Is it all because of fire prevention?
(Image courtesy of cnnphilippines.com.)
Claim: The primary cause of the recent West Coast fires is forest management. By protecting forests from logging and brush clearing, the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Parks Service have actually added to the fire danger.
Rating: MOSTLY TRUE/BARELY WRONG
Explanation: A hundred years ago, California banned Native American tribes from practicing their traditional controlled burns. All this time, dead brush and trees have been building up, although the Forest Service has been using a few controlled fires recently.
Experts broadly agree now that decades of fire suppression actually made the risk of forest fires worse. This policy increased fuel loads in the nation’s forests that under different circumstances would have been thinned by flames.
It took time for fuel loads in Western forests to rise to dangerous levels, largely because suppression policy coincided with rapid expansion of the logging industry. Throughout the 20th century lumber companies harvested trillions of trees from the nation’s forests, driven by military demand during the world wars and then by the post-World War II housing boom.
In the late 1970s logging began to decline in the West. One cause was competition from Southern lumber companies. Another was an increasingly litigious environmental movement that became adept at using federal environmental laws to restrict logging. For example, conservation groups worked to get the northern spotted owl listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, a strategy that ultimately led to timber harvesting bans on several million acres of forestland on the Pacific Coast.
—The Conversation
However, arson and climate change have a role as well.
A number of wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California are now being considered arson, and several arsonists are already in jail – while there are more on the run, we’re told.
On Wednesday, September 10, 2020, Troopers in Puyallup, Washington said they arrested a 36-year-old Puyallup man caught setting a fire in the brush. This was along State Route 167 in Puyallup in the median of SR 167 at Meridian.
The fire started to spread, but the Puyallup Police closed the northbound ramp on the highway. He told troopers he was looking for a camera. They still took the suspect to jail.
Another arson suspect was arrested in Spokane after allegedly starting multiple fires.
Christine Comello,36, was arrested after allegedly starting multiple fires in Spokane on Monday. Officer Mohondro arrived on the scene where he witnessed some grass and a palette outside of a commercial business on fire. There was reasonable evidence the fire was started by a human and not lightning or telephone poles.
Mohondro spotted another fire a few blocks away. This was next to an old oil drum under a tree. This could cause the fire to explode into something much larger. The Spokane Fire Department responded and extinguished the fire.
More units arrived in the area and detained Comello. She originally lied about her name, but it was discovered she had a warrant for her arrest.
Witnesses identified her as the arsonist. As a result she was booked for 2nd degree arson, 1st degree arson and burglary.
—Law Enforcement Today
Simon Wang of Utah State University about how climate change is intensifying the wildfires on the West Coast:
"What really makes a large-scale fire, no matter how they are triggered, is the fire weather and then also the fuel. And the fuel means, like, the forest that becomes very easy to burn and very easy to spread. And the weather conditions - you know, they come from really the basic factors, like the temperature, humidity and winds. So, you know, all these three conditions - they come together and make the fire to be easily spread. And now that - with the lengthening of the fire season and the worsening intensification of the fire season, it really can only mean that, when we have a fire, the fire's going to grow bigger than before."
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