The Wildfire Tragedy

The wildfires burning north of Los Angeles are truly a disaster. There have already been fatalities, with more possible, and the property loss is huge.

This isn’t even the height of the wildfire season, since the Santa Ana winds are not yet a factor. They are still to come in October, so this huge fire is being fueled without the usual winds that spread it.

The Southern California area has been under severe drought conditions for three years or more, so the underbrush is completely dry and just waiting for the spark to ignite it.

The question is, how could we prevent, or at least lessen the threat of wildfires in and around Los Angeles? After all, these fires are a perennial event, and they displace or harm thousands of people and their homes. It isn’t as though we couldn’t prepare and execute a plan of prevention.

On my recent trip through the American Northwest, I witnessed something that I never thought I would see. In the Black Hills forest of South Dakota, which I drove through extensively, I saw huge amounts of wood and other flammable debris stacked in conical piles. The ground around these tinder piles was clear and green with new grown grasses.

I’m not describing a small area that some local group of volunteers cleared, either. This was something I saw at every place I stopped, and all along the Iron Mountain road, which is about 25 miles in length. It appears that the entire area of Custer State Park was cleared, too.

It occurred to me that there must be a tremendous effort in the Black Hills to clear that flammable underbrush. It must have taken several hundred, even several thousand, people to do such a magnificent job. It reminded me of the pictures I recall of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, back in the Depression Era from 1933 to 1942.

With all of the current unemployment we are experiencing, and all of the stimulus money that is being thrown around, why wouldn’t it make perfect sense to ‘hire’ some of those people at a reasonable salary to clear forests in other parts of the country, and especially in those areas like Southern California?

Maybe it is too late for a lot of that forest, but there certainly must be a lot of trees out there that still could be saved by removing the undergrowth that fuels those huge and tragic wildfires.

In case you cannot believe that all that debris can be adequately cleared, here is one of the pictures I took in the Black Hills. Look closely and you’ll see that there are many piles back in the forest itself in addition to the four you see in the foreground.



I don’t know what the future plan for these conical piles is, but they could be removed pretty quickly in the event of a forest fire there. Since the picture was taken in the early summer, the tinder piles might have already been removed to a controlled burn area. It did look like a work in progress.

I am sending this column to my representative and both senators for their consideration. Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I don’t see much in the way of results from the stimulus infusion so far.

How about you? Will you copy and forward the column to your senators and House representative in Washington?