Wildfires

the dragon came, “The people suffered, everyone Lived in terror, ...” The story remains the same when wildfires come near human settlements. Obviously, society should expect an extreme wildfire to occur once or twice a year, but with wildfires so commonplace they burn millions of acres every year, there has to be change. According to www.nifc.gov, since 1960 there have been four years where wildfires have burned over 9 million acres, and all four years have occurred in the past decade. This…

with fire". To people who do not understand why a controlled burn is beneficial and effective, this seems like a perfectly valid argument. The purpose of a controlled burn is to limit the amount of fuel in an area that an actual fire can consume. Wildfires can cost millions of dollars of damage and a controlled burn is a relatively cheap and simple way of preventing such destruction. A controlled burn helps the environment by preventing larger and more destructive forest fires from developing…

While wildfires have been around since the beginning of time, our encroachment into forested areas and dry locations such as southern California requires mitigation to reduce loss of lives and property damage. The most impactful thing I see the communities and individual owners do is vegetation management. There are multiple ways to fight overgrowth of vegetation; prescribed burning, chemical treatments, and mechanical treatments (San Diego County Wildland Fire Task Force Findings and…

strong imagery: “consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable march across the mountains to the sea” (par 1). Davis then constructs a premise that wildfires will continue to cause immense damage as long as private residential homes continue to exist in the Santa Monicas. He rebuts this premise by offering numerous historical examples such as the wildfire in 1835 in Jose Tapia's Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit and the 1903 fire that started in Calabasas and ended at the sea, both of which caused…

I think prescribed burns are useful. They decrease the probability of uncontrollable devastation from wildfires, insects and invaders, and increase biodiversity. Thousands upon thousands of acres every year lost in forest fires once a year. we tend to always hear about the dramatic losses caused by forest fires and are usually involved by them. There ar such a big amount of alarming effects from fires and most of them have an effect on such a big amount of individuals. Studies have shown that…

The state of California has a program that allows inmates from prison to be put through a two week course so they can help fight wildfires. Normally, this is just for “minimum-security inmates with no history of violent crimes that can participate.” The numbers of inmates in the firefighting unit have dropped in California due to overcrowding in prisons. To help the inflation, they are keeping people in jails around the state. Their job is to handle the tools to “chew through brush and…

communities. For example, the 2011 Slave Lake wildfire had left the town in ashes and caused over 1.8 billion dollars and 4,700 hectares of damage. Wildfires are caused mainly as a result of human impact rather than natural sources such as lightning. Fires should be managed but just to a certain extent, where the landscape can be reestablished and the community would be away from harm. Wildfires can help eliminate a variety of waste, insects, and pests. Wildfires cause dead vegetation to be…

There are some legendary forest fires that have been documented all the way back to the late 1800s. The most notable fire in that century was the Peshtigo Fire of 1871. After these fires, there were two main conservationists, Franklin Hough and Bernard Fernow, which pushed for protecting timber supplies and watersheds. The federal government then established the US Forest Service in 1905. The Forest Service was given control over the national forests. The current management at the time focused…

The Yellowstone National Park wildfire of 1988 is nothing that is unheard of when it comes to our country’s natural disasters. This specific wildfire was remarkable considering that it was the largest fire complex ever recorded in the Greater Yellowstone Area. It was the summer of 1988 when it actually occurred, and this area was dealing with a severe drought. The setting to create the perfect fire consisted of a wet spring where dry winds reached up to sixty miles per hour, a humidity level…

During the summer of 2016, I fought wildland fire for the Weiser Ranger District of the Payette National Forest in Idaho. I worked on a type four heavy engine, E-421. As a firefighter, I was able to witness climate change and increasing fire activity first hand on an off forest assignment to Midas, Nevada. It was there where my module was the first to respond to the Hot Pot Fire. In a little under 36 hours, the Hot Pot Fire spread 123,000 acres. It claimed an abandoned ranch and almost consumed…