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
You’ve actually accidentally invented a really commonly used fire prevention/mitigation technique call fire breaks. Trouble is, they do nearly nothing if there’s wind and generally large fires only get large because there’s wind.
Yes, OP, a little naive.
Wildfires do not happen only when there’s no wind, lot’s of humidty and in non-drought years. Even if there’s no wind at the start, fires create their own wind. This is found in the “chimney effect” where a fire is burning in a canyon, it is sucking in so much oxygen that a wind is created going into the canyon and all of it shoots out the top which gives us those smoke clouds that look like volcanoes.
When that happens, large debris gets easily sucked up and is sent up. If it doesn’t burn itself up, a smoldering leaf or weed could float down hundreds of feet away igniting a new wildfire.
The really big fires can easily jump hundreds of feet if a strong wind is blowing, becoming blowtorches of embers setting off fires across a firebreak.
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.
We used to do a lot of stuff similar to that, controlled burns, proper cutting and spacing of the forest, allowing cattle to graze the vegetation down but we stopped doing it and now the fires are getting worse and worse every year. Short answer is the the people in charge thinks it looks bad to do all of that stuff. We also have issues over here with the clean air authority that like to prohibit controlled burns during the safest time of year to do it thus allowing the fire to get out of control in the summer.
Burning embers float on the wind. The Oakland Hills Fire of 1991 jumped a huge freeway intersection.
I’m not sure you’re understanding just how big these forests are. Imagine the upkeep it would take to manage that many 1000 ft wide fire breaks.
Have you ever tried to keep up with weeding a flower bed? It takes a lot of time and effort on just a small part of land. Now scale that up to the size of a forest.
We do it sometimes, but it’s more expensive than you would expect and it doesn’t always work.
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