go out into that inferno willingly. I couldn’t do it. Getting shot at seemed safer. 🙂
Oh, fire will jump, all right. Ask any Chicago firefighter about that.
Look up a fun little thing called area ignition. I’ve seen it (from a safe distance) and it’s fucking scary.
I remember learning about three types of fires in an Environmental Conservation class I took in college, they are surface, ground and crown. An example of a Surface Fire would be a controlled burn where the fire temperature would be low enough not to sterilize the soil while getting rid of excessive undergrowth and releasing nutrients. A Ground Fire moves fast and hot, often on a Prairie and can sterilize soil. A Crown Fire is when too much fuel builds up in a forested area and everything gets burned with the soil getting sterilized leaving washouts and mudslides a big danger in a rainstorm. What IMHO is little more than absolute neglect is what the tree-huggers in charge have labeled as conservation when Loggers should have been let in to clear out infected trees and deadfall as well as having controlled burns to lessen the amount of fuel on the forest floor! I fell for the tree-hugger propaganda when I was a young meathead in college and after time in the real world I see that logging is a necessity for healthy forest.
Mentioning trees, I thought I’d share this: https://youtu.be/ElJFYwRtrH4
(Not directed at you, my friend. Just thought folks would find it funny).
A most wondermous Thanksgiving Holiday is wished upon all of my Brothers and Sisters at TAH. May your food orgy be filled with tasty tidbits of delectable delights, and pure joy from being with family. May chtulpatooie enjoy a bag of dicks. I will be out of the comm loop for several days, y’all keep ’em straight out there, you hear! GO DAWGS and ROLL TIDE. Both GA Tech and the former Alabama Polytechnic School(auburn) can join chtulpatooie for a bag of dicks.