Were the California fires preventable?
Published 7:44 am Friday, January 10, 2025
The fires from this past week in California have been absolutely heartbreaking. When you know that thousands of homes have been destroyed and lives lost, it’s hard not to feel sadness for all involved.
But even with that being the case, I think the question must be asked: Why do we see these kinds of wildfires repeatedly in that single state?
It’s a very complicated issue. While it’s still unclear how these particular fires started, experts point to a combination of factors that have made conditions ripe for the unfolding disaster. The entire region has seen extremely low autumn and winter rainfall, with downtown Los Angeles seeing less than a quarter of an inch of rain since October 1, compared to an average of 4.64 inches in a typical season.
And as most anybody that has worked in fire prevention will tell you, you combine very dry conditions with very high winds and you have a recipe for exactly what we’ve witnessed.
I’ve spoken to several plantation managers over the years regarding prescribed/controlled burns and how they alone might be able to impact such a situation. There’s no doubt that controlled burns would eliminate a lot of underbrush, fallen trees, leaves, and such that serve as little more than high-octane fuel for fires to turn into uncontrollable monsters.
The problem with California is there are several different and distinct types of land in question regarding these fires. The forest areas in question in the state would be perfect for controlled burns.
But where these particular fires are is not ‘forested’, so doing controlled burning wouldn’t greatly change the fuel structure found there. Plus, when you have 60+ mph winds that have been in the mix this week, the impacts of prescribed burns would be minimized. When you have these high winds, even if they run into an area that has had a prescribed burn, the embers are just blown right over that burned area and ignite on the other side.
The areas in question at the epicenter of these most recent fires include some very heavily populated sections, including some of the most expensive real estate in America. When you have bunches of multi-million dollar homes built closely to each other, running successfully controlled burns around them can get very tricky very quickly.
Most of California’s overall ecosystem – especially in forested areas – has evolved over the millennia to adapt to or even depend on fire, which can rejuvenate those forests and help nutrients return to the soil. But the hard fact of the matter is state land management agencies in California banned controlled burns for many decades, arguing that all fires were dangerous and could hurt the timber industry there. Even though it seems to fly in the face of common sense, last October the US Forest Service announced it would stop prescribed burning in California “for the foreseeable future,” stating that the decision was made as a precautionary measure to supposedly better ensure the availability of staff and equipment in case of potential wildfires.
What’s even more curious about that decision is the history of the area clearly shows the benefits of controlled burns proven over many centuries by the Native American population there. In fact, Spanish explorers wrote in their journals about how the land appeared like a “well-tended garden.”
How was that case? Indigenous people native to Yosemite and many other parts of the world used fire to promote healthy forests.
But early European settlers who set foot in California saw tribes setting fire to the land and simply didn’t understand the practice, labeling it as ‘primitive’. Strangers to the kind of ecosystem found there and fire’s important role within it, they chose to eliminate the practice instead of respecting it. In 1850, California passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which outlawed intentional burning in the newly formed state. One early U.S. forest ranger there suggested people who set fire to any land should be shot.
Add to the mix borderline radical environmental regulations added over the ensuing decades and you have what we have today.
According to the Univesity of California, a recent UC Berkeley study of Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin – a 60 square-mile area where lightning-created fires have been allowed to take their course over the past half-century – also clearly illustrates fire’s healing effects. The landscape there looks something like it may have looked 200 years ago: a mixture of grassland, shrubland, and meadow, all filled with abundant wildflowers and boosted plant and pollinator diversity.
And, despite what many will try to convince you otherwise, climate change is a minor factor in the overall mix.
“I think climate change is no more than 20 to 25 percent responsible for our current fire problems in the state, and most of it is due to the way our forests are,” said senior study author Scott Stephens in a recent interview.
As mentioned earlier, it’s a complicated mess. While there’s little doubt that a return to regular prescribed burns would go far toward helping the state as a whole, the hard fact of the matter is thanks to overpopulation and bureaucratic lunacy it simply can’t be ‘the answer’ for everyone there.