I do feel bad about the loss of life and I respect the hard work the fire fightes. But I have very little symapathy for the home owners who lost their homes, since they chose to live there. They chose to ignore the cold hard facts of how mother nature works, and she can go from nice to nasty in a blink of an eye.

Forest fires are a going to happen, its a natural part of the forest ecosystem. There is only two choises, ether put them off untill you get a big nasty fire or you carfully manage several smaller less damaging fires.

If you knowingly build a house in a area with a high water table you ether don't build a basement or invest in a sump pump. So if you build a house in a tinder box, then it stands to reason that you should also take steps to prevent getting burnt. Yes, the person that has to run a sump pump to keep their basment dry pays higher electric bills, but that is the price they pay to live were they do. You ether suck it up or move to higher ground.

If the local "enviromentalist" goverment will not let you take steps to protect your home and family, then ether change the goverment or sell the house while it is still worth something.

Some will say that I have over simplified the issue, but try looking at it this way. Insurance is a piss poor way to "protect" your family and home. Witch would you rather have, a nice warm bed or a cot in a shelter wating for that fat insurance check.

How mother nature works? Are you contradicting yourself? Mother Nature would have had periodic fires, eliminating the built-up fuel source for a fire of this magnitude. However, apparent forestry mismanagement has allowed fires of this magnitude to occur because they didn't have carefully-managed smaller fires. If that had been allowed to occur, then those people would still have their homes.

Not at all. Basily I was pointing out that there is nothing we can do to keep forest fires from happening. It is like trying to stop the rain. We can put the fires off but we are only setting up for a much stronger fire.

You are absolutly right and we are both on the same sheet of music. Mother nature would have perodic fires if left to her own devices, but too often she is not. Every one would be much better off if we worked with the enviroment instead of against it.

There is plenty that can be done to keep forest fires to a minimum. Even with Arson. If the environmental wacko special interest groups would have gotten the collective "logs" out of their asses, the powers-that-be couldve been thinning underbrush and other dead wood from the forest floor. They should have been able to thin the forests just enough to make it safe for animal and man. Its the difference between a three foot high fire that burns itself out, and a 90 foot high fire jumping all willy nilly from tree to tree. Its about priorities, and these wackos have proven again and again that thiers are way out of wack.

Just for the sake of argument (suprise huh?), who should pay for this "thinning of underbrush" for the people who live in these fire prone areas? I hope you're not suggesting the tax payer of the state/country pay for it. I for one would like to see the residents of disaster prone areas shoulder most of the burden themselves when it comes to the thinning of brush, building of additional dams, etc. The revenue of course would come from their elevated town property taxes.

In addition to making the requirement of fire/flood/earthquake insurance mandatory for these residents, the state should toughen the building requirements/codes even further for the people who want to build in those trouble prone areas by making mandatory fire resistant roofs/building material, basement/septic tank levels 2 - 3 ft above highest recorded flood level (required in my state of Mass Title V cert.), and stronger wall construction in areas where tornados are the norm. All I can say is if you don't want to pay the additional cost to live in these known "trouble" areas, go live somewhere else. I'm required to carry fire insurance on my house (mortgage requirement), why shouldn't everyone else? These people shouldn't expect the state/country to pay for their misfortune from these natural disasters.

For the sake of argument, why does this venture need funding? Why don't you and all those other tree-huugin liberals volunteer your time cleaning up the forest as MB stated above? Instead of volunteering your time handcuffing yourself to a tree in a forest, uncuff yourself and clean it. Oh yeah, that's right. Tree-huugin liberals refuse to work, especially manual labor. You guys only speak up after the fact and never do anything constructive to help fix the problem.

Who are you referring to as a "Tree Hugger" here nimrod? I know it can't be me, I work for a living, and I'm all for the thinning of forests to minimize fire. Got anything else "intelligent" to add to the conversation?

:rolleyes:

Wouldn't some of the thinning pay for itself? This is wood we are talking about here. The bigger trees that are removed can be sold. I think if you let a company do some careful logging, you could give them the wood, and they in return they could pay for the forest management. You just need someone to tell them what they can take and someone to make sure they are doing the job correctly.

One of the main problems the E-wackos had was logging. Everytime someone tried to push some kind of initiative through to do some prevention, the Wackos would claim the Logging companies would destroy the earth.

For god sake, these companies rely on trees as thier livlihood, they are not going to destroy thier livlihood by killing all the trees. One company planted 130,000,000 seedlings last year. Its a cycle that nature used to carry out on its own. Now, we need to help by thinning or the fires will just get bigger and bigger. The E-wackos will not allow that help to occur.

Only after the state/federal government passed laws for reforestation did the logging companies adopt these programs:

http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/state/forestry/hist/hist2.htm

That is true Sean. With proper forestry techniques, the loggers, and nature can coexist and benefit each other. Wood is the only renewable resource besides food that this country has.

