California’s age of megafires. Drought, housing expansion, and oversupply of tinder make for bigger, hotter fires. By Daniel B. Wood. Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor.
Many factors behind the current California wildlfires are similar to those last summer in Idaho and Montana, except, of course, the sprawl into the “fire plain” is worse, and I haven’t head about a role of any invasive species like cheatgrass.
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Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan’s Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of “Hiking Idaho.” He also wrote “Beyond the Tetons” and “Backpacking Wyoming’s Teton and Washakie Wilderness.” He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
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Bob, the CA fires are solely related to historic fire suppression policies, poor landscape and house designs, and the recent drought. Now, having said that San Diego County is a different story. Those folks have lived on the cheap, depending upon mutual aide for major fire suppression and spending next to nothing on local fire resources. There is no county FD in San Diego, it is all volunteer. The worm turned when LA County rightfully sucked up the lions share of the mutual aide resources (not to mention that LA County actually leases the Canadian super scoopers each year to augment local aircraft) and then San Diego county caught fire after the fact and cried wolf once again. The individual victims deserve our empathy but the politicians down there should tied to a bark beetle pine and left for the embers.
Invasive species played a very minimal role in all this, assuming you don’t count humans as an invasive species…