Skip to comments.Harsh Yosemite fire aftermath: 40 percent of land 'nuked'
Posted on 09/19/2013 7:30:28 AM PDT by shadeaud
Within the footprint of California's Rim Fire is an area of 60 square miles where everything is dead, the worst such burn damage in centuries.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.msn.com ...
I remember the Yellowstone fires that burned so hot the ground was sterilized. It appears to have happened here as well.
They just had to go there, didn't they?
Gosh too bad no one cut fire-breaks through the ‘pristine’ forests...
Not so pristine anymore, are they.
And no jobs created building things from the wood, and a ton of smoke added to the atmoshpere as it turned to nothing but ashes instead of houses for the homeless(but hey! it’s natural!)
Regardless of the devastation, it was not NUKED...were that so, it would be uninhabitable. Go see what happened to the environment since Mt. St Helens got ‘nuked’.
THis is NOT true. Many seeds require a fire to germinate. The region will come back very soon.
God has a green thumb ... just wait, watch and see.
It is a natural process, nature renewing herself.
1. The greens prevent selective logging of the forests
2. Forests become overgrown jungles
3. Forest fire starts and raging, supra-natural inferno ensues
4. Millions of dollars of timber up in smoke
5. Animal holocaust
6. Greens prevent loggers from using partially burnt, but otherwise dead, logs
7. Go back to Step 1 above.
Having worked alongside forest management agencies and private companies in the forests neighboring this one, I can predict with absolute certainty there is a stack of paperwork a mile high relating to attempts to have undergrowth as well as dead and dying trees removed from that area, and next to that stack will be a stack of restraining orders court actions, and court orders back and forth (advanced by environmental groups in places such as Rhode Island and Connecticut), the net result of which was nothing being done and the tinderbox left to explode. Thank the busybodies and their favorite judges.
Next they’ll spend millions of my wasted tax dollars to produce a report finding that the forest has unexpectedly rebounded in spite of what a carbon belching gas bag I am.
You could smell that fire in Mn. Not kidding.
“THis is NOT true. Many seeds require a fire to germinate. The region will come back very soon.”
It is this way every time. In a few years there will be all these articles expressing surprise at the rebound....unless of course scientists try to step in to fix it.
Remember Mount St. Helen it recovered nicely.
Normally that is true, but these mega-fires fed by excess undergrowth burn much longer and hotter than typical nature-caused fires DESTROYING the seeds and pine cones.
Bullcrap. It’s 32 degrees here in Eastern Washington State
Yes.....I was about to post that same thought.
There is nothing so void of wildlife as overly matured forest. The ground is an unuseful empty plate for animals.
As Mel Ellis the late true environmentalist used to do, Set it to flame and watch the deer, grouse, foxes, and an endless list of wildlife flourish on the regeneration.
No rabbits equals no wildlife. Without brushy ground cover growth there is nothing for the food chain to start off with.
Fire is nature's kitchen output for the next 75 years after. Without it the kitchen is closed for Bambi, thumper, wolves, bison, wolverines, foxes, and so on. Without fire all you have are tree rats and predator birds who can cover twenty square miles for a meal. Not much else can.
Google Mount St. Helens..there are amazing pictures showing what happened in the days, weeks, months, and years since the eruption..
Forget Mt. St. Helens.
Look at how quickly Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which WERE actually nuked, recovered.
Oh, it will come back. If the ground was sterilized it will just take a bit longer.
Truth @ post 10. The record of environmental legal battles makes no sense unless you consider how much money advocacy lawyers make.
If it is a normal fire, then yes, there will be seedlings coming up soon. As mentioned earlier, some seeds need fire to germinate. But a fire can get so hot that it actually kills everything within a foot of the surface. This sterilization is rare but may have happened in certain parts of the Rim Fire.
You forgot the best part.
10. Liberals homes get burned up and they and their attorneys rip off the insurance companies.
“Regardless of the devastation, it was not NUKED...were that so, it would be uninhabitable.”
Not really. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are major cities today.
Thanks..I learned something new. Do you know of examples where this has actually happened?
They weren’t nuked with a good bomb....
Obama ain't the only one that needs to be impeached.
I would say its pretty damned dry now.
The only instance that I am aware of are parts of Yellowstone from the fires back in 1988.
I was at MSH about five years ago. The desolation, and regrowth, was astounding. I stood there just staring for a long time. In its truest sense, it was awesome.
I also visited Yellowstone the year before that. It was about ten years after their big fire, and there were green shoots. But parts of that place still smelled of fire and smoke.
33 here in N Nevada today at 6:30 AM.
It's as if they have a cardboard bogeyman on a stick and they bring him out during a puppet show:
“Beware Punch, beware Judy, beware Brimstone. look out Prince Bumbo!
Global Warming is coming to steal your silver bananas!”
Read the last para "Spring 2010" and also click on the last link under "Resources"
I lived in Idaho most of my life. Several years back, there was a fire that did this same thing. I can't remember which forest, but I heard many folks tell of it after fishing/hunting trips. It was devoid of vegetation for about 5 - 7 years after a very hot, slow moving fire. IIRC, after this period, they went in and seeded the ground with a mix of vegetation and some heavy duty mulch. I did not witness this myself, and it was all hearsay, so take it for what it is.
We had a fire in the Pecos a number of years back. There were holes in the ground going down dozens of feet where the ponderosa pines burned completely to ash, roots and all.
Thank you for a demonstration of appalling ignorance. It will come back all right, to what? After losing millions of tons of topsoil to be washed down into reservoirs, there will be miles of Arctostaphylos sprouted from root crowns, six feet tall, and with no breaks for wildlife or forbs. In a few years, there will then be so many seedling pines that it will pack up completely. Moisture demand by that many trees will dry up streams by as much as 35%. The next wave is beetle kill. Worse, if there is then another fire, with all that standing dry wood left behind, what you get is enough heat to fire the soil into a ceramic. It then takes jackhammers to plant trees.
In the mean time, the cleared landscape is then wide open for the intrusion of roadside weeds into a perfect germination medium. I wish I could show you the miles of musk thistle and cheat grass that resulted from this idiot "let it burn" policy in Mesa Verde National Park. It is a disaster.
This has all happened before, many times. Drop the mythology and get with reality. You see, people no longer harvest pine cones as the Indians once did, which played just as important a role in maintaining a spacious forest as did fire. Fire alone will not fix this mess. It takes work done by people, managing animals, harvesting trees, and reducing predation so that herbivores can keep the brush under control and let fewer trees develop. It may be possible to recreate the forest the Indians reluctantly bequeathed, but not by leaving it alone.
I photographed it and may post a few if I have time.
The big problem was not the lack of wolves but the removal of the apex predator in the system: HUMANS, who had hunted the elk and wolves and built the biodiversity we prized by gardening the landscape to supply themselves with food and materials. People shaped that landscape, which is why when the first explorers arrived they thought it beautiful. It's this urban myth we have about "Nature" that is the real problem here, that causes us to believe in a self-optimizing system that has nothing to do with reality.
Consistently write with the tone of 39 and I think you’d be happier with responses. Yes. I know how difficult. Pray.
Wow, that bottom photo taken in ‘08 does not show much green where the burn scar is. Thanks for the link. MODIS is how I followed the Yosemite Rim fire.
This is what happens when people in government worship a cartoon bear as their god.