thank you tree huggers

[charleskieffner]

once again we have another piece of forest (SEDONA-BRIN FIRE)designated "wilderness " that is being devastated as we speak due to lack of forest thinning and lack of roads into area, allowing hot shots to gain access! how many million acres of forest will be toasted until someone gets a clue this isnt working "as planned!"

will be intersting to see how fire started since NO thunderstorms were in the area at the time. source of ignition point WAS in wilderness area. hot shot type 1 crews having to hike miles in due to harsh terrain and wilderness designation. which means no dozers can be used, nor any vehicles allowed in area. once again YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!

declare everything wilderness and watch it burn! welcome to arizona!

girlfriends house and her parents (2) houses toasted last year during "CAVE CREEK COMPLEX FIRE" so i kinda have an attitude about the subject. plus i caught my first trout in oak creek when i was a kid and the fishery will be devastated come first heavy runoffs from summer rains. over 3000 acres toasted since 130pm yesterday.

[widebody911]

Originally posted by charleskieffner
once again we have another piece of forest (SEDONA-BRIN FIRE)designated "wilderness " that is being devastated as we speak due to lack of forest thinning and lack of roads into area, allowing hot shots to gain access! how many million acres of forest will be toasted until someone gets a clue this isnt working "as planned!"

Actually, it's the overzealous suppression that isn't working. Forest fires are natural; they clear out all the cruft that builds up. Allowing it to build up creates bigger fires when they do happen. The forest 'thinning' of which you speak is simply a thinly-veiled excuse to harvest. Mother Nature doesn't need Weyerhauser to do her work for her.

What isn't natural is building houses in heavily forrested areas.

[Nathans_Dad]

So, since the entire west coast was pretty much once heavily forested, all you people should move out and let the freaking forests grow back!!

[charleskieffner]

PLEASE NOTE : number of board feet logged in50's- 60's-70's here in arizona and number of crowning fires in this state.

number of board feet logged since late 70's til now and number of catastrophic fires arizona has had. lived here 48 yrs and know the timber industry inside/ out since dad sold them tooling. not one single logging operation going on in this state w/exception of rodeo/chedeski fire post fire cleanup(our biggest fire to date-cave creek complex fire 2nd largest desert chaparal/scrub oak veg).

another industry shut down by morons, land shut off to off road vehicles by morons and NOW THE MORONS CAN WATCH IT BURN. thereby being worthless to any and all parties including our most exalted tree huggers!

now the world can watch tree hugging at its finest as sedona and oak creek burn to a crisp. maybe if they chant over their moronic CRYSTALS the fire will just put itself out!

[charleskieffner]

for an update to the BRIN FIRE go to azcentral.com or coconinonational forest.com tankers hitting it hard but winds expected to go to 25mph - 0 humidity temp 100 degrees +. winds out of SW fire burning upslope towards I-17. tankers coming out of prescott(quick turn-around) helos grabbing water from golf courses!

[widebody911]

Wow, pretty tuff to argue with the 'slash-and-burn' crown

[charleskieffner]

look up cause of "CROWNING FIRES". "DUDE FIRE" outside of payson, az. killed a good number of hot shots caught in upslope area that started crowning a few years back. every year we get drawn for a different area hunting and every year we go to an area that has not been logged in years and comment on what next summer will bring. w/all the second growth trees(ladders) that allow a simple natural "DUFF" fire, catch upper limbs and the crowning effect takes off. flagstaff dodged major bullet last week w/"woody fire" in city limits. forest service commented that only reason it didnt run was due to "THINNING EFFORTS" of the last couple of years.

[Joeaksa]

We also need to add to this situation the fact that the air tankers were grounded two years ago so we have about 40% of the number of airplanes to drop retardant on the fires this year.

We need to get rid of about half of the tree huggers and feed them to the spotted owl's. Agree that a forest fire is natural but so is thinning. When we are not allowed to thin out these areas they are an accident waiting to happen...

[Nathans_Dad]

Thom I'm not part of the "slash and burn crowd", I'm simply pointing out how ludicrous your position is.

You say that we shouldn't build houses in heavily forested areas yet you live in one of the most densely populated areas in the country which USED to be a pristine wilderness.

It's sorta like Barbra Streisand flying in on her private jet and arriving at a speech in her stretch limo where she proceeds to tell everyone to stop driving their evil SUVs and polluting the air.

Tell you what, I agree with you. We'll make a pact. We'll both bulldoze our houses and allow the land to go back to its natural state. You first.

[widebody911]

a fire in the city limits is a completely different subject than a fire in the wilderness what that has to do with hot shots im not sure but i know what 'crowning' is after working 3 seasons as a firefighter with the us forest service and 4 with the california department of forestry the 'thinning' that is being pushed by the timber industry is not for fire danger mitigation it is to harvest timber in remote areas on the cheap kinda like me taking your porsche so that you don't hurt yourself with it! i really like chocolate, i really do. do you really think the timber industry is going to spend the manpower to just remove the ladder fuels my gawd what are you smoking and why arent you sharing! man i have the munchies really bad now. the fire suppression policies of the past umpteen years are the problem how do you resolve it? its like a locomotive out of control speeding down the tracks with no brakes and my friends and i went mountainbiking last year and there was this hobo who was drunk out of his gourd so you understand that it is not the tree huggers fault that the undergrowth builds up its blm/usfs/park service that dont want any fires you see they try doing controlled burns but itsnot a controlled burn unless it gets out of control lol i'm not saying to let the land go back to any natural state - you got a license for that hyperbole? yer gonna poke an eye out with that thing but if you are going to build then clear some frickin' area around your house, ok?

