[Newsbot]

Title: BC calls for fire help
Category: Environmental
Posted By: Robair
Date: 2018-08-13 14:16:14
Canadian

[Robair]

Air advisory warnings are rated from 1 to 10. This morning was rated "ten plus".
My eyes water, head hurts, skin is itchy. couldn't see out to the middle of the lake around noon today. Really shitty out!

[herbie]

Burns Lake this afternoon looking east. That's the "Shovel Lake" fire, looks like someone nuked us!

[Strutz]

That's nasty herbie.

The article on CBC includes a couple of pics similar to yours.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... -1.4783912


The air here was terrible today as there is so much smoke coming from the interior.

Hopefully with the addition of extra forces on the ground and in the air they can get some control on these fires. Some extensive rain (please no lightning) would be a big help too.

[herbie]

That picture's just a backburn meant to stop it from spreading in one direction. The main body of the fire's behind it, now over 30,000 hecatares - about the size of Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond all burning.
Pic of the smoke from the main fire I took in Fraser Lake, doesn't show the red, brown boiling hell in the clouds. Too smoky for a pic of the firefighter's camp and I forgot about taking a shot while we watched 3 more choppers set up to join the fray at the makeshift airport.
On a lighter note, more than a week under a Red Sun and still waiting for the super powers to use Xray vision on the hottie next door....

[BartSimpson]

With the fires here in California starting to come under control I hope we can send some resources north to help out!

[llama66]

Apocalyptic.

[BartSimpson]

llama66 llama66:

Apocalyptic.

No, just leftist environmentalist whacko forestry management practices playing out to their logical and inevitable conclusion.

When you insist on putting out small fires and when you object to controlled burns due to air quality and global warming concerns then fuel builds up to unnatural levels.

Then when a fire finally happens it easily leaps from the ground to the crown of the trees and kills everything in its path.

The solution is to return to either industrial forestry practices where forests were thinned, dead trees harvested, and periodic ground burns carried out.

OR adopt native practices of lighting controlled burns every single year to clear underbrush, reduce fuel, and improve forage for game animals.

But this nonsense of forestry neglect coupled with intervention to stop natural fires is an total and complete failure and it has to stop.

[llama66]

I meant the photos looked apocalyptic.

[herbie]

Good God. Politicizing a forest fire.
Do you really think Conservative - Social Credit - Liberal - NDP gov'ts have different firefighting policies? Or 10 years in the last 100 or the last year of NDP caused the fires?

If you really want to politicize you could blame certain idiots putting protectionist duties on lumber instead of buying up all the cheap wood they could've got their hands on.

[herbie]

BTW I'm not disagreeing with a lot of what you said. Read my posts about my cabin I'm pissed as hell my Mom was such a tree-hugger and my sister did SFA about clearing the deadfall in the last 10 years. It's a disaster waiting to happen and now all the small loggers have left the area, we'll have to PAY to have tens of thousands of bucks worth of lumber 'taken away'...
but stop the ridiculous bit, no one's going to object to the greenhouse gases from a controlled burn to save a forest. That's like griping about the gas mileage on a truck to bring parts to an oil well.

[bootlegga]

llama66 llama66:

Apocalyptic.

Ed Struzik's Firestorm is at times as depressing as an apocalyptic movie, but I still recommend reading it:

https://www.amazon.ca/Firestorm-Wildfir ... 1610918185

[BartSimpson]

herbie herbie:

Good God. Politicizing a forest fire.

I'm so glad that you object to politicizing a fire.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/climate ... d=56937704

$1:

'Undeniable link to climate change' in California's fire season, expert says

And the liberal-left Sacramento Bee is political but vaguely supportive of President Trump:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-go ... 60995.html

$1:

Trump wants to clear more trees to halt fires. The feds need to spend more, experts say.

WASHINGTON
When it comes to wildfires, California is “not on the side of nature,” Gov. Jerry Brown acknowledged in an Aug. 1 press conference. “We’re fighting nature.”

There are, however, things people can do to mitigate the risk of forest fires, which are growing ever longer and more destructive in the West thanks to high temperatures, drought and invasive species. After years of neglect, California’s government is now stepping up efforts to do just that.

The federal government, however, is not moving with the same sense of urgency.

...

Neither federal nor state authorities have been doing enough to respond to the historic 100 million-plus dead trees littering the state’s forests, experts say. “California’s forests suffer from neglect and mismanagement, resulting in overcrowding that leaves them susceptible to disease, insects and wildfire,” the independent Little Hoover Commission wrote in a February report. And a 2017 report by two U.S. Forest Service officials found that “the current scale and pace of treatment implementation is not keeping up with the current needs or addressing the backlog” of overgrown forests.

[PluggyRug]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

Apocalyptic.

No, just leftist environmentalist whacko forestry management practices playing out to their logical and inevitable conclusion.

When you insist on putting out small fires and when you object to controlled burns due to air quality and global warming concerns then fuel builds up to unnatural levels.

Then when a fire finally happens it easily leaps from the ground to the crown of the trees and kills everything in its path.

The solution is to return to either industrial forestry practices where forests were thinned, dead trees harvested, and periodic ground burns carried out.

OR adopt native practices of lighting controlled burns every single year to clear underbrush, reduce fuel, and improve forage for game animals.

But this nonsense of forestry neglect coupled with intervention to stop natural fires is an total and complete failure and it has to stop.

Eucalyptus trees.

https://www.kqed.org/science/4209/eucal ... ve-species

[Thanos]

BC's main problem is less the multiple years of drought conditions that it is the endless amount of deadwood the mountain pine beetles have left behind them in their destructive wake. Even if there was still normal summer rail fall the conditions for fires would still be there because of the incalculable amount of beetle-destroyed timber. BC would need to get soaked by about five summers in a row of non-stop rain to make that deadwood moist enough to no longer be a fire hazard.

We used to have a natural pesticide called winter, where a couple months in a row of bone-chilling minus 30 C would be enough to kill off pests like the pine beetles. Or the current tick epidemic in the United States, as well as the Africanized bees creeping even further north from the desert states. Now, over the last two decades at least, winter in the arid high plains and the BC/north-west interior just isn't cold enough for long enough anymore to take care of these insects that are now out of control. The epidemic of these kinds of creatures is one of the more glaring signs of climate change in that they can now thrive in places that used to be too hostile in terms of cold weather for them. These nasty vicious things that were once confined to swamps or deserts are going to spreading further and faster as time goes by.