Thanks to Bill Gabbert and Wildfire Today for this post to a video about fuel treatments and the Creek Fire.
Part of the post is a video produced by the Alaska Interagency Incident Management Team featuring folks from the Forest Service and Calfire about how their work…worked. For those of us who have worked in the Sierra, it may be interesting to see what the stands looked like after mechanical treatments and prescribed burns, and what they looked like after the fire came through.
Like the man said “it did work” and it has worked b4 1971 when i got into the business and the 50 yrs since. On west & east & inbetween, it works more than some give it credit for. It is just another example that the “why try” people either don’t know what they are talking about or they aren’t seriously concerned about clean air and protecting our wonder filled forests and are simply using environmental concerns as a proxy to pursue some hidden agenda.
This video does not exactly constitute a rigorous scientific study. What other variables were there that are unaccounted for? Were there changes in the weather? How about the topography and aspect? Was the road used as an anchor for fire suppression activities? Etc., etc…
Also, the video did not show the untreated area for comparison. From what I could see, it looked much the same as the treated area.
I agree that video is pretty sketchy and leaves much to the imagination. Conclusions may be true but not discernible from what’s in the video…
No, Jeff, it doesn’t exactly constitute a “rigorous scientific study”. I’m not sure you could actually do that with these kinds of questions. I’m thinking you would have two communities, matched for everything else, with similar topo, fuels, etc. and don’t do anything in one and have fuel treatments around others. I agree with Jim below that the video could have spent more time “see the fire was up to here you can see on the trunks on one side, and then it dropped as you can tell by…”.
Still, these are videos of real people on the ground that say it was helpful to them in protecting communities. It sounds like a situation, of which we have many in Forest World, in which scientists disagree and yet somehow we have not designed a process by which their different opinions and on the ground experiences can be shared to actually add to our understanding of what works and what works best.
If doctors were noticing that people getting the Covid vaccine continued to get Covid, and yet models showed that couldn’t happen… would we assume the doctors must be incorrect? No, folks would try to figure out what is going on that could explain both results. Back to a previous post, that’s the beauty of professional meetings where researchers and practitioners exchange views and experiences.