[charleskieffner]

my room mate is building house in mountainaire. my step-brother has home right in path of last weeks "woody fire". he was sweating it............BIG TIME! this "BRIN FIRE" has all the makings of a real bad one. winds out of SW...........fire going upslope into ponderosa pine, sky high ambient air temps, 0 humidity and 25MPH winds.

got a real education from "cave creek complex fire" last year since airport here was base for all HELO OPS. called girlfriend at 530pm last year when dry lightening hit, warning her about fire. she was home at camp creek. came out to go to work at 7am next day and that was the last time she or her folks saw their homes. have pics from about 5am day after dry lightening hit thru out the day into the evening. this place turned into an inferno from hi ambient temps/no humidity/ and lots of wind. everything the fire is going to do today, 1 mile from sedona.

AND LIKE JOE SAID.............NOT ENOUGH SLURRY BOMBERS!

[widebody911]

Originally posted by Joeaksa
We also need to add to this situation the fact that the air tankers were grounded two years ago so we have about 40% of the number of airplanes to drop retardant on the fires this year.
The tree huggers were annoyed that the wings kept falling off.

Agree that a forest fire is natural but so is thinning. When we are not allowed to thin out these areas they are an accident waiting to happen...
Aye, there's the rub. This 'thinning' is not what it's claimed to be. The lumber companies version of 'thinning' is simply removing the most marketable/profitable lumber, which does nothing to mitigate the fire danger. I have personally surveyed and marked timber-sale lots, and have seen such sales harvested. The fat juicy trees are dropped and removed, and everything else - including the limbing debris - is left behind.

[charleskieffner]

the last 3 weekends i have drank copious amounts of beer, got sunburned as hell ,105-111 degrees, and LANDSCRAPED the dez 35-40 ft from house and 3 outbuildings, by hand by myself! managed to walk away each and every day throughly toasted, cactus spines stuck in me, and passed out to exhaustion.......and beer consumption LOL!

with the drought we are in. bark beetles in the forest, neither dezert nor forest is safe from fire . have watched these dezert fires just flat run with the wind and there is no way you will outrun them. NASTY! the same goes for this upslope "BRIN FIRE"

i admit more and more building is going on at a rapid pace in rural areas, and fire depts let alone forest service cannot keep up with it. it gets real old going hunting in the fall to an absolute pristine area and that previous summer a fire has crowned thru and now it looks like hiroshima! when we drove from forest lakes outside of payson along hwy 260 all the way to the salt river canyon, all you saw was hiroshima! never in my life have i seen such devastation of a forest.............EVER!

[Joeaksa]

Thom,

If I, or my fellow pilots are ready to get in them and try to save a fire, how about trusting us? The men who died in those two crashes did not want to go but they thought that the planes were safe otherwise they would not have left the ground. No one likes to see a bird go down.

Agree with you a bit here. We need to have the thinning revamped. Done properly it makes the forest safer and leaves some of the best trees.

[charleskieffner]

fire has just come down canyon at slide rock. has now taken on #1 national priority! god help the idiot that started it!

[dhoward]

I got it, Thom...

[Nathans_Dad]

Originally posted by widebody911
if you are going to build then clear some frickin' area around your house, ok?

First off Thom, I realize that Charles likes to post without punctuation but that doesn't make it ok for you too!! Yeesh, my head hurts after trying to decipher that rant...

Second, I'm not in a position to debate whether the thinning that is going on is truly good thinning for the forest or not. That's not my cup of tea. My point is that your house sits on land that likely was heavily forested a couple hundred years ago. Some other slash and burner took down those trees and you now call that place home. Now you want to deny someone else the same opportunity because you are concerned about the forest?

The other thing I don't get is that you seem to be against this thinning practice yet want to encourage people to clear land around their homes? I get that forest fires are mother nature's way of cleaning out the scrub and renewing the forest. I think that if we can have a responsible way of doing the same thing artificially then we minimize the risk to homes, people, dogs, cats, pollution and those cute little woodland creatures.

I guess my point is that plague and famine are mother nature's way of cleaning out the human population from time to time too, should we allow those natural things to occur too?

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally posted by dhoward
I got it, Thom...

[tobster1911]

Originally posted by widebody911
a fire in the city limits is a completely different subject than a fire in the wilderness what that has to do with hot shots im not sure but i know what 'crowning' is after working 3 seasons as a firefighter with the us forest service and 4 with the california department of forestry the 'thinning' that is being pushed by the timber industry is not for fire danger mitigation it is to harvest timber in remote areas on the cheap kinda like me taking your porsche so that you don't hurt yourself with it! i really like chocolate, i really do. do you really think the timber industry is going to spend the manpower to just remove the ladder fuels my gawd what are you smoking and why arent you sharing! man i have the munchies really bad now. the fire suppression policies of the past umpteen years are the problem how do you resolve it? its like a locomotive out of control speeding down the tracks with no brakes and my friends and i went mountainbiking last year and there was this hobo who was drunk out of his gourd so you understand that it is not the tree huggers fault that the undergrowth builds up its blm/usfs/park service that dont want any fires you see they try doing controlled burns but itsnot a controlled burn unless it gets out of control lol i'm not saying to let the land go back to any natural state - you got a license for that hyperbole? yer gonna poke an eye out with that thing but if you are going to build then clear some frickin' area around your house, ok?

Nice attempt but need more CAPITALS and DOTS..........

[DaveE]

Originally posted by Nathans_Dad
...... My point is that your house sits on land that likely was heavily forested a couple hundred years ago. Some other slash and burner took down those trees and you now call that place home. Now you want to deny someone else the same opportunity because you are concerned about the forest? ......

Please tell me you don't seriously mean this?