Dixie and Caldor Fires - Fuels Management
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ย. 2021
- This video explores 'fuels management' which is basically forest thinning and removal of smaller trees. How did this kind of work help to protect communities in South Lake Tahoe and Lassen County from the Caldor and Dixie Fires? What does it take to get this kind of work done? Where should we do it? What are the limitations? Note, the maps in this video only show projects on lands managed by the US Forest Service. There has been a lot of thinning done on privately-owned lands as well, but it is harder to get mapping data showing these projects.
This video came out a little rough, we'll probably do an improved version in next few days.
This video is a production of The Lookout (the-lookout.org), a user-supported wildfire reporting and education initiative run by Zeke and Erika Lunder, in Chico, California. Please visit the-lookout.org for more other detailed fire intel and wildfire education information.
If you find this information useful and want to support more educational videos like this one, please consider making a donation via the Paypal or Venmo link on our website.
I used to be the crew leader of the land management crew with the California Tahoe Conservancy. It's good to hear that our hard work removing fuels, has paid off! Thank you for these videos.
You da real mvp 🤟
@@christianbroderson4618 The fire fighters!
Feels good that all those days sweating your ass off working those projects paid off. Good work sir and your brethren.
@@XAlpineSuptDN Thank you! (Btw myself and the assistant crew leader are ma'ams 😁)
@@orangecrush69420 More power to you Ms. Crush! Well done.
Thanks for heads up about missing audio. The missing section of audio shows different results of thinning along highways. I'll post a fixed version when I get a minute, otherwise, you can skip to 6:55 if you want.
Yeh the video is good showing before and after views of the thinning areas. The main goal is keeping the fire from becoming a crown fire and you are right that it has to be strategic. There is only so much money available from the budget for fuels work. Plus all fuels work needs to have NEPA completed to ensure that this is the best alternative and won’t damage the environment too much.
Fantastic information. You have been our “go to” during this fire experience. Our home was VERY close to the fire in the Myers area of Lake Tahoe. We are currently still in a holding pattern from evacuation. You have continually provided us with up tp date and accurate information and helped to concrete our confidence. THANK YOU from the community of alike Tahoe, and THANK YOU to all battling this and all fires!! You’re Rock Stars!!
Great comment of gratitude. This channel is really excellent. And Aaron I hope your home and community stay protected as they currently are. It’s really amazing it didn’t hit Myers and Christmas Valley. And that’s cause the firefighters are amazing. 🙏🏻👊🏻🙌🏻🌻
@@moonbeammagic7499 thank you kindly 👊😘 extremely grateful.
@@aaronshagar You’re welcome. 🙏🏻🙌🏻🙂
Agreed! Keep em coming!
Thank You for Outlining the Fuels Management Tree Thinning Process and Legal Hurdles. Excellent Report!! Hopefully the New Wildfire Smoke Signals that are being seen west of the Mississippi will open the doors of change for a better Fuels Management Effort and FireFighting: future.
Lots of smoke headed south toward LA too. Hopefully a wakeup call.
I really hope so too
Thank you. You are an amazing down to earth presenter on the matter. Reducing the fuel load is a whole new thought for forest management to consider. Thank you JB for sharing this connection.
Spending tens of millions is the problem. There is simply not enough funding to manage the forests. Considering how much it costs now in fire fighting, health impacts and economical setbacks, there should be more funding up front.
You have once again given the reality and historic aspect of fuel management. Information such as this needs to reach the masses!! There is no political “slant” so folks can’t close their brains based on red vs blue…this is our great state and needs to be treated as such. Thank you Zeke and Erica for your wonderful and much needed information.
You guys came through the Rainbow Tract behind my home about 8 years ago I think and did a beautiful job cleaning it out. Over the last week you have no idea how thankful I am you did it. Very likely my home is still there because you did the fuel reduction and of course the tremendous work the firefighters did on this fire. Thank you 🙏🏻
Fun that you included memories of playing in the Ultrapower wood chip dunes! What used to be owned by 'Ultrapower' gen station in Chinese Camp is still there as well as a few others on these western slopes, the fuel is bought and trucked in and makes dunes.
