The S denotes a short term drought of less than 6 months. The drought in the west in decades long in some instances. We also have had record breaking temperatures here in California for the last several months
Why is so much more area being burned this year than in years past? It’s not the number of fires that’s so devastating, we have them every year. it’s that the fires themselves are much more severe in scope. This is because of environmental conditions
They have arrrested a lot of people for arson. Oh and this:
A man was arrested on Sunday for intentionally setting a brush fire near Interstate 205 in Portland then, just hours after he was released, he was taken into custody again for lighting six more fires, according to Portland police.
Probably was out again in a few hours to start more fires – you know lib cities and we can’t hold non-violent offenders on bail and all.
Only 1 for any of the bigger fires. It also does absolutely nothing to explain why the fires are so much more severe this year. Something that everyone keeps conveniently ignoring.
Mismanagement of public lands and never ending lawsuits by environmentalists.
Imagine if the forest had been responsibly logged over the past 20 years. Imagine if controled burns were allowed to happen in places were logging couldn’t be done.
Another example is controlled burns.
This article explains it well
From 1999 to 2017, an average of 13,000 acres of California were subjected to controlled burns each year. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published a report arguing that California needs to burn 20 million acres of forest in order to restore forest health.
And what does it take to burn federal land?
there will be a 5,000-page document, which no one could conceivably ever read because it’s so long and complicated, but then the project will still get put on hold for an indefinite period of time, because some special interest group filed a lawsuit.
Hello environmentalist leftist lawsuits!
Congress needs rto step up and exempt good federal land management from a lot of the regulations. Here in the west there has been a saying for years. Log it, graze it – or watch it burn.