Hi. Maybe this is a dumb question with an obvious answer, but I don’t know/remember enough to know for myself.
Lightning causes forest fires. It’s happening more and more as there are more droughts. If they can put lightning rods on buildings to protect them, could they not build a bunch of lightning rods in forests in susceptible areas? Would the lightning go into the ground and be harmless, or would it somehow still start a fire?
Cost aside, would it help prevent forest fires or no?
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TIA.
In: 6
Because forest fires are actually [important](https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/5425/benifitsoffire.pdf) for the health of the overall ecosystems.
These issues with current forest fires, especially in the western USA, are actually partially caused by [preventing too many fires](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/decades-mismanagement-led-choked-forests-now-it-s-time-clear-n1243599).
Forests typically are ‘cleaned out’ by small fires which burn away dead trees and other biomass. Normally, these fires aren’t very hot (in absolute terms) and live trees tended to survive these fires. Some trees even NEED fires for their seeds to begin to germinate.
Over the years, overly aggressive fire management in the forest and other wildlands led to forests that had too much undergrowth and un-burned biomass. Now, when a fire happens, the fire has so much fuel it is able to ignite even the healthy living trees, causing immense and incredibly destructive fires.
This issue currently isn’t that we need to avoid fires altogether, its that we need ‘healthier’ fires.
Of course, this explanation does not touch on the issues of climate change, loss of groundwater and other sources that mitigate fire severity, nor the trend of building towns/suburbs/residential infrastructure inside highly forested areas (which is the forest-fire equivalent of building a major city like New Orleans/Houston directly in the path of hurricanes).
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