Well the title is the question.
With ‘split’ I mean create some space between blocks where fire has nothing to travel to the next block to spread.
I imagine that actions like dropping water with helicopters would also be unnecessary since we could ‘give up’ a burning block and then the fire would be over.
Or am I too naive about it?
In: Earth Science
These already exist. You see them all over the hills and mountains in Southern Spain
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak&ved=2ahUKEwiPiITFrIjyAhVai1wKHSFpBegQmhMwDXoECAUQAg&usg=AOvVaw0k749A_V5NIumHTGOvRTDe
We do this in forestry blocks in Australia. They are called “fire breaks”. If you lease the land, you must keep the fire breaks free from debris & keep the grass slashed or you can be fined.
Because that is an IMMENSE amount of work. Ever cleared dense trees? It’s very difficult and expensive work. You don’t do it unless you need to. In tall, established forests an effective fire break has to be quite wide, 30 ft or more. Cutting a single miles long 30 ft wide swath through a forest would be the work of years, and it might not even be effective if the wind is wrong when the fire happens. It’s just not economically feasible.
You’re describing [firebreaks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak). The issues as I understand them are:
With wind fires can jump the gap or burning embers from one side can blow across. Embers can jump firebreaks of 600-800 feet on occasion.
They are not always practical to create given the shape of the land – hills, mountains etc
They are hard to maintain given you need to keep them free of most vegetation across a large area.
People own land and so you can’t just cut firebreaks on a perfect grid across the countryside.
Edit: Because a lot of people are commenting on the numbers I gave for 6-800 feet. I’m referencing one of the numbers given in Wikipedia of a 600 feet wide firebreak which was actually jumped. But it also mentions that embers can fly further and start fires further afield.
This is vaguely what proper forest management is supposed to do. One factor on why forest fires can get so big and spread so fast is when there is too much “junk” on the forest floor. Stuff like little sapling trees, dead trees that have fallen, years and years worth of leaves. It’s often that sort of thing that catches fire first. Big, mature trees can often withstand a relatively fast fire around their trunks, but if there’s too much litter, the fire burns too long and can reach up into the tops of the big trees, leading to the infernos we see. So one strategy that has been deployed to fight this is “controlled burns” where firefighters and forestry people will pick a section of woods, and go in and slowly and methodically burn off the excess junk. Then the next time a wildfire starts, it has way less fuel in a given area to burn.
One of the lessons learned from the Yellowstone NP fire back in the late 80’s was it’s better in the long run to sometimes let smaller fires burn more often, because then they don’t become massive. They had been suppressing any and all fires in Yellowstone for years, and when something finally caught and they couldn’t get it under control, so it burned most the park to a crisp. So now, they take a slightly more “hands off” approach, in that if a fire starts, they keep an eye on it and let it burn at least for a while
For one, money. That would be extremely expensive to do it over a big enough area. Extremely resource intensive also, to keep a 200 yard stretch of forest Mike’s long clearcut down to the dirt.
Then that would also create environmental issues and cause problems for animals, I think they have figured out that leaving islands of trees behind after clear-cutting areas is still bad for local populations of animals. Plus more erosion, etc.
Also, fire is good for a lot of species, at least small regular fires. The problem is we have been stopping all fires for the past several decades, which leaves us with a giant pile up of fuel on the forest floor that creates giant raging fires that kill everything, as opposed to small brush fires which clear out undergrowth and clutter.
These splits are called “Fire Breaks”, and that’s one of the main things which forest fire fighting crews do. Building them, and maintaining them, is too expensive to do all the time. They also have to be quite large to protect against spread of large fires, which makes them unattractive. They can also lead to erosion and other environmental damage.
A far better strategy is more frequent, smaller, fires as nature intended. This could lead to burning down more homes, but perhaps that would send the message “Don’t build if a forest that burns regularly or your house will get burned down regularly.” More people need to get that message.
You want to have the forest burn from time to time to clear the brush out and avoid a real conflagration later.
This is a common practice around settled areas, to prevent wildfires from coming in too quickly to destroy homes and give residents time to evacuate. But in many cases, it just doesn’t work. The fire breaks are too thin, and winds too high to prevent embers from spreading fires across the breaks. A fire produces its own weather system, superheating air to create a low pressure zone, throwing embers high into the air, while drawing in winds from surrounding weather systems.
But even if firebreaks *can* work, it’s not economical to create firebreaks in the wilderness, however, and also, if the fire is big enough, it’s counter-productive to fell enough trees and clear enough brush to prevent embers from jumping the breaks, because you’ll wind up destroying more forest than by taking your chance with the burn.
Fires are a normal part of the forest lifecycle, and what’s become normal is to do ‘prescribed burns’, which allows us to consume fuel and promote trees which require burns to sprout, while ensuring that the fire won’t get out of control.
Yeah i mean thats pretty naive. Have you even considered the time/recourses it would take to even plan, let a long execute that? I could list a few reasons why that wouldn’t work and only a few of them would be political. I mean the gaps would have to be HUGE to really be effective, like probably 1000ft wide for assurance and that would take a long time just to clear, and those gaps would have to be frequently maintained after the fact. Also, given that a lot of these fires take place in the hill/mountainous West, you couldn’t just do a straight grid, you’d probably have to design around the topography which means a surveyor would have to go out and do that for whatever land area you’re doing this for, that alone could take over a year depending on the area of land you’re thinking about. There’d be so many legal hoops to jump through, probably on all levels of government. And you’d have property owners to deal with.
As some have pointed out, this concept does exist but you don’t often because it’s just not always the most practical solution.
Latest Answers