Logging vs keeping the forest healthy by thinning. Would like to hear more about that.
Logging changes the fuels complex too. However w/ logging they are taking the merchantable timber and leaving behind the slash and smaller trees. If they don’t burn the unit afterward then you have a huge fuel loading left on the ground of these clearcut units. So while it prevents the crown fire it might not necessarily reduce the fire intensity. If they do burn the unit afterward then it does reduce fuel loading. If you look on google earth there you can see quite a few clearcut units which are primarily done on private land lots. There is some places that do selective logging so that not all trees are taken out but then alot of times the slash is left behind. Sometimes the slash might get piled by dozers and then burned during the rainy season. The thinning is done w/ the intent of reducing fire intensity and reducing the likelihood of crown fire initiation where the smaller trees and brush called ladder fuels are removed and larger trees left behind. It looks very park like vs a logging unit w/ lots of slash remaining behind. Also all thinning and logging don’t prevent a person’s property from burning up if the land owner has not done their due diligence to FIREWISE their property. It all really needs to go hand in hand. If communities gather together and complete a CWPP community wildfire protection plan then they are eligible (or at least used to be) for federal fuels reduction grants.
@@XAlpineSuptDN thanks for the helpful answer. After hearing a lot about how trees communicate with each other, even the different species (was listening to some logging science person months ago), it seems people associate wildfire management with heavy logging, and often the trees needing to stay for the health of the forest seem to be the ones that have the most monetary value. Sure wish I could remember the woman's name. Saw a study (can't remember by whom) that showed heavily logged areas burned at least as bad (can't remember how they defined that) as the non-logged areas. Lots of questions and controversies!
@@Berry_N A lot of it depends on whether they have followed logging w/ burning as to whether the unit will burn w/ high intensity or not. If you look on google earth you will see lots of clearcuts. That is the cheapest way to log a unit because you just cut everything down and then yard it out. All the branches, logs that aren’t worth anything and trees are left behind on the ground. Some of the slash depending on tree size can be six or more feet deep (having burned units in the Hayfork area in the past). So while the unit won’t support crown fire those units if not burned will burn w/ very high intensities if consumed in a wildfire and then could potentially initiate crown fire into the forest that is adjacent to these units. I know when we were burning clearcuts in Hayfork that we’d often have issues w/ spotting outside the unit and we’d be chasing spots and slops all the time. Luckily most of our burn units also were plumbed w/ water so we’d be able to catch and mop up the spots much easier. A lot of times they are burning these clearcuts in order to prepare the seed bed and the ground for planting of seedlings afterwards. Tree species like Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine need mineral soil in order to germinate naturally. But most often the unit will get planted w/ seedlings to improve survivability. So yeah if the units aren’t burned they don’t reduce fire intensity and are not a good place to try to stop a fire because of how rapidly a fire will move through them.
@@XAlpineSuptDN I've seen a lot of those piles and always wondered. Thanks, I understand a lot better now. Do they often just leave those piles? Seems like it.
@@Berry_N Most times if they build piles then they try to burn them but usually they wait for rain or snow to burn them so they don’t escape. Also they might let them cure for a year so the wood is dried out and will burn completely. When it is green it will burn but not as completely.
Everything is political. This is why people need to be engaged in the political process and familiarize themselves with how it works. Everyone has options but only those with knowledge of what is feasible are going to have a serious discussion. Saying that “ I’m not interested in politics ” or ”all politicians are crooks” is just a bad excuse for being lazy.
options = opinions?
Thanks, I spent a season at the Westwood station so I love seeing you showing the area I'm familiar with.
Thanks for more great info!
Is there supposed to be any audio commentary that goes along with the video from appx 2:50 thru 6:55 ?? If no audio commentary was intended then you may want to add note in video description (to save repeated comments asking about this issue)
I am seeing this issue as well
Me too. Sorry Zeke, no sound when you switch to showing how fuels reduction works..
