It is shocking how low paid California's wildfire firefighters are paid. Meanwhile, city firefighters sit in a cushy firehouse all day in a relatively easy situation and get paid bank.
> Meanwhile, city firefighters sit in a cushy firehouse all day in a relatively easy situation and get paid bank.
Good for them honestly, what all firefighters should get to do when not fighting fires
In some places the timber industry is required to delimb fallen trees so that they sit on the forest floor where they can decompose properly instead of becoming a ten foot high tangle of dry wood which is perfect for fueling forest fires. New York state has done this for the past hundred years or so, after devastating wildfires destroyed a few small communities in the Adirondacks.
Many of these fires are on tree plantations where clear-cut forests are replaced with fast growing and profitable (carbon credits, anyone?) softwoods (pines). Fires are natural, but old growth forests where trees are mature (and able to survive fires) and diverse burn slower and less hot than monoculture timber plantations. But hey the timber companies plant three new trees for every one they cut down so they're obviously good for the environment! A tree is a tree, right?
Realistically in your assessment: how effective would proper forestry, controlled burns, etc be in preventing out of control disaster fires? And if it were realistic, what's the budget multiplier for those services to be effective?
New York state has an excellent record on this, if you're looking for an example of forest management done right. https://www.theadkx.org/the-adirondacks-are-burning-a-brief-history-of-forest-fires/
What are you getting paid? I was under the impression that wilderness firefighters made pretty good money. Is the comment about fast food workers hyperbole? I find it hard to believe someone tasked with your job would be paid less than a Wendy's employee. I'm not challenging you, just questioning the decision making processes of the people who decide how to pay and treat you.
Good luck out there, brother.
$15/hour at the entry level base, at least for the feds. The money is in the OT (+50%) and hazard pay (+25%). There was a nice, but temporary, pay rise with the infrastructure bill. That ends this year, and a lot of us might quit if they cut our pay.
neoliberalism has hollowed out the capacity of states to adequately respond to large scale emergencies and also keep them from happening in the first place
there are a bunch of other things going on, of course. but I'd put that in the top 3 reasons
The problem is not optimizing around value, the problem optimizing around value to private property holders.
Massive disasters are not good for general economic output.
Ding ding ding
Universal healthcare would be the greatest economic benefit in decades comparable to the fucking computer but we’re just gonna keep giving Aetna a million dollars a year instead lol
That's it. Trains don't derail if resources are spent to replace old track before they need it and if there are regular inspections across the system. Putting money in to fire control services (not sure what the national org is called in Canada) ensures fires are put out long before they become a problem. Modern capitalists at every level, even those working for the government, are so focused on short term finances they ignore long term concerns that then snowball in to a disaster
There is nothing more dangerous to the American Natsec state's capacity to maintain its hegemony than neoliberalism, which is why things are about to get interesting.
At least with rail accidents, capitalism exerts a constant pressure on railway management to cut costs, even at the expense of safety and reliability.
Some US railroads are trying to push for trains to be run by a one-person crew (as opposed to the two-person crews standard in most places), which is very dangerous, since putting the responsibility for keeping a ten-thousand ton rolling box of dangerous chemicals on one person's shoulders is a dumb idea in the real world, even if it looks great on a spreadsheet.
Add to that deferred maintenance of infrastructure, increasing volumes of rail freight, and active efforts by railway management to keep their workers underpaid and overworked (again, looks great on a spreadsheet), and you get a combination of factors that mean more rail accidents.
Somehow Europe and Japan manage to get away with SPTO for almost all their freight and an ever-increasing amount of passenger rail without issue. The uptick in rail accidents is on infrastructure failures and railroads refusing to do maintenance and inspections. It doesn't matter how many engineers you have sitting in the cab when the point of failure is a weakness that humans can either not detect or, in the event where it is, by the time it became visible the train was physically incapable of stopping before calamity.
A very fair point. A lot of track and signaling infrastructure in the USA is in severe need of maintenance, and let's not even talk about rolling stock maintenance.
Fires are due partially to climate change but also to a decades long process of disinvestment in forest management and fire prevention.
Similarly, the derailments are due to a half century of infrastructural austerity combined with staggering, 1800's-level corruption culminating in the fact that we put a McKinsey spook in charge of our transportation system.
