The Cost of Forest Fires

Technocrat

The Cost of Forest Fires

zogger

Fri Jul 04 07:24:00 -0700 2008

Science

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California is experiencing basically non stop wildfires now, and the actual monetary cost of fighting them is rising. They are already way over budget from what they had originally intended to be the set aside sums. Will this become a very non trivial expense in the future if we continue to see great climate fluctuations?

In the past decade, however, the state has not budgeted enough funds to fight wildfires. In every year but one, the state has had to dip into cash reserves to pay firefighting costs.ed.z.: I think they need some sort of super swarming fast reaction force to deal with the fires. Normal volunteer combined with professional doesn't seem quite adequate yet, plus hard to get to remote fires they may spot but are beyond the roads, and they don't seem to yet have enough of their own equipment. It just seems like with such a huge population and giant economy they are always sort of bragging about that they could come up with a more efficient emergency force..sort of like a huge state fire militia that was enhanced with the latest high tech, which would give them an additional new industry there, developing said tech. The Gov there could get on the toob and call for an additional half a million (whatever) volunteers for training, something like that. It's not like people there lack trucks and ATVs to get into remote areas, that is something to start with anyway. And in the huge river floodplains in the "heartland" with all the flooding, get on the stick and just start permanently building those levees bigger and stop with the emergency sandbagging. That's nuts, go to all that trouble to sand bag, then tear it all down a short time later, just to do it again later. How many times do they have to do that before it becomes just silly? You can see 100 year and 500 year flood thinking is completely out the window, it is now every other year or so massive floods, just admit reality and start making all those berms and whatnot permanent and much higher and stouter, including perhaps designated huge man made soaker sponge overflow reservoir "lakes" that may or may not be lasting throughout the season, just someplace to temporarily store vast quantities of water so it isn't released all at once. And if the homes and buildings need permanent berms, so be it again. What's cheaper, keep your house and eat the cost of a permanent berm, or keep rebuilidng from scratch after you lose everything? In other words, stop with the living in the past idea and admit reality that previous guesses and modeling with climate and weather are just slap wrong. Take their worst estimates and plan for double that, along those lines, do it once and well, not 15 times half-well. Katrina taught us that, just a scosh better and they wouldn't have had near the problems, now the costs of dealing with that disaster are a lot of dead and displaced, cleanup, rebuilding etc. "Penny wise and pound foolish" fits.

The Cost of Forest Fires

Bhima

Fri Jul 04 14:03:43 -0700 2008
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Every time there is a some catastrophe I listen to or read an interview with Scientists specializing in whatever went wrong: floods, fires, hurricanes, locusts... And every time the Scientist says something along the lines "we shouldn't carry on business as usual and not expect the negative consequences of our actions" Then they go on to list the things we do to exacerbate the investable natural disasters and expensive ways to avoid them.

I've never seen any large scale program fully funded and implemented... just things like building more and bigger levees. An exercise which a litany of of experts stated in interviews does as much more harm than good.

Not a whole lot people have any business acting surprised at frequent forest fires and floods.... we're doing our best to make them worse. It's been 3 years since Katrina hit New Orleans and over 7 billion dollars have been spent on levees in Louisiana and the whole coast line of Louisiana is at risk and New Orleans couldn't withstand a category 2 hurricane.

The way I figure it we could Katrina every year in a different city and fires like the '88 yellowstone fires every year in a different state and US domestic policy wouldn't change.

The Cost of Forest Fires

President4242

Mon Jul 07 11:39:21 -0700 2008
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My answer- and strangely enough it's the libertarian answer to this- required forest fire riders COUNTRY WIDE on homeowner's insurance for anybody choosing to live outside of the public water grid. And at that point, charge the insurance companies for every house within 5 miles of a forest fire that WASN'T damaged by the fire, for the cost of fighting the fire and the service of keeping that fire away from the homes that it surely would have taken if the fire had been allowed to burn out of control.

Then start granting discounts for towns that do something to prevent the disaster such as fire breaks and fire-resistant landscaping requirements.

Same thing goes for flood prone areas- building codes that allow the free flow of water reduces flood insurance rates, as does elevations more than 200 feet above the local water table, and still require *everybody* to have the flood rider. Eventually rebuilding will be too expensive in the areas that flood.