Experts frustrated by stalled efforts to counter megafires
"This is really a healthy-looking forest, to me,” said Beasley, looking over a spot where his crews intentionally burned 5,000 acres in 2002 as part of Yosemite National Park’s pioneering program to use prescribed fires under controlled conditions to ease the threat of extreme wildfire. The retired forest fire chief – a designated “burn boss” at the park for a decade-- looked up into a tree blackened at its base from the megafire seven years before. “This large tree is still alive, right here,” Beasley said. “It looks like a red fir -- it's still alive because all the fuels were cleared away in 2002 when we burned here.’’ Beasley said that’s because his crews removed a million tons of so-called surface and ladder fuels – a century’s buildup of small trees, dead needles twigs and branches – from the forest floor. Without the surface fuels, he says, the Rim fire still burned but did not shoot up and engulf entire trees.
Experts To Western States: Time To Finally Fight Wildfires With More Fire
If historically flawed forest management is half the problem here – battling most every fire - the other half is the world's warming climate with hotter, drier conditions igniting a Century of built-up fuel.
Amid devastating US fires, experts urge fire prevention rethink.
Tim Ingalsbee, a former wildland USFS and NPS firefighter who now runs the FUSEE think-tank told Al Jazeera huge wildfires could be prevented if there were a more robust state and national prescribed burn strategy. “There wouldn’t be the big catastrophic fires that burned small towns, it would not be the disaster we’re seeing today,” he said.