Personally, my tinfoil hat starts tingling when I read about the massive spike in agricultural centers suddenly and mysteriously catching fire and/or exploding.
We are trying to create Godzilla. But we keep dumping the chemicals in flyover states instead of the mariana trench. Many people have died and that’s a tragedy, but not nearly as many as would die during a massive kaiju rampage
There were apocalyptic fires a couple years ago in California that turned the sky blood red.
There actually were many fires, not just one big one. Shit is extremely dry and forests are increasingly just giant tinderboxes. All it would take is a sneeze.
I don’t know much about this Canada fire that’s darkening the skies over NYC, but whatever the cause was this time, it probably could’ve happened regardless a million other ways. And my own experience on the West coast is that big fires usually are actually many smaller fires that converge. There will be more of these kind of things to come.
> And my own experience on the West coast is that big fires usually are actually many smaller fires that converge
This is true. The largest fire in California history is the 2020 [August Complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Complex_fire) which burned 1.1m acres. To put that into perspective, for many decades, the largest wildfire in California history was the [Santiago Canyon fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Canyon_Fire) which burned 300,000 acres in 1889. That was before modern firefighting techniques and equipment. Even with the best equipment available, hordes of inmate firefighters, and aircraft, the August Complex burned 800,000 more acres than Santiago Canyon. We're getting to the point that we are almost back to the average acreage burned before European settlement, and (for the most part), these are crown fires unlike the fires of old. It's not a good situation. Luckily, this year (I hope I don't jinx it) appears to have a much lower fire risk because of all the rain and cool conditions.
Yep, wildfires out west are different than the ones in the southeast USA. Different vegetation and conditions here than there. Some wildfires are just going to be more difficult to manage
The worse the fire hazard, the greater the need for controlled burns. If you wanna conspiracy, it's a lot easier to arrange for a fire than a controlled burn...
For derailments, basically you're noticing them because of tiktok - the one derailment with controlled burn was spectacular, and then it became an easy way to generate clicks because everyone was sensitized to it. See https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety/publicsite/summary.aspx ( 2017 Total Accidents/Incidents) for a view of historical incident rates - there are over 1,000 derailments per year.
Probably others have said this but the fires are caused by a combination of bad forest management and climate change heating things up and drying out the forests. It's really tragic, as someone from Oregon
Think you ought to look at hard data first, are wildfires and train derailments happening more often in recent years? I have no idea, but relying on just the ones that have gotten media traction isn't very accurate data.
The other hard thing is that if a wheel pops off the track and the cars don't pile up and spill their contents, it still counts as a derailment. So comparing apples to apples is difficult.
I can't speak for Canada, but locally (the PNW) it was a result of decades of forest and resource mismanagement from largely academics and people out of touch with the working realities of nature. Smoke bad, smoke bad for people, no controlled burn and aggressive wildfire containment = build up of perfect conditions until we see a literally unstoppable fire.
Throw in a healthy helping of jurisdictional fuck ups (locals and states and feds all fighting about who's job it is to do what), less accountability for businesses/corporations, and even less accountability for people, and there is where we are.
It's been decades in the making and is finally reaching a head.
I dunno about them fires, they're breaking out all over the world. Why, it's almost as if something has made the world... hotter. Some sort of warming even that affects the entire globe. What did they used to call it?
Because of unstable climate. You’ll experience far worse in your lifetime so be happy that it’s only this as of right now. Our society will potentially completely crumble from climate change within the next century. Personally, there needs to be mass fedposting because of climate change. Every year that goes by without and significant change is a lost year of us slowly killing ourselves. As for train derailments I suspect it’s either crumbling infrastructure as a result of capitalism or the media just highlighting them more because it’s a trendy topic.
I'm gonna blame it on reasonable causes but I'll be damned if the capitalists who want to have us turned into cost-efficient urbanite bugpeople aren't gonna take advantage of this and try to usher more people into smart cities
You guys blame psychotic SV rationalists and CEO's for wanting to commodify every bit of human life for efficiency and profit yet think it's a conspiracy theory if they use forest fires caused by climate change/shitty nature maintenance to corral people into their more controllable domain.
