Anonymous
Prescribed burn near Los Alamos jumped containment lines and burned an additional 10-20 acres on Tuesday.
The three-day 557 acres prescribed burn started on the BarM Ranch south of Los Alamos around 8:00 a.m. Close to 5:00 p.m., the Santa Barbara County Fire Department reported the fire went beyond the containment lines.
Air tankers have been brought in to assist and it’s unclear if the firefighters have regained control of the area outside the containment line.
#BarFire– A three-day 557 acre prescribed burn on the BarM Ranch south of Los Alamos jumped its containment line Tues charing an additional 10-20 acres. pic.twitter.com/iZInkV28MI
— SBCFireInfo (@EliasonMike) November 13, 2019
WHAT: Prescribed burn of approximately 557 acres of Oak Woodland, Chaparral and Sage Scrub
WHEN: Tuesday, November 12, Wednesday, November 13, and Thursday, November 14. Burning will occur on three consecutive days as conditions allow; each day, the burning will begin at approximately 8 a.m. and conclude by 6 p.m. on a permissive burn day.
WHERE: Bar M (also known as Barham) Ranch, approximately four miles southeast of Los Alamos along Highway 101.
WHY: The goal of this three-day burn is to reduce the risk of wildfire by removing old growth flammable vegetation while helping to improve rangeland. Prescribed, or planned, fires typically burn less intensely than wildfires. The burn will be conducted when the meteorological conditions are highly favorable to direct smoke away from population centers.
WHO: This vegetation management prescribed burn is being planned and conducted by the Santa Barbara County Fire Department & Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control on private land in coordination with the California Air Resources Board in order to minimize impacts on air quality on surrounding communities. APCD staff have reviewed the Smoke Management Plan and provided conditions to minimize smoke impacts in Santa Barbara County.
HEALTH PRECAUTIONS: If you smell smoke, take precautions and use common sense to reduce any harmful health effects by limiting outdoor activities. When you can smell smoke or when it is visible in your area, avoid strenuous outdoor activity and remain indoors as much as possible. These precautions are especially important to children, older adults, and those with heart and lung conditions. If you are sensitive to smoke, consider temporarily relocating and closing all doors and windows on the day of the burn. Symptoms of smoke exposure can include coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, chest tightness or pain, nausea, and unusual fatigue or lightheadedness. Use caution when driving near prescribed burns.
A portable air monitor will be set up in Los Olivos to monitor air quality conditions. Data will be available on the Air Pollution Control District’s website: www.OurAir.org/todays-air-
To view prescribed burns throughout the state, visit the Prescribed Fire Information Reporting System (PFIRS) website: https://ssl.arb.ca.gov/pfirs/.
This burn depends on weather and air quality conditions that are favorable for smoke dispersal. If the conditions are not as desired, the burn will be rescheduled.
Ugh.
Lack of education results in false beliefs, like being mistaken about where opposition to controlled burns comes from (it’s not environmentalists), a general misunderstanding of environmentalists and environmentalism, the stance of Native Americans (they are on the forefront of the environmental movement), mistaken ideas about how smart “we” are, the exclusion and separation of Native Americans from “we”, the current state of our technological savvy (controlled burns are a regular occurrence in Yosemite because we smart educated folk learned from the practices of Native Americans, among other sources), etc. Anyone who frowns on technological savvy should turn off their smart phone, cancel their streaming services, stay off the internet, ditch their car, and give up all the other things they use that are the result of smart educated savvy technologists and go live in the woods off their own wits. (One could say that they need to be put in their place.)
probably not anymore than 1 of Leo’s flights to the Mediterranean to hop on a yacht
Indeed. The notion that burning trees is “carbon neutral” is ludicrous, since it releases carbon into the atmosphere where it has a half-life of 100 years. Thus the burning of trees in the Amazon has severe consequences for global warming. But release of carbon from burning trees is not a reason not to have controlled burns, when those burns help prevent much larger and hotter uncontrolled fires.
I found the paper at the link below which gives some interesting historical context. In the pre-industrial era, nearly 150 million acres of forest burned annually in the conterminous US. That is on the order of 10% of the total forested area at that time, which was something like 1 billion acres according to Wikipedia. Today, only about 10 million acres burn every year. Fire is a natural process that we have suppressed for generations. We have a long way to go to restore the natural balance between fire and growth, and our forests are severely overgrown as a result. I think that controlled burns will play a crucial role in restoring and maintaining a healthy balance in the future. However, the 557 acre burn at issue here is a drop in the bucket. Santa Barbara county alone encompasses around 1.75 million acres of land. How much of that would have burned naturally every year in the pre-industrial era? https://www.nifc.gov/PIO_bb/Policy/FederalWildlandFireManagementPolicy_2001.pdf
It’s not either/or, zenyadda. “Decreasing the risk of larger scale, catastrophic fires which consume decades of built up fuel” is one of the reasons listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in_ecosystems
“That is on the order of 10% of the total forested area at that time, which was something like 1 billion acres according to Wikipedia. Today, only about 10 million acres burn every year. ” — But much less is forested. “Santa Barbara county alone encompasses around 1.75 million acres of land. How much of that would have burned naturally every year in the pre-industrial era? ” — Not a meaningful question because there’s far more cleared land now.
There is less forested land now than there used to be. Today over 800 million acres are forested, and that has been increasing in recent years. That is about 20% less than the forested area before the arrival of Europeans in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States If we reduced the annual acres burned by the same 20%, we would still have well over 100 million acres burned per year.
