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Pollution from wildfires may increase Covid19 risk in affected regions

#1
Leigha Offline
Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Small particulate matter pollution in wildfire smoke in the western United States increases the risk for COVID-19 infection and death from the disease in people living in affected regions, a study published Friday by Science Advances found.

Nearly 20,000 COVID-19 cases and 750 deaths in California, Oregon and Washington between March and December of last year may be linked with a rise in fine particulate air pollution, or PM2.5, generated by the wildfires plaguing the region, the researchers said.


https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2021/08...medium=sci

I wonder if this study will change any minds when it comes to climate change, as far as it not being considered (by many) to be an imminent threat.
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#2
Syne Offline
Those wildfires are more a result of leftist refusal to do things like controlled burns and forest management. The misguided notion that nature can be left complete unmanaged and present no threats to humans is idiotic. And the deaths occurred in the same states that already believe climate change is a risk. So they're not likely to change their forest management efforts, since they can just keep harping about climate change. It only affirms what they already believe.
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#3
Leigha Offline
From what I've read about it, if done properly, ''controlled burns'' can restore forests. CA does them, but seems like not enough. Could it also be a financial burden to doing them, as to why there aren't more underway?
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#4
C C Offline
(Aug 16, 2021 02:46 AM)Leigha Wrote: From what I've read about it, if done properly, ''controlled burns'' can restore forests. CA does them, but seems like not enough. Could it also be a financial burden to doing them, as to why there aren't more underway?

What seems left out of the four factors below is that the state allowed people to move into high-risk areas where they never should have been allowed to take up residence and set up businesses to begin with. And as a result: California residents didn't want controlled burns near their homes.

Barriers to prescribed burns: Risks, resources and regulations
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/...fire-risk/

EXCERPT: The researchers found three types of barriers [to prescribed burns]: risks, resources, and regulations. In terms of risk, the fear of liability seems to be preventing many private landowners from considering burns. In 2018, the state created a training certification and a protection from liability for those who complete it and follow safety procedures. The researchers say that more programs like this could help.

The resource-related barriers can largely explain the gap between plans and actual area burned. Responding to uncontrolled wildfires obviously takes precedence over prescribed burns, both in terms of staffing and funding. CAL FIRE, for example, hires seasonal staff focused on the fire season—which isn’t the best time of year to be attempting prescribed burns. And the US Forest Service has had to use much of its fire budget on active wildfires, diverting funding from prevention. Add in a demographic wave of retirements among fire managers, and staff availability has been limiting.

As is true elsewhere, mechanical thinning efforts in California have suffered from the tension between financial incentives for those doing the work and optimal thinning techniques. Private logging operations would like to target the largest trees, ignoring the small stuff that won’t yield lumber. But thinning operations focus on the small stuff, greatly reducing the profit potential.

Finally, there are the regulation-related barriers. Air board approval is one bottleneck. The experts interviewed felt that the working definition of “acceptable weather conditions” has been strict, which can cut short multi-day burn plans. There are also many local air boards around the state, and a lack of consistency can create problems for burn projects that have to involve more than one of them.

There’s some friction, in that the particulate pollution and carbon dioxide emissions of prescribed burns are counted as human-caused, while emissions from wildfires go in a separate category. There’s no offset for prescribed burns reducing potential wildfire emissions.

It’s also true that burns supported by state or federal grants have to undergo additional environmental reviews, which can sometimes hold up projects past windows of opportunity. The researchers say that the experts they talked to felt these reviews are designed for larger projects and don’t work well with prescribed burns. They were also leery of weakening environmental protections, though, so there was no clear recommendation.

The researchers noticed, unsurprisingly, that the California State Legislature tends to introduce more wildfire bills following major disasters—of which there have been plenty in the last few years. Many recent bills have focused on addressing roadblocks like liability concerns. But in order to treat something like a million acres of land each year, the researchers say more strategies (and money) will have to come out.

Hiring dedicated staff during the prescribed burn season would be a good start. And real financial incentives for landowners to carry out burns, or for logging contractors to cut brush, could get some wheels rolling. The researchers also suggest that CAL FIRE’s legal requirement to suppress active fires on state or private land could be eliminated, giving them the ability to allow non-dangerous fires to burn when that makes sense, as the Forest Service does on federal land.

They write: “Generating the political willpower to make these important policy changes will probably require a combination of administration support, successful burns, collaboration among multiple stakeholders and, unfortunately, more deadly and destructive wildfires.”


Barrier to prescribed burns: Fighting fires is big business in California
https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire...anagement/

EXCERPT: . . . More quantitatively — and related — fire suppression in California is big business, with impressive year-over-year growth. Before 1999, Cal Fire never spent more than $100 million a year. In 2007-08, it spent $524 million. In 2017-18, $773 million. Could this be Cal Fire’s first $1 billion season? Too early to tell, but don’t count it out. On top of all the state money, federal disaster funds flow down from “the big bank in the sky,” said Ingalsbee. Studies have shown that over a quarter of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression spending goes to aviation — planes and helicopters used to put out fire. A lot of the “air show,” as he calls it, happens not on small fires in the morning, when retardant drops from planes are most effective, but on large fires in the afternoon. But nevermind. You can now call in a 747 to drop 19,200 gallons of retardant. Or a purpose-designed Lockheed Martin FireHerc, a cousin of the C-130. How cool is that? Still only 30% of retardant is dropped within 2,000 yards of a neighborhood, meaning that it stands little chance of saving a life or home. Instead the airdrop serves, at great expense, to save trees in the wilderness, where burning, not suppression, might well do more good.

This whole system is exacerbated by the fact that it’s not just contracts for privately owned aircraft. Much of the fire-suppression apparatus — the crews themselves, the infrastructure that supports them — is contracted out to private firms. “The Halliburton model from the Middle East is kind of in effect for all the infrastructure that comes into fire camps,” Beasley said, referencing the Iraq war. “The catering, the trucks that you can sleep in that are air-conditioned…”

Cal Fire pays firefighters well, very well. (And perversely well compared with the thousands of California Department of Corrections inmates who serve on fire crews, which is very much a different story.) As the California Policy Center reported in 2017, “The median compensation package — including base pay, special pay, overtime and benefits — for full time Cal Fire firefighters of all categories is more than $148,000 a year.”

The paydays can turn incentives upside down. “Every five, 10, 15 years, we’ll see an event where a firefighter who wants [to earn] overtime starts a fire,” said Crystal Kolden, a self-described “pyrogeographer” and assistant professor of fire science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. (She first picked up a drip torch in 1999 when working for the U.S. Forest Service and got hooked.) “And it sort of gets painted as, ‘Well, this person is just completely nuts.’ And, you know, they maybe are.” But the financial incentives are real. “It’s very lucrative for a certain population of contractors.”
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#5
Zinjanthropos Offline
Last year I remember claims from Australia about many of their fires being deliberately set by climate change activists. Conflicting stories say people were charged but also talk of the whole arsonist thing being a lie. Personally, if climate change arsonists were responsible, it wouldn’t surprise me. The question then becomes whether or not such motivated/inspired groups exist in California? Is some finger pointing going on in that state, are activists being accused of arson?
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