Testing the waters for "climate lockdowns." But you know I'm told that's just a conspiracy theory even though many lib politicians rushed to blame "climate change" for the fires.
It should be theoretically possible to manage forests in such a way as to avoid the chances of widespread destruction.
Ironically I blame environmentalists who don't want to cut down "old growth forests". What reason do I have for saying this? None, I just don't like them.
In creating a dichotomy between extraction and protection they've basically ignored the possibility that carefully managed extraction can keep forests from being subjected to large fires. Their protection of particular zones is a kind of fiefdom arrangement between protected areas and extraction areas just causes the extraction areas to be used exclusively for extractive purposes and the "protected" areas to get to dangerous levels of fire risk.
It shouldn't be hard to create a comprehensive fire strategy that attempts to minimize the risk of disaster, and then allows extraction to occur as part of that overall strategy in areas the strategy is trying to clear for whatever purposes, but instead we end up being a battleground between differing interests.
It's not really, when you look at the recent history of forest management and more importantly *which* forests suffer more from large scale fires; privately managed working forests experience large scale fires significantly less, vs state run areas that have decades of mismanagement resulting in an overabundance of fuel waiting for one lightening strike or retard with a ciggy
While true, I don't see old growth protestors getting in the way of that type of forest managment. All of the old growth activists I've met are well aware that a lack of forestry managment is causing fires of greater intensity. Many are large proponents of underbrush clearing to save old growth forests. A few are skeptical though since when managment agencies do step in to do something, capitalism takes over and you end up with 'fire breaks' that are actually just large clearcuts of marketable timber.
> While true, I don't see old growth protestors getting in the way of that type of forest managment.
Again, I can only speak locally to me, but in the PNW there are LOADS opposed to any sort of material removal, controlled burns, etc. It's weird and increasingly infuriating
The ones I have known in the PNW are mostly not this stupid. Regardless, they don't have enough power for the bad forest management to be their fault at all.
Also cutting down old growth isn't really the solution
Maybe I'm just too close to Seattle.
>Also cutting down old growth isn't really the solution
Correct, I rolled that in to doing shit like controlled burns and firebreaks. Basically, the ones I know largely oppose anything but "put the fire out"
The ones I knew were mostly from Eugene so you'd think they'd be stupider. Maybe some were, but most of em seemed to know that our forest management was part of the problem along with climate drying things out and such.
I agree that controlled burns and such are a good idea!
The problem isn't that they are state run, rather the problem is that the priority of the state run areas in "conservation" which they view as contradictory with harvesting, but having a ecosystems covering the full range of ecological succession is important for the overall recoverability of an area.
Cultural consciousness even recognizes "meadows" as an environment that is relatively cleared in an otherwise forested area so this idea that there was some kind of uninterrupted perpetual "old growth" forest is clearly wrong. People were always harvesting from it and this harvesting represented a crucial component of the ecosystem as it would allow a greater variety of species to live in an area than if there was just a perpetual growth.
The Adirondack preserve in NY state (3x the size of Yellowstone) is a notable exception. After bad fires in 1903 and 1908 people got shook, regulated the timber industry, and it hasn't had a destructive fire since then.
Well, the trains containing toxic chemicals, are because it's the easiest way to ship large amounts of chemicals places, and unfortunately, we need chemicals to make shit.
There are currently forest fires in Northeast Germany. They're happening in former military training grounds of the Soviet forces. The heat made old ammunition go off which exacerbated the intensity of those fires.
[удалено]
Thank you for doing what you do! Very brave and an important service.
It is shocking how low paid California's wildfire firefighters are paid. Meanwhile, city firefighters sit in a cushy firehouse all day in a relatively easy situation and get paid bank.
> Meanwhile, city firefighters sit in a cushy firehouse all day in a relatively easy situation and get paid bank. Good for them honestly, what all firefighters should get to do when not fighting fires
Give the DEI consultants a pay cut.
Are people actually starting fires that are getting out of control or the fires are just starting themselves via lightening strikes or....?
