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"We can prevent these large catastrophic fires or at least reduce the intensity of fires," he said. "So, a little smoke now and a bit of annoyance now are well worth it to compensate for these big destructive fires."
It is a small step forward to fill a major deficit. According to the commission's report, a region the size of Maryland – including state, private and federal lands – needs a planned maintenance or fire to become healthier.
Easier to say than to do
A day of prescribed burning in the Tahoe National Forest provides insight into the difficulties encountered in completing these projects.
United States Forest Service firefighters drilled a line in the ground around a plot of land in the Yuba River District near Pendola, overlooking Bullard's Bar for a day's work. A "hot shot" crew and two engine crew members gathered for the day's work.
"This day started a few years ago," Jennifer Hinckley laughs dryly. Hinckley is a fire and fuel specialist for the Tahoe National Forest. And it does a lot of paperwork: even before the first torch is able to fire on the ground, federal law requires a thorough environmental review.
Even with the approval, federal wildland managers have been waiting months for weather and environmental conditions. Hinckley says these criteria range from the speed and temperature of the wind to the amount of water in the soil. It was a very wet spring; intermittent rain caused several months of delay here.
The thickness of vegetation in the understory is also a limiting factor. Hinckley says his teams often have to cut and flatten vegetation to create safe burning conditions.
Even when all the stars line up, Hinckley says she may not have a hot body for the job. This is what happened last fall when fires in the state blocked the fire crews.
"I did not have teams to do prescribed burns," she says, "because forest fires are a priority."
Even when the permit is complete and the weather is favorable and crews are available, the air may be too polluted to add more smoke to the mixture. Air traffic controllers allow burning days, which is difficult to achieve: the regional weather conditions cause smoke from the Sierra Nevada forests to flow into the central valley, where air pollution is still bad.
Balancing forest and human health
Whether it's a wildfire or a planned burn, the smoke looks like pollution to the vulnerable lungs.
"The consequences are the same in terms of the patient's response," says Praveen Budigga, an asthma and allergy specialist based in Fresno. "I mean, patients will have the same effects of the fire."
Regional and regional air boards say they work for a balance between forest health and human health.
"We must protect public health; That's our mandate, "says Dar Mims, a meteorologist with the California Air Resources Board. "But we also recognize that we need to burn in the forest and that many compromises have to be made in real time because decisions need to be made: do we want to have a potential impact on the air pool or want we burn. "
Air regulators and fire officials say that to promote prescribed burns, the public will need to be better informed about the hazards that affect them. Last year, an innovative study concluded that forest fire smoke contains three times more pollution than smoke from prescribed fires.
"We must protect public health; it's our mandate. "
Ken Pimlott of CalFire said this was the reason why more burns were needed.
"We want to have more flexibility to burn days [when] Maybe it's not quite as close to a clean air day as we'd like, but it's a perfect prescription window, "he says. "Suppose we have the resources available and the temperatures, the humidity and the wind – all these, vegetation, all align to create a perfect burn. So we want to have the ability to have some flexibility. "
Make fire a healthier landscape
Evidence of the ecological benefits of fire can be seen in the Bouverie Reserve, a wild area of Sonoma County. Beginning in the spring, a living carpet of purple lupine, white-flowered chrysanthemum, and yellow coliflorum was unfurled in the fields and canyons of the reserve.
"It's lush and green with wild flowers. It's very beautiful, "says Sasha Berleman, fire ecologist. For her, this extraordinary growth indicates a healthy landscape, where wild flowers quickly followed the fire.
But look more closely at the trees, she says, pointing out that the heat of the fire of the Nuns has blackened the ground and charred the oaks, their trunks marked with flames up to six feet high. Berleman wonders if the fire should be so bad.
"With the wind we had, it's not that this fire is totally preventable, but we probably could have had an impact on the behavior of the fire in the area that burned," she recalls.
To see how, she points to the side of the road, a land of 17.5 acres where she lit a regulatory fire last May. These trees remained green. The flames were only a few inches high. These lands will recover more quickly.
"They might not have burned so hard or so hard in the oak forests if we had managed them regularly," says Berleman.
She also believes that more planned burns could have saved Bouverie's buildings. This hot and extreme fire set all but one on fire. Berleman returned to the reserve while the fire was raging. David Bouverie and herself were able to save the last building, using a bucket, shovel and chain.
"So now, this building occupies a special place in my heart," she says with a laugh. "We had a good 24 hours together."
Berleman now works as a consultant, promoting the use of eco-friendly fires for private customers and the East Bay Regional Park District, among others. Paradoxically, this summer, she is deploying her "hot shot" training as a forest firefighter, where the job is to eliminate fires.
"I felt like we were putting out fires that did a good job. Just because that's what the machine does, "says Berleman. "That's what we do, put out the fires."
His hope is to reconcile the conflicting goals of these jobs and the relationship between fires and the Californian landscape, so that scientists and wilderness managers will move in the same direction.
Adrift
Craig Thomas, director of conservation at Sierra Forest Legacy, said that over the past 25 years it has become easier to do. But during these years, Thomas points out that a different challenge has been posed: more and more people have left the cities to settle in wild places.
"You know, some people think that a landscape, it's like a photo," he says sadly. "You know, when you have those great tall trees and we want to stop them on the picture."
Thomas argues that it's a bad idea. Fire is a natural disturbance, he said, "a process that reflects both the image of where you land and the trees."
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