Great work. I work out of Truckee, and travel along east shore Lake Tahoe quite a bit. Lots of forest thinning has been going on in this area for several years.
Thank you for this tutorial on fuels thinning. Maps are incredible. Learn and teach 😚🐈🐈🐈⬛♥️🇺🇲
It just shows how important it is to properly manage the forests.
It would be great if you would talk about people FIREWISE’ing their land and how fuel reduction on private property helps firefighters as well and might even protect their home.
It would also be great if property rights and fuels management are addressed. There's several houses near me that have done NO management of fuels for probably decades, and are just vacation houses that are sitting there. Plumas county has a real problem also with not incentivizing landowner removal (friends and neighbors here banded together to get a dumpster and was still around 2-3k).
I’ve cleared my 10 acre property in Placerville. The dump costs are freakin retarded expensive. I can see why folks don’t keep things clear.
@@07negative56 Jesus, how much did that cost in removal charges? A burn permit would be great for us but can't do shit during fire season and there's so much scrubby sage brush and crap to burn.
I’m into for about $1800. I have a 7 yard dump trailer. I’ve got 2 burn piles. But obviously can’t burn during summer. My place has been neglected for a good 10-12 years. I’ve only owned for 2 years now. Insurance required me to demo an old structure. I rented a 20 yard dump bin, that was $600. I just don’t like having debris laying around. I try to mindful of my neighbors and whatnot. Everyone says get goats. I dislike goats. They’re a pain in the ass. Plus I don’t want a livestock guardian dog yet or at all.
Once I get a handle on things. I’ll put systems in place. Just picked up a 500 gallon water trailer with Honda motor on it. Hoping to keep areas wet near structures.
@@07negative56 Right on man. Good to be conscientious about where you live which is in the woods where it burns more often than not unfortunately. Or maybe it doesn’t burn again for several years but you never know. Such a beautiful place to live but it comes as a bigger price than living in the city. but the rewards of living out in the woods are so amazing. Keep fighting the good fight!
"The cost, the money spent, there is no market for"...we have to stop looking at everything we do through dollar signs rationalizing lack of preventive maintenance with nearsightedness and then go all out, damn the cost, in fighting these monsters. Then we act woeful at all that's lost. Money can not be the only factor in determining if having a heathy forrest is worth it.
Actually, this information that there is no market for the chips makes my heart happy. We so desperately need to just realize that this will never be free. Those who think that more logging will solve this really do believe that there is money to be made. No, there is money that needs to be spent. I will continue to try to get that point across, but my current Rep doesn't think it is worth the money.
Will share your efforts here. There are some significant insight for sure. We are learning all the time are we not?
Thank you. Informative!
You mentioned a few vids back that the Plumas National forest is just about wiped out..:((( I cant help but think of all the animals that are perishing....extremely sad! Thanks for your reporting...even in the bathroom..lol..
We used to have a lot of power generation wood burning plants.
They needed a small KWH subsidy of about 10¢>
They were put out of business because of a dime.
Dixie fire reported cost over $400 Million so far?
That cost would have gone a long way to reduce fuels. Excellent report.
The money is in the treatment, not the cure.
$400 million is just the cost of suppression to date Juan. Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) will be the next task followed by other long term tasks- all of which are not free.
To be fair, large scale prescription burning of standing vegetation has significant follow on cost as well. Mechanical (i.e. hand and/or machine) thinning followed by pile burning not so much.
At the morning breifing 9/5, $440,000,000.
1900 +per acre about the cost of fuels reduction costs. Pay now or pay ++++ later.
Thank you for this excellent presentation. Here's a question; can fuels management be shown to be less expensive than firefighting for each acre of forest protected? If you have a reference to such a study, I'd be pleased to see it. Thanks.
Good to hear that biomass power plant helped a lot. We have one here in Medford OR. Why did yours close?
