Forest thinning is helping to reduce fires

By Jim Carlton of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"As the Caldor Fire approached this Lake Tahoe town last month, the flames burned 150 feet high and embers rained down from the sky. But not a single house burned.

That is largely because fire crews had thinned the forests that surround the town, chopping down small trees, sawing low-hanging limbs and clearing the forest floor of combustible debris. With much less fuel to burn, the blaze was smaller and moved slower, making it easier to control."

"Similar thinning protected a grove of giant trees in Sequoia National Park, including the General Sherman, the largest tree in the world by mass, when the KNP Complex of wildfires threatened it earlier this month."

"Prescribed fire was widely used in the Western forests by Native Americans, in part to keep insects out of acorns they ate, said Susie Kocher, forestry and natural resources adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension.

“Our forests are adapted to frequent, low-severity fires,” Ms. Kocher said.

For most of the 20th century, though, the policy of land authorities in the West was put out wildfires as quickly as possible—which made forests increasingly flammable. Prescribed burns were reintroduced to Sequoia National Park in the 1960s and to other regions by the 1990s."