Fire became uncontrolled this afternoon as it jumped containment lines, they had to bring air tankers in. Who is paying the bill for the airdrops, they are very costly. Yep, you guessed it, the tax payers. Is it very smart to have a “controlled” burn in the middle of high fire season? Leave it to the fire department to have such a brilliant plan.
Yes, we need more of these!
Don’t complain about uncontrolled wildfires then..
I always wonder about how these burns and even wildfires contribute to carbon load in the atmosphere. Is one burn more pollution than all the cars in California for a year?
Photosynthesis 101: CO2 from the air becomes carbohydrates in the plant tissues and when the plant tissues are combusted it returns to air as CO2. It doesn’t get more neutral than that.
A fascinating read is “1491” which is an attempt to reconstruct indigenous life in North America prior to to the arrival of the Europeans. One of the contentions of the book is that the entire continent was basically set alight every year. Halting regular burning not only upset the natural balance here in California, but also in every location in NA. The first paintings of Yosemite Valley show it occupied by oaks, but after more than a century of fire suppression conifers are now the dominant type of tree.
I think a simple thought experiment will illustrate the absurdity of the denier talking points here: How long does it take a tree to grow to 30 feet in height? How long does it take the same tree to burn to the ground?
Concerned4Calif, I believe fires are 100% carbon neutral. When plants grow, they absorb CO2 from the air and turn it into wood. The higher the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the faster the plants grow. The sun provides the power to transform the CO2 into wood, and a significant amount of energy is stored in the wood. When a plant dies, all the carbon it absorbed and turned into wood is released again. Whether the plant rots, gets eaten, or burns, it releases the same amount of CO2 that it absorbed. When a forest reaches a steady state of equilibrium between new growth and decomposition it will release CO2 at the same rate that it absorbs CO2. Carbon is not created or destroyed, it just changes forms.
In the pre-industrial era I betcha there was a heck of a lot more forest than there is now, dontcha think? Duh.
Great. Controlled burn out of control. Is there anything more shameful than this deliberate pollution of our air?
Finally. The Native Americans who lived in Yosemite did controlled burns, they were smarter than we are with all our so called “edumacation” and technological savvy. We need to put these environmental nazis in their place, as their pushiness has significantly impacted us in a very negative way.
Trees burn and are burned much faster than they grow, however, so burning increases the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Above a certain level of CO2, plants do not benefit, but instead grow more slowly.
11:02 – Not sure “environmental nazis” (a stupid thing to say, either way) are against controlled burns, but way to politicize yet another non-political thing!
11:02 The Native Americans in Yosemite did not set controlled burns for wildfire mitigation. The used it in farming. They did it to propagate plants like Milkweed & bunch grass ( which is highly flammable) which they used as sources of food. Fire also encouraged more acorn production from the oak woodland
I have to say, I am a bit skeptical of “skepticalscience.com” Below is a link to NASA’s website which describes a paper about the recent greening of the earth. “An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.” And this conclusion regarding CO2: “Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. ” https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
Agree with you 100% on that JQB. I have a lot of confidence in the firefighters. The bottom line is overgrown land will burn whether we like it or not. I believe it is better to burn it under favorable conditions with firefighters preparing for and monitoring the process from start to finish. I also believe that burning land more often will result in less destructive fires. Instead of creating a scorched earth WWI battlefield, fires could clean up overgrowth and dead foliage and leave a healthier surviving forest behind.
BTW, if burning trees were carbon neutral, then so would burning fossil fuels, since the carbon in fossil fuels also got there via photosynthesis (https://www.geochemsoc.org/files/6214/1261/1770/SP-2_271-284_Sato.pdf). Of course this is nonsense, because burning trees or fossil fuels adds carbon to the atmosphere, which by definition is not carbon neutral–a term which refers to offsetting added CO2 by reducing it some way. Of course you can offset it by planting some number of trees (it takes far more than one for each one burned, since trees grow far more slowly than they burn), but the planting decades or centuries earlier of the tree you just burned doesn’t offset the CO2 released by burning it … that’s a radical failure of basic logic and science.
It’s pretty much wind caused, right? And we always have wind in the afternoon. Really bad planning.
One option for greenhouse growers is to increase growth rate and yield of plants by artificially raising the CO2 concentration as high as 1000ppm in the greenhouse. I think the CO2 growth enhancement starts tailing off above 1500ppm based on what I’ve read. It would be great if some of the greenhouse growers in the area could chime in.
Jumped containment?! Duh, it was windy. It’s always windy in the afternoon; what were they thinking!?
Then why don’t we see fires burning large portions of the channel islands every year?
Job, all evidence to the contrary, right? I remember in San Diego the fire dept burned some Xmas trees to show how flammable they were, and that fire went out of control and burned 1500 acres. Professionalism at work.
Professional Arsonists? Paid FireBugs? Ooops, we burned your house, it was controlled until it wasn’t. When are they going to learn what our mothers always said, don’t play with fire…
Shasta – 1491 does sound interesting and I will check it out but your following statement is an oxymoron – “Halting regular burning not only upset the natural balance here in California, but also in every location in NA.” What is natural about Native Americans setting fires to the countryside? They did it to manipulate their environment! Ending these man-caused fires allowed the environment to revert back to a more natural state. Sounds like you are just trying to justify promoting controlled burns.
And that’s your evidence that anonymous people taking pot shots at fire departments know better than fire departments? You’re better than that. And you can always find mistakes made in any profession … I didn’t claim otherwise. What I *did* say is not touched by your anecdote, let alone “all the evidence”.
I do believe that the fire department understands these things far better than people anonymously taking pot shots at them.
Climate myth #43 – “CO2 is plant food”
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https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food.htm