Has anyone done modeling to see where terrain lines up with typical wind patterns to create favorable conditions for an extreme fire run? It would be interesting to see where that's more or less likely. But it could be difficult to account for all variables like the amount of fuels everywhere in the landscape.
I think you or someone else said these are the only fires known to cross the Sierra. We had one in Colorado last year that crossed the continental divide (East Troublesome Fire). It would be interesting to know if there's something special about these locations or if it could happen anywhere.
If there are special locations at high risk, then maybe it would make sense to do fuels treatments there in addition to around developed areas.
There are some good free fire hazard models out there. One of them is called Pyregence.org. I'm test-driving it for work. Check it out. Works best in Google Chrome.
Is allowing the natural process of fires to occur at least in more remote areas part of the overall strategy of forest management? Does fire suppression actually promote the build up of fuels?
Yeh in some areas where fire has a lot of room to roam where they can do point protection they will manage fires for resource benefits and is one of the strategies used by all the federal land management agencies. It also depends on what National Planning level we are at as to who makes the decision whether a resource benefit fire will be suppressed or not. At PL 5 like we are now those decisions are made at a national level where as when we are at lower levels a forest supervisor or park superintendent or BLM Field Manager will make the decision. They typically manage fires for resource benefit in places like forest service wilderness areas or in larger national parks like Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Sequoia, Lassen, Glacier and have been doing so for years. It is a huge risk to the Forest and park leadership though if there is a bad outcome. I’ve worked many resource benefit fires over the years in Yosemite and Grand Canyon. Some parts of the fire are suppressed and some are allowed to roam. Infrastructure and values at risk are point protected.
Forest thinning is important, however, I'd much rather see more firebreak roadways throughout dense forest that allow forestry monitoring vehicles through the area, as well as creating a wider width of distance between paved roadways and the forest line; graveling along the shoulder of these roadways should help to provide further support in vegetation growth and fire that travels along the ground floor. Also, I believe in utilizing people power as much as possible through volunteer opportunities. Many Nomads of all ages and retirees living in RV's, etc., love to boondock in these beautiful and wild places - so why not enlist their help by providing regions they could be assigned to, like that of a camp site host, to help monitor as citizen forestry volunteers? I for one would love that opportunity. Additionally, many Nomads now incorporate Solar Energy into their lifestyle, which means they can operate off-grid much of the time, which would mean they could definitely be in remote places to help keep watch.
Zeke: are there supposed to be images inserted at 9:35 9:43 9:49?
I don't see Rogue Siskiyou NF doing much fuel reduction up here in Southern Oregon. I'd like to see a few more biomass generators go in, so we could burn wood without having smoke all year long. Doing my own mini fuel reduction projects with my campfires and stealthy battery chainsaw. One man, one acre.
and then it grows back with understory brush and mats of saplings you can't even walk through. Lower elevation private property fuel loads are also a big issue, these people can't afford to thin all their land plus the brush just comes right back even faster... Maybe biofuel plants all over and tons of free chippers that are passed around between home owners 🤷♂️
If communities gather together and develop Community Wildfire Protection Plans then they can get federal grants to have the thinning done by contractors. There is info about it on the FIREWISE website.
@@XAlpineSuptDN I imagine the scope is too large for the given funds. Wonder what the Amish would do
@@feralfpv3768 Could be. Although quite a few communities mainly organized around the fire protection district in CO have done CWPP’s and got federal grants to help protect their lands. Also more and more these days you see Insurance companies requiring you to do work to your land FIREWISE in order to be insured against wildfire. The good thing about the CWPP is that they write up a thorough plan that shows more than just where needs to be thinned. They identify and have GIS layers that show water sources, potential safety zones, escape routes etc etc etc. It gets the community involved in planning for their own safety while in the wildland urban interface. And you are right unless folks want their taxes raised the given funds can’t tackle the whole issue.
@@XAlpineSuptDN A lot of FIREWISE work being done in Southern Oregon as well. It takes time but each year we are making progress!
