Dry conditions are dangerous in this season of devastating wildfires. Twenty-one large fires are burning across the West. None are as bad as the recent Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado, which left two people dead and burned 346 homes.
Fires this destructive, or so fierce that they can’t be contained, are called mega-fires. And we’re seeing more of them. Drought and climate change are big contributors, but there is one factor that we’ve brought upon ourselves.
A small army of high school students took to the hills recently in southern Montana. Armed with simple garden tools, they cleared away decades of fallen trees and brush from a nine-acre site.
The major problem for many Western forests is what’s building up on the ground: tons of downed, dead debris, and small trees. Under natural conditions, fires would have come through and burned the debris.
But now, because people live in the forest, we don’t want fire. In our eagerness to suppress the fires, the debris builds up and it builds up to the point that when you do have a fire, it becomes catastrophic.
From KBZK 7 News: https://www.kbzk.com/news/aggressive-fire-suppression-leaves-west-a-tinderbox-making-mega-fires-worse/