The Camp Fire in northern California has been named the state's deadliest ever, with at least 42 dead, 228 missing, and more than 7,100 homes and other buildings consumed since last week, Sharon Bernstein and Noel Randewich report for Reuters.
The entire town of Paradise was an early casualty of the fire, and was mostly destroyed by Friday. Some remains are so burned that university anthropologists are trying to identify the remains, Daniel Trotta reports for Reuters.
President Trump tweeted that California's repeated problems with wildfire are because of poor forest management, but "the truth is more complicated," Kendra Pierre-Louis reports for The New York Times. The fires aren't from forests, to begin with. "Rather, the Camp and Woolsey fires, which are ripping through Northern and Southern California, began in areas known as the wildland-urban interface: places where communities are close to undeveloped areas, making it easier for fire to move from forests or grasslands into neighborhoods."
Another problem with blaming the fires on poor forest management by the state is that the federal government owns and manages 57 percent of California's 33 million acres of forests, while only 3 percent are owned and managed by state and local agencies. And because the U.S. Forest Service has been forced to spend so much money fighting wildfires in recent years, it has lacked the money to mitigate future fires with controlled burns and other preventive practices, Pierre-Louis reports.
In a USA Today opinion piece, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed the state's wildfires on environmentalists who oppose logging. But dead trees are too big to easily catch fire, and logging leaves behind the brush and twigs that do. "In fact, the wooded land that abuts Paradise, Calif., the community so badly damaged by the Camp Fire, underwent the kind of post-fire logging that Mr. Trump’s tweet and Mr. Zinke’s article suggested," Pierre-Louis reports.
The entire town of Paradise was an early casualty of the fire, and was mostly destroyed by Friday. Some remains are so burned that university anthropologists are trying to identify the remains, Daniel Trotta reports for Reuters.
Another problem with blaming the fires on poor forest management by the state is that the federal government owns and manages 57 percent of California's 33 million acres of forests, while only 3 percent are owned and managed by state and local agencies. And because the U.S. Forest Service has been forced to spend so much money fighting wildfires in recent years, it has lacked the money to mitigate future fires with controlled burns and other preventive practices, Pierre-Louis reports.
In a USA Today opinion piece, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed the state's wildfires on environmentalists who oppose logging. But dead trees are too big to easily catch fire, and logging leaves behind the brush and twigs that do. "In fact, the wooded land that abuts Paradise, Calif., the community so badly damaged by the Camp Fire, underwent the kind of post-fire logging that Mr. Trump’s tweet and Mr. Zinke’s article suggested," Pierre-Louis reports.
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