@@owenjurling2615 That’s all you can do is keep pecking away at it and spreading the word of FIREWISE. When we lived in the wildland urban interface I made sure I limbed up all my trees and thinned my forested lands so that fire would stay on the ground if we had a wildfire. We also would build fireline (18” wide) like a trail around the outskirts of the property so a crew would have something already built to burn from. As well as insuring that we removed all needles from our gutters and roof valleys. Raked needles away from foundations and decks. Keep all firewood well away from our house. Also removed all fuel from around our propane tank. All the slash we burned in piles in the winter when snow was on the ground.
For the public watching this it would be great to specify what "thinning" is. It is not removal of large diameter mature trees--AKA conventional logging.
One more thing - continue to use drones for monitoring as often as you can; I love this technology.
They are being used more and more but it requires a permit process. Because if you are flying drones on a fire they can become a hazard to other aircraft just like power lines or other aerial hazards. So the pilots need to know where the UAS are being operated and that it is qualified operators using them. The public flying their drones on fires is a huge hazard. If you fly FF’s can’t.
Anybody here able to hook him up with a resource qualified to discuss Cultural Burns?
You look tired. 😔 I hope you get to rest.
I know the 2016/2018 eastern fire season helped get funding and approval for rangers that had been begging to thin or fire popular tourist areas for a decade or more 🤦♂️ i know everyone is afraid of losing a few seasons of tourism, but that's better than losing your entire national forest area or state park! Especially when the terrain means tourists will likely become victims in the event of a dry wind driven fire 🙁
take the able bodied homeless and prison inmates to remediate fuel before the fact.
Newsom released many of the inmates that were previously used to fight fires. So now trained firefighters are being diverted to lesser "skilled" tasks of clearing brush. And at a higher cost. All in the name of "social justice"
Add to this, the environmentalist prevent the clearing of dead and diseased trees (fuel).
Vot YES to #recallNewsom
Actually they already do use inmates to do thinning. CALFIRE inmate crews do alot of thinning work when not being used on wildfire suppression. They use inmates in almost all western states to some extent on fires and thinning projects. But also trained firefighters do the work as part of their project work. It’s great work hardening and training opportunities for crews during the early spring when the crews are training and coming together as a cohesive unit. Back in the day we spent every spring in Mesa Verde NP doing hazard fuels thinning projects. When the park burned back in the 90’s that thinning project protected all the infrastructure in the park. Also all the thinning and pile burning we did in Rocky Mtn NP helped to slow down and protect the park last year during the East Troublesome fire. They also use contract crews to complete thinning projects. You can’t just use anybody to complete this work. You have to be trained in how to use a chainsaw and be physically fit enough to spend all day either pileing the slash or carrying it away to a truck. Not all thinning is done by machinery like was Zeke showed us but some of it is. It’s not like the old days of pulling drunks out of the bar to go fight fire.
@@XAlpineSuptDN are you aware of the recent developments in Northern California? Fire authorities are complaining about the lack of inmates to help with the fires. Newsom released many of the inmates that would be helping.
@@RamblinRoadies Maybe things have changed since I was fighting fire in CA. things are constantly changing.
@@RamblinRoadies Traditionally inmate crews come from the minimum security prisons. If inmates are going to be released early it would make sense for them to come from those populations.
Thanks for the info but you sound like you really need sleep, get some soon (:-)
nice video, but I think the California population blew way past it's carrying capacity for human population, Cali population grew off of the back of the Colorado sharing it's snow pack when Colorado was a low population state, Colorado almost has 9 million people now and there will be a day where Colorado cannot share it's snow pack anymore, that day is coming and California's population is artificially big, I see a pending disaster in Cali
I know the 2016/2018 eastern fire season helped get funding and approval for rangers that had been begging to thin or fire popular tourist areas for a decade or more 🤦♂️ i know everyone is afraid of losing a few seasons of tourism, but that's better than losing your entire national forest area or state park! Especially when the terrain means tourists will likely become victims in the event of a dry wind driven fire 🙁