Thread by @SavorTooth

🧵 The wildfires in California are extraordinary, and the more I report on them the more amazing they seem - a few examples from my latest piece: grist.org/wildfires/outp…

Jeff Marsolais, Eldorado National Forest supervisor: "All of the fuels experts I have been around — people with 40-, 50-year careers — have never seen conditions like this. We were ordering up air tankers for initial fire attacks in January." January!

California is ramping up efforts to thin forests, cut brush, and do prescribed burns ramping up spending 16-fold year over year. But it takes a little while to do the environmental assessments of those projects and line up the contractors (especially on federal land - NEPA)

So what happens when you are planning tons of projects in the most fire-prone areas and then gigantic fires spread? Yep, a lot of those project burn before they can start:

Tom Esgate, operations manager for the Lassen County Fire Safe Council: “If you want to see a wildfire come to your community, all you need to do is have Tom Esgate plan your project. It’s been like whack-a-mole around here.”

Note - the chart above doesn't contain every project: for instance the Mapes project on Plumas NF, where workers were waiting for a break in the dry weather to get in and do Rx burns. Turns out climate change can make it hard to do climate adaption.

The fires are still burning and the @R5_Fire_News and @CALFIRE_PIO have their hands full, so we won't know the full extent for months.

Moisture is low all over the West. But it's particularly egregious in California where we've had years of relatively low precip + a snowpack that disappears by June. It sure looks like a lot of forests are transitioning to a much drier biome - and that means more fire.

It's not all dire though. In a lot of places these giant fires are doing the fuels reduction work (on a much grander scale) as the planned projects. And a lot of the projects affected by fire will continue in part, or pivot to cleaning up and post-fire resilience.

California just passed a slew of bills making it easier to do Rx burns. @MarkArmao highlighted one important one: grist.org/burning-issue/…

And for all the projects burning, a lot are getting done. @Morse4America pointed out that projects the state funded this April in South Lake Tahoe were done in time to save that community from the Caldor Fire. That's fast!

And @RicardoLara4CA has pushed to create a state fund to backstop the liability insurance for Rx burn pros so that it's not totally unaffordable.

This story is a perfect example of something I see all the time reporting on climate change: As a society we punish those who act quickly, especially when those actions cause damage - like an escaped Rx burn. We don't get as upset when INACTION causes more damage.

With climate change, that tendency to pump the brakes, and make sure our actions aren't inadvertently causing harm, may do even more damage.

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