This was a good thing, some occuring 75 years ago. With the amount of knowledge we share today, I find it hard to believe that a company would destroy the very thing it was trying to make money from. Today's logging companies face strict guidlines to follow for the protection of the forests. But these guidelines also protect the companies from losing thier source of income.

I just believe the E-wackos arguments are moot. They are close-minded and do not see "the forest for the trees." They are so busy arguing thier point that they fail to use common sense.

It seems that most people are forgetting or don't know that most of the plants in the area of the fires will only "reproduce" after their seeds have be subjected to fire. I can't remember the name of the plant, but it is found in Southern California and only germinates after it has been subjet to fire. Fire is part of the ecosystem there.

This area is always going to have fires. Like others have said, the owners of the houses that burned should have known the risks inherent in living there. If they had insurance, they are covered. If they didn't have insurance, lesson learned.

Where I lived in Iowa, there were people that lived on the river bank in houses built on stilts. Every single spring some of these houses would get flooded out. Every spring a homeowner would bitch because they didn't have flood insurance because it was too expensive and expect free money to rebuild their house! These are the idiots that I don't feel sorry for.

hmm....seems like alot more people agree with me than you people gave my ideas credit for!!!!

There are idiots born every day.

Guido, I understand that fire is a necessary part of the ecosystem. That is why proper forestry is necessary. Controlled burns help the forest, while preventing the entire thing from going up in flames.

Here is a lovely photo of the fire near San Diego:

I think I just figured out why Spalind says the things he does!

New Hampshire

The trouble is that loggers are just as bull headed as "tree-huggers". You give an inch and they take a mile. In some of the Utah forests forest thinning is allowed if you have a permit but one group sees a responsible company thinning the forest and the they think that means it's open season and they clearcut part of the forest.

The other problem is that the fallen trees on the forrest floor are usually rotten and not worth anything to loggers, so they leave them. Most of the dead trees still standing are partialy rotten too. And how often do you see a logging truck hauling out dry ground brush? The only good wood is the trees that are still alive so that's all they take.

I (as a "tree-hugger") don't have a problem with companies thinning the old growth out, but too many companies take more than they're supposed to or they clearcut. Plus they don't restore the logging trails they cut so the ATV's start using them all the time and then protest when the forest service tries to close them (or they destroy the barriers and use the trails anyway).

It's a vicious cycle and the only way to stop is is more regulation, control, and policing of logging laws and logging companies. But the forrest services are already under-funded and under-manned. And last year Bush passed laws to loosen restrictions on logging (I'm not tring to make this argument partisan, I'm just saing we're currently heading in the wrong direction).

Which brings me to off2cjb's comment:
You obviously don't have the slightest idea what most ecological groups do. The only people hancuffing themselves to trees are college student protesters and extremist groups like Greenpeace. Almost all legitimate eco groups fund outings to clean and revitalize the forest and raise awareness of how to work with the forest and how logging positively and negatively impacts the ecosystem.

They put in a hell of alot more money to rebuild the forests than the recreation groups that protest their actions. And they spend all their time trying to bennefit the forrest, that's a hell of alot more than can be said about your constant bitching about "Tree-Huggers".

Kerensky, you bring up valid points. I believe that these fires hitting so close to home for so many people will change the way a lot of the 'tree huggers' think. What do you think about these ideas?

1. Have the forest service tell the companies which trees they can take. They need to have a working relationship.

2. Make the companies pay for or do part or the rest of the job. This includes getting rid of some of the dead trees, controlled burns and such.

3. Open up some off road parks and charge entry fees. Here in Texas we have a private organization, the TMTC, that has had great success doing this. The government could take some of the forest areas and set them aside for this type of recreation. If you have places to go, with maintained trails people will go to them. If you don't some people will trespass and cause problems elsewhere.

All those points would help the situation, especially the first. It's not so much that loggers are wrong its usually just a problem of miscommunication or misunderstanding. People need to talk things out and find a middle ground that will make everybody happy. When the two camps of loggers and anti-loggers become too polarized nobody will be willing make concessions. Then one side sees any logging as forest abuse, when it might have been benneficial from the start.

I think offroading parks would help too but when it comes time to setting aside land everybody is going to say, "Not in my backyard".
But the idea does work. Here in Salt Lake they put skate parks up in a few places and now kids walk miles to skate at the park becasue it's way better than going up and down the railing at the supermarket over and over.

The same idea would probably work with offroading to keep people mainly in one place. Worst case scenario they trash the park and learn they have to keep it up to use it. Best case scenario people goto the offroad park as newbies and then go into the mountains after learning how to protect the trails and the land they use.

Someday people won't have to worry about going to their favorite campsite and finding a sign that says "This canyon closed due to trail abuse."