5 thoughts on “In Memory Of Those Who Gave Their All: ONLY THE BRAVE – Trailer #3”

  1. The tragedy should never have happened. Fire managers allowed the fire to get big and unmanageable, with Let-Burn tactics, as fires burned everywhere, that year. The West Fork Complex in Colorado was wrongly allowed to become HUGE, tying up aircraft and crews that would have gone to Arizona, if they had bothered to put it out, when it was small and safe. Sadly, the decision-maker on the West Fork Complex wanted more dead Wilderness to burn, in the middle of a HUGE outbreak of wildfires. Scarce resources were squandered, allowing a fire that was a mere 150 acres, after 9 days of burning, to burn over 100,000 acres.

    AGAIN, we NEED a ban on Let-Burn fires, during the middle of fire season.

    Reply
    • If it doesn’t burn now, it will someday and probably have a lot more fuel. Why put out a fire in the West Fork of the San Juan? One could not guess that it would blow up but that is what fires do. Either now or in the future.

      Reply
      • Of course, it would be MUCH better (and cheaper) to torch it off, late in fall, when there are more resources available but, I guess some people make horrendous and tragic errors in judgement, sometimes, eh? A vast Wilderness, full of dead spruce, in the middle of summer and a blank check to gamble on. What could go wrong? $100,000,000 later, with horrible health effects on cities far away, was 100,000 acres burned really an “accomplishment”?

        Yes, it would have been better and cheaper to heli-torch parts of it, at the right time in the fall.

        Reply
      • David

        So you don’t want to protect “the West Fork of the San Juan?”
        –> So why do we have an endangered species act?
        –> Why do some people get upset about using forest management on a comparatively small acreage but aren’t concerned about large acreage wild fires?

        This is a self contradictory statement: “One could not guess that it would blow up but that is what fires do. Either now or in the future.”
        –> i.e. If blowing up is what fires do then, One could easily guess that it would blow up.
        –> Given the imprecise nature of weather forecasting, any forester knows that an unplanned decision to let a wild fire burn to accomplish the same objective as a well planned controlled burn is a very high risk decision.

        Reply

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