Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Are we being fire attacked tonight?

therein lies the rub as some Englishman once said.

"We" try to vote in fiscally conservative folks, "They" try to put together massive spending packages, "our folks" don't play, the whole package gets cancelled and nothing gets done.

Anyone who has followed my posts here every fire season knows my feelings on the issue. Many, if not most, of these major fires start in areas that are not commercially important. Chaparral, scrublands, Oak grasslands, sagebrush/juniper grasslands, roadside brush (Carr fire and apparently one of the Ashland fires). Because there's no financial value to these lands (maybe some grazing and firewood permitting) there is no push to spend money on REAL fire prevention in these areas.

No commercial company is going into these areas without being compensated with taxpayer monies. No Govt agency (Fed,State, Local) is going into these areas without raising taxes or cutting other necessary programs (roads, police, fire). There's NO money in thinning or controlled burning in chaparral or scrublands.

In areas with productive forests it's sometimes possible to get a commercial operation in there to take some of the small stuff down................if they can get a BIG harvest of merchantable timber. As in enough to cover them losing money on cutting down pecker poles. (dog hair thickets to some of y'all) . But, they'd just as soon go in and harvest good trees and leave the rest.

Someone mentioned "clear cuts" as being part of the answer? Ever seen a clearcut a couple of years into recovery go up in flames, especially on private land where they've nuked the brush with weed killer to release the conifers? That might be worse than a chaparral fire sometimes.

Lots of solutions...............................NONE of them cheap............and we don't get to pick and choose where our tax dollars go unfortunately. Really sticky for Fed stuff. Folks in the Midwest and back East don't want billions of $$$ going to clear brush and chaparral on our Western Public Lands. It's "our Western problem" after all, right? Well, I get a bit miffed every decade or two when the Mississippi or Missouri floods a good chunk of cities along their banks and folks are allowed to rebuild in the flood zone and "my" money is used to fund the rebuild.

Most of us here on the 'fire are fiscal conservatives and don't want to pay more in taxes for most anything. So we get to live with wildfires out here in the West, floods in the midwest, hurricanes on the Gulf Coast (people build back again as soon as the wind stops blowing, right?), Blizzards and Nor'easters on the Atlantic coasts.

And then there's.............................The Corona.........................which we're all going to pay for for a long long time.

I didn't start anything with you a s s hole, you came on a thread about the fires in Oregon and tried to make a point about me. Totally classless as usual.

This is serious, peoples lives are being destroyed, lots of them. You and Dead-Weight Dave offer nothing.

Was that burning grass hard to control between four lanes of asphalt?

The “Cliff Notes” said...Politicians Bad!

LOL

😎

If it makes you feel better, I truly feel for everyone in Oregon and hope the very best in outcomes for every one of them.

Except you.

This must have ceased being about fires?

You think this thread was about fires?

Boomer

hope your friend makes it through OK , along with any friends and family.

Big fires are a scheidty occurrence anywhere, especially so when loved ones and friends are in the way of them.