> Call me crazy but if I was the mayor of LA I’d make them invest heavily in PREVENTION. Cameras and drones all over the place in the forests, to nip fires in the bud (and carch arsonists).
This is a terrible way to deal with fire. The issue isn’t preventing fires from starting at all, because small fires are all over the place. A dropped cigarette can light a city block on fire if the wind is just right. The issue is preventing spread, and taking precautions when conditions (like wind) are conducive to rapid spread.
And those precautions are… putting out the fire before it spreads, right?
No. Forest fires should be allowed to spread to prevent fuel buildup. It’s bad when they cross into developed areas, though, so you want to prevent that.
If anyone ever implements your drone-based surveillance-state wildland fire suppression system, please let me know so I can avoid hiking in the area.
That seems incredibly dangerous. As you said the wind can pick them up and cause an inferno.
If you want to do controlled fires IN ADDITION to the fire suppression system, you can. If fires are the only way to neutralize the fuel, at least control them, and don’t allow any uncontrolled fire to spread and get out of hand. The controlled burns would be planned in advance, done on good days and isolated from spreading too far. Of course those burns would be excluded from the fire suppression system.
But it seems reckless to just “let the fires spread”. You need actual control over fires if you want to have any chance of avoiding disasters.
Imagine you did this in any other area where you're in charge of a system. For example you run a forum and refuse to implement any sort of moderation or spam control. You claim we shouldn't put anything in place to clamp down on it and need to let things run their course naturally, because sometimes risking spam is necessary to get really good updates about stuff by experts. The proper thing to do, then, is to intercept spam from spreading as much as possible but then carve out a whitelist of exceptions. Not to simply not have an anti-spam system at all.
Well, a lot of people at the Forest Service and other land management agencies used to think like you do. We focused on full suppression throughout the 20th century. Now, when a forest fire does start, it isn't controllable like it used to be. There's too much fuel lying around that we prevented from burning for over a century.
Prescribed burns make sense in certain high-risk areas, but there's no substitute for actual, natural forest fires. We can never artificially cover the same kind of area that a natural fire can cover.
> For example you run a forum and refuse to implement any sort of moderation or spam control. You claim we shouldn't put anything in place to clamp down on it and need to let things run their course naturally, because sometimes risking spam is necessary to get really good updates about stuff by experts.
That analogy has absolutely no bearing on anything we're discussing. Online forums and human behavior aren't a good analogue for forests and forces of nature.
That's not how these fires work. Wind and dry fuels mean they can't be put out by the time they've been identified and someone has verified they're not some dude burning trash. Drone armies can't carry enough water.