For those of you interested in taking a look at the King Fire, this is probably the best website I have found:

InciWeb the Incident Information System: King Fire

Look at the burn map, is the burnt area smaller than, equal to or larger than Lake Tahoe? (Hint: click on the minus sign on the left of the map to compare.)

Unfortunately, the FS does not have money to thin the 400% (more than historical) trees which are overburdening the citizens' national forest lands and to reduce the forest floor fuels (i.e., the dead trees and logs on the forest floor).

They only have $70,000,000 to fight the fire which would have erupted anyway by lightning, negligence or intent in the tender box that they created.

Expect more of this.

And remember, since the removal of tariff's on Canadian forest products and the rise of the environmentalists, we no longer have a logging industry in California (there were five logging mills in Placerville, CA when I was young).

San Joaquin County just added 35 more no burn days to their calendar.

But, without a logging industry, there is no way to remove the dead logs. (The forests just keep growing...*)

So, our forests will burn either one log at a time in our fireplaces or a forest at a time.

Either way will release smoke and carbon into the atmosphere.

The latter way kills animals, sanitizes the soil, and burn's people's homes.

Which way is the most productive way to burn?

* And there is nothing "natural" about the kind of fire that occurs in a forest which has 400% more standing trees per acre than it has had historically and has 40 years of accumulated fuel on the forest floor.

 

I was unable to open the Link. I have family In Rocklin, Folsom and North Lake Tahoe and have been getting reports of how big the fire is getting.

 

Here it is again:


InciWeb the Incident Information System: King Fire

 

please the forest fire line of argument is the lumber companies mantra.
It's way more complicated than that.

 

The smoke in Tahoe is unbearable! Thank you rain gods we need it! Last night Mt. Rose got its first sign of snow last night.

 

As your friendly resident retired professor of forestry/department chairman (Sierra College, 23 years), I will tell you it is as bad as Tim writes. Many, many of the trees which are burned would make wonderful sawlogs at a mill. Unfortunately, they won't be harvested following the fire. The USFS is run by leftists who have prevented (in conjunction with the enviro-crazies) the harvesting of the Rim Fire (275,000+ acres, 430 square miles) area. They will tie-up salvage logging sales in court for at least a year. Then the value of the logs will be so low (due to fungi and weather) that it would not pay a company to log the area (and that is what they want). About 20 years ago there was a large fire above Lake Tahoe and Sierra Pacific Industries bid $20 million dollars to salvage log it using copter logging (so no roads would have to be built)...the crazies ran to court and prevented it. Today those logs are rotting on the stump as a hazard to anyone in the area. I obtained multiple degrees in forestry and judges think they know more about forestry than I do.

Accretion (build-up) of fuels in the Sierra Nevada exceeds decomposition rates. This means if you don't harvest timber with saws, nature will harvest with fire. Show me a forest in the Sierra that you can even see into the woods anymore from the road...The Sierra has turned from an early successional forest (pines) to late-successional forest (firs & incense-cedar) that can live in extremely dense stands.

Oh, and the crazies have caused the shutdown of 80 mills in California due to little to no green sales (living trees) being conducted on our National Forests. At the same time 80 mills have opened in Canada...hard to run a sawmill without logs! My guess is that Californians are using no less lumber or toilet paper. Thank you for the loss of jobs in rural California. Damn incompetence!

This same aversion to managing natural resources that the USFS has is coming to Nevada. What I saw happen to forestry in California for over a quarter-century, the "environmentalists" are now working hard to shut down mining in this state on BLM land. City folks don't care because the products they use, whether wood products or mining products, will come from somewhere else in the world. It is NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). The only difference out here in the "sticks" is we just see the jobs, at the mill or the mines, going away. Damn shame!

I retired from my teaching position, moved to Nevada, and returned to truck driving because of this insanity...

Here is another good link for King Fire info...

 

100% correct….I am a timber cutter, who lives near Boise,id….and the Governor of this state has had enough Catastrophic fires to warrant renewed look at logging…it has helped

 

Yes, but there will be plenty of Pawn shops and title loan stores to work at…the like minded masses are ruining our economy, our children and our country….

 

I agree with everyone who's posted in this thread, except Dusty.
After living in Tahoe for >20 years and having as two of my best friends a senior USFS official and a CalFire senior official, what the enviro's have done to our forests is a crime.

Dusty, you are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but if you haven't lived in the area that's being affected, you don't know the politics behind the scenes first hand.

What has happened to once beautiful California, (?) is now happening to our once beautiful Country. Comrade...............

 

I'm in Ada county outside of Kuna (Kuna and Cloverdale) and have one hell of an elm you can practice on in my yard as long as it falls away from the house.

 

The battle with the USFS is an ongoing one. My dad works for CalFire and is currently assigned to the King Fire, and the Rim Fire when that happened.

The USFS receives so little funding, its astonishing (considering how highly we place "green" objectives). They cannot afford to do controlled burns, which is known as one of the best ways to thin and manage forests in a natural way. Instead they must rely on "natural" (even though most are caused by man) fires, and proceed to let them burn. They don't put out fires, they manage them. And they do a pretty poor job of it. I would bet, without looking, that every major wildfire in CA was started on, or grew uncontrollably, on USFS controlled land.

The King Fire recently made a run on SRA (State Responsibility Area). Cal Fire was ready and waiting, once it crossed the line they quickly put out that area. Not that CalFire doesn't understand areas needing to burn, but you can't let it get out of control like USFS does.

But, it does make for some great pictures!

 

Also, here is another great resource. Its a forum updated by boots on the ground.

Hotlist.wildfire.com

 

Not enough money??? What? The USFS manages 193 million acres and had a 2014 budget of $5.6 billion dollars. If there budget was doubled they still wouldn't manage the forest. Why? The USFS has been captured by the enviro-crazies. Make the USFS funding dependent on timber sales and they would have more money than they know what to do with. How is it that they own some of the most productive timberlands in the United States and they can't produce money for the Treasury, rather than be a net drain on the Treasury? They stole the land from the states, then they mismanage the forests because....wait for it...they are not dependent on funding from the forest products that are produced from our national forests. They are dependent on politicians who know less about forest management than your average 7th grader. In turn, the politicians running the executive branch and the Senate are dependent on the contributions of the environmental groups. See how this works?

I use to work for CDF (way before it was called CALFIRE) and I had a swamper who on night fires would have to look for USFS firefighters sleeping in the brush so they didn't get crushed. When I drove contract water tankers they would hang around my tanker like fleas on a dog. Pay people by the hour to put fires out and guess what? They aren't in any hurry to put the fire out!

Oh and Dusty, I have no dog in the fight, I am no mouthpiece for the timber industry. I know what I know...and I know proper forest management!

 

Do you have any information to compare the USFS budget to? What was CalFires budget? $5 billion is a big number but what does it compare to? Also, how much of that goes to the fire fighting side? There's a lot more to USFS than firefighting.

I'm not defending USFS, growing up in a CDF house as a kid (most of the stuff in his house STILL says CDF on it) I've learned to not like USFS firefighting. And my few personal/professional encounters with them have been less than uplifting.

 

How much goes to the fire side of USFS is up to the genius GS-15's (regional bosses) that earn $155k+ (in 2012) to decide. Congress gave them $5.6 billion, the administrators (like a department chair) submits the budget to their boss (the President in this case).

I recognize that you aren't defending them...but please don't cry poverty for them...they do it enough themselves.