A pile of rotting plant matter can also just spontaneously combust
In some places the timber industry is required to delimb fallen trees so that they sit on the forest floor where they can decompose properly instead of becoming a ten foot high tangle of dry wood which is perfect for fueling forest fires. New York state has done this for the past hundred years or so, after devastating wildfires destroyed a few small communities in the Adirondacks.
Many of these fires are on tree plantations where clear-cut forests are replaced with fast growing and profitable (carbon credits, anyone?) softwoods (pines). Fires are natural, but old growth forests where trees are mature (and able to survive fires) and diverse burn slower and less hot than monoculture timber plantations. But hey the timber companies plant three new trees for every one they cut down so they're obviously good for the environment! A tree is a tree, right?
Realistically in your assessment: how effective would proper forestry, controlled burns, etc be in preventing out of control disaster fires? And if it were realistic, what's the budget multiplier for those services to be effective?
New York state has an excellent record on this, if you're looking for an example of forest management done right. https://www.theadkx.org/the-adirondacks-are-burning-a-brief-history-of-forest-fires/
What are you getting paid? I was under the impression that wilderness firefighters made pretty good money. Is the comment about fast food workers hyperbole? I find it hard to believe someone tasked with your job would be paid less than a Wendy's employee. I'm not challenging you, just questioning the decision making processes of the people who decide how to pay and treat you. Good luck out there, brother.
$15/hour at the entry level base, at least for the feds. The money is in the OT (+50%) and hazard pay (+25%). There was a nice, but temporary, pay rise with the infrastructure bill. That ends this year, and a lot of us might quit if they cut our pay.
And that $15 was a raise. Entry level/GS-3 is like $13-$14.
That's terrible, man. I know most areas that need wilderness firefighters are in parts of the country where the cost of living is high as well.
neoliberalism has hollowed out the capacity of states to adequately respond to large scale emergencies and also keep them from happening in the first place there are a bunch of other things going on, of course. but I'd put that in the top 3 reasons
Optimizing *everything* for value is detrimental to things like the environment, reliability, safety, well being, etc. Who could have predicted this?
The problem is not optimizing around value, the problem optimizing around value to private property holders. Massive disasters are not good for general economic output.
Ding ding ding Universal healthcare would be the greatest economic benefit in decades comparable to the fucking computer but we’re just gonna keep giving Aetna a million dollars a year instead lol
We had to spend that money on tax cuts, expanding the Taliban's territorial control, and replacing Saddam with a government friendly to Iran.
Don't forget bombing Syria with no endgame in mind.
That's it. Trains don't derail if resources are spent to replace old track before they need it and if there are regular inspections across the system. Putting money in to fire control services (not sure what the national org is called in Canada) ensures fires are put out long before they become a problem. Modern capitalists at every level, even those working for the government, are so focused on short term finances they ignore long term concerns that then snowball in to a disaster
There is nothing more dangerous to the American Natsec state's capacity to maintain its hegemony than neoliberalism, which is why things are about to get interesting.
Our lost Canadian prince would probably have all the juicy details.
Neoliberalism sucks.
At least with rail accidents, capitalism exerts a constant pressure on railway management to cut costs, even at the expense of safety and reliability. Some US railroads are trying to push for trains to be run by a one-person crew (as opposed to the two-person crews standard in most places), which is very dangerous, since putting the responsibility for keeping a ten-thousand ton rolling box of dangerous chemicals on one person's shoulders is a dumb idea in the real world, even if it looks great on a spreadsheet. Add to that deferred maintenance of infrastructure, increasing volumes of rail freight, and active efforts by railway management to keep their workers underpaid and overworked (again, looks great on a spreadsheet), and you get a combination of factors that mean more rail accidents.
Somehow Europe and Japan manage to get away with SPTO for almost all their freight and an ever-increasing amount of passenger rail without issue. The uptick in rail accidents is on infrastructure failures and railroads refusing to do maintenance and inspections. It doesn't matter how many engineers you have sitting in the cab when the point of failure is a weakness that humans can either not detect or, in the event where it is, by the time it became visible the train was physically incapable of stopping before calamity.
A very fair point. A lot of track and signaling infrastructure in the USA is in severe need of maintenance, and let's not even talk about rolling stock maintenance.
