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If the predicted El Niño brings epic rains this winter, scenes like these will be all over the west coast, but most violently, I expect, in California, because of the millions of acres wildfires have burned over the last few years. Erosion and mass wasting happen, but they happen much more and to a greater extent after large clearcuts or wildfires this big.
Dead trees and understory cease holding the dirt onto the slopes. The rain washes it down into the streams, and anything that will serve as a stream, like roads, like the space between your house and your neighbor's. Debris creates temporary dams everywhere it sticks, which causes the water to flow around them and over them, which increases the pressure on yet more dirt and debris to come down, and then at some point these debris jam dams break and create even more force of erosion and mayhem, with things like cars and lawn chairs and swing sets and your new Sears siding, maybe your whole house, becoming part of the debris flowing down out of the thousands of acres of wildfire devastated former forest.
None of it cares a jot what it takes out on its way to lower ground.
You'll probably hear officials yammering about making sure all the drains are cleared to prevent flooding. This will make maybe a minute's difference. You will be finding antique gold miners' boots stuck in your mud-encrusted hedge remnants.
Stream beds will fill up with so much dirt and debris there is every chance they will change course... rivers even.
It is true that I don't know anybody who would trade this impending catastrophe for another year of drought, but every single acre they are letting burn is creating another acre of debris and hillside to bury you in this winter.
The fires in California have been worsening steadily over the last decade, and the drought has been known and heavily monitored by scientists for at least four years. YET the response to this year's fires has been this feeble.
I do not mean to diminish the heroism of even one firefighter, or to give the impression my gratitude for them is lessened an iota, but I really DO wish to impress upon you that humanity has both the technology and the equipment and the manpower to have halted every one of these fires long before they reached this epic extent.
It has not been used.
It's still not being used.
Anyone sick enough of all the PR in place of effective action is given a load of shit about lack of resources, and fire fighters and equipment coming in from states far flung, and how wildfire really is natural and good for the forest over all, when the POINT is: This is a heavily populated state, with already struggling and strained ecosystems, in the middle of an epic drought and the damage to living things has been within our power to mitigate all along... has NOT been mitigated... and STILL isn't.
Whenever I manage to get the full extent of the situation clear to someone, they say we don't have the money.
And I keep screaming at the top of my lungs that this is NOT a good enough excuse!
Then they call me a "commie" or a "utopian" and go off about their days.
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Last night, after bellowing about all this to Old Uncle Dave, who pointed out that we really do seem to have plenty of money for starting fires in other countries and none for putting them out here, and that I really should stop huffing and puffing and wishing death by fish bone on Moonbeam until the air quality improves a little, I flipped on KMUD news.
They were going on about how Mendo World has farmed out yet another local government service to another private company nowhere near Mendo World. I have no hair left to pull out. My eyeballs can neither spin faster in their sockets nor pop out any further.
You ASSHOLES!
Some company in Timbuktu has zero fucks to give our problems. Our people and habitat are mere abstractions to them, and in no case, not even actionable ones, will these abstractions matter to them over their bottom line. This is NOT "local government".
You run your community this way and everything, everything, everything gets worse. The ultimate benefit of the local resources ends up in an oligarch's bank account and the town's fire chief is buried under tons of mud.
always and any time....