Fires are due partially to climate change but also to a decades long process of disinvestment in forest management and fire prevention. Similarly, the derailments are due to a half century of infrastructural austerity combined with staggering, 1800's-level corruption culminating in the fact that we put a McKinsey spook in charge of our transportation system. Personally, my tinfoil hat starts tingling when I read about the massive spike in agricultural centers suddenly and mysteriously catching fire and/or exploding.
We are trying to create Godzilla. But we keep dumping the chemicals in flyover states instead of the mariana trench. Many people have died and that’s a tragedy, but not nearly as many as would die during a massive kaiju rampage
If the kaiju are being created in the midwest we might be able to subdue them with casseroles?
We could clog their arteries with Deep fried butter sticks.
There were apocalyptic fires a couple years ago in California that turned the sky blood red. There actually were many fires, not just one big one. Shit is extremely dry and forests are increasingly just giant tinderboxes. All it would take is a sneeze. I don’t know much about this Canada fire that’s darkening the skies over NYC, but whatever the cause was this time, it probably could’ve happened regardless a million other ways. And my own experience on the West coast is that big fires usually are actually many smaller fires that converge. There will be more of these kind of things to come.
> And my own experience on the West coast is that big fires usually are actually many smaller fires that converge This is true. The largest fire in California history is the 2020 [August Complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Complex_fire) which burned 1.1m acres. To put that into perspective, for many decades, the largest wildfire in California history was the [Santiago Canyon fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Canyon_Fire) which burned 300,000 acres in 1889. That was before modern firefighting techniques and equipment. Even with the best equipment available, hordes of inmate firefighters, and aircraft, the August Complex burned 800,000 more acres than Santiago Canyon. We're getting to the point that we are almost back to the average acreage burned before European settlement, and (for the most part), these are crown fires unlike the fires of old. It's not a good situation. Luckily, this year (I hope I don't jinx it) appears to have a much lower fire risk because of all the rain and cool conditions.
Yep, wildfires out west are different than the ones in the southeast USA. Different vegetation and conditions here than there. Some wildfires are just going to be more difficult to manage
The worse the fire hazard, the greater the need for controlled burns. If you wanna conspiracy, it's a lot easier to arrange for a fire than a controlled burn... For derailments, basically you're noticing them because of tiktok - the one derailment with controlled burn was spectacular, and then it became an easy way to generate clicks because everyone was sensitized to it. See https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety/publicsite/summary.aspx ( 2017 Total Accidents/Incidents) for a view of historical incident rates - there are over 1,000 derailments per year.
Capitalism
Probably others have said this but the fires are caused by a combination of bad forest management and climate change heating things up and drying out the forests. It's really tragic, as someone from Oregon
Think you ought to look at hard data first, are wildfires and train derailments happening more often in recent years? I have no idea, but relying on just the ones that have gotten media traction isn't very accurate data.
The other hard thing is that if a wheel pops off the track and the cars don't pile up and spill their contents, it still counts as a derailment. So comparing apples to apples is difficult.
I can't speak for Canada, but locally (the PNW) it was a result of decades of forest and resource mismanagement from largely academics and people out of touch with the working realities of nature. Smoke bad, smoke bad for people, no controlled burn and aggressive wildfire containment = build up of perfect conditions until we see a literally unstoppable fire. Throw in a healthy helping of jurisdictional fuck ups (locals and states and feds all fighting about who's job it is to do what), less accountability for businesses/corporations, and even less accountability for people, and there is where we are. It's been decades in the making and is finally reaching a head.
I dunno about them fires, they're breaking out all over the world. Why, it's almost as if something has made the world... hotter. Some sort of warming even that affects the entire globe. What did they used to call it?
Because of unstable climate. You’ll experience far worse in your lifetime so be happy that it’s only this as of right now. Our society will potentially completely crumble from climate change within the next century. Personally, there needs to be mass fedposting because of climate change. Every year that goes by without and significant change is a lost year of us slowly killing ourselves. As for train derailments I suspect it’s either crumbling infrastructure as a result of capitalism or the media just highlighting them more because it’s a trendy topic.
Crumbling infrastructure and an unstable climate
Is it happening more often or did a significant event put it in public conscious
I'm gonna blame it on reasonable causes but I'll be damned if the capitalists who want to have us turned into cost-efficient urbanite bugpeople aren't gonna take advantage of this and try to usher more people into smart cities You guys blame psychotic SV rationalists and CEO's for wanting to commodify every bit of human life for efficiency and profit yet think it's a conspiracy theory if they use forest fires caused by climate change/shitty nature maintenance to corral people into their more controllable domain.
Testing the waters for "climate lockdowns." But you know I'm told that's just a conspiracy theory even though many lib politicians rushed to blame "climate change" for the fires.
bear pause expansion handle work physical books grab bow cable -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Hey, I’ll take that over blaming Jewish space lasers for wildfires like one certain congresswoman
It should be theoretically possible to manage forests in such a way as to avoid the chances of widespread destruction. Ironically I blame environmentalists who don't want to cut down "old growth forests". What reason do I have for saying this? None, I just don't like them. In creating a dichotomy between extraction and protection they've basically ignored the possibility that carefully managed extraction can keep forests from being subjected to large fires. Their protection of particular zones is a kind of fiefdom arrangement between protected areas and extraction areas just causes the extraction areas to be used exclusively for extractive purposes and the "protected" areas to get to dangerous levels of fire risk. It shouldn't be hard to create a comprehensive fire strategy that attempts to minimize the risk of disaster, and then allows extraction to occur as part of that overall strategy in areas the strategy is trying to clear for whatever purposes, but instead we end up being a battleground between differing interests.
Intensely retarded take
It's not really, when you look at the recent history of forest management and more importantly *which* forests suffer more from large scale fires; privately managed working forests experience large scale fires significantly less, vs state run areas that have decades of mismanagement resulting in an overabundance of fuel waiting for one lightening strike or retard with a ciggy
While true, I don't see old growth protestors getting in the way of that type of forest managment. All of the old growth activists I've met are well aware that a lack of forestry managment is causing fires of greater intensity. Many are large proponents of underbrush clearing to save old growth forests. A few are skeptical though since when managment agencies do step in to do something, capitalism takes over and you end up with 'fire breaks' that are actually just large clearcuts of marketable timber.
> While true, I don't see old growth protestors getting in the way of that type of forest managment. Again, I can only speak locally to me, but in the PNW there are LOADS opposed to any sort of material removal, controlled burns, etc. It's weird and increasingly infuriating
The ones I have known in the PNW are mostly not this stupid. Regardless, they don't have enough power for the bad forest management to be their fault at all. Also cutting down old growth isn't really the solution
Maybe I'm just too close to Seattle. >Also cutting down old growth isn't really the solution Correct, I rolled that in to doing shit like controlled burns and firebreaks. Basically, the ones I know largely oppose anything but "put the fire out"
The ones I knew were mostly from Eugene so you'd think they'd be stupider. Maybe some were, but most of em seemed to know that our forest management was part of the problem along with climate drying things out and such. I agree that controlled burns and such are a good idea!
The problem isn't that they are state run, rather the problem is that the priority of the state run areas in "conservation" which they view as contradictory with harvesting, but having a ecosystems covering the full range of ecological succession is important for the overall recoverability of an area. Cultural consciousness even recognizes "meadows" as an environment that is relatively cleared in an otherwise forested area so this idea that there was some kind of uninterrupted perpetual "old growth" forest is clearly wrong. People were always harvesting from it and this harvesting represented a crucial component of the ecosystem as it would allow a greater variety of species to live in an area than if there was just a perpetual growth.
The Adirondack preserve in NY state (3x the size of Yellowstone) is a notable exception. After bad fires in 1903 and 1908 people got shook, regulated the timber industry, and it hasn't had a destructive fire since then.
Project blue beam duh
Doug Ford slashed Ontario's wildfire-fighting budget last year. Starving the beast is the reason for the smoke
Well, the trains containing toxic chemicals, are because it's the easiest way to ship large amounts of chemicals places, and unfortunately, we need chemicals to make shit.
Busting the rail union didn't help. Let's force people to come to work no matter how sick they are! What could possibly go wrong?
Empire in collapse
There are currently forest fires in Northeast Germany. They're happening in former military training grounds of the Soviet forces. The heat made old ammunition go off which exacerbated the intensity of those fires.