posted 4 years ago
I’d recommend checking out Bill Zeedyk’s work, some of which is available on YouTube and elsewhere for free.
I would consider fire effects in any such woody debris filled ditch or drainage, but in many cases the amount of water held and seeped into the ground/vegetation vastly outweighs the risk, as that wood is going to be the wettest stuff around. Also, wood less than 1ft long or with good ground contact becomes inoculated with fire retardant fungi. It could of course burn in a big fire, but it is likely to be one of the last things to ignite. In most cases healthy plants with ignite well after ones deck or wooden structures. This was shown in the fires inland of me last year which burned many structures close to each other, but that had trees surrounding them that survived.
I have had to accept where I am that despite getting 80-120” of rain per year, I have pyrophytic trees around me here just above the redwood belt, and there may well be a mega fire across NW California that I can do very little about, beyond being a good steward and educator. Such a fire could potentially burn everything organic in its path. It probably did historically burn pretty catastrophically across the Pacific NW coast every 250yrs or so. The last was in the early 1700’s, as shown by soil samples, surviving tree scars, native peoples’ oral histories and sailors accounts. Large, self stabilizing climatic pockets of Coast redwood (2500yr+ Lifespans), and cloud forests in the montane zone (around 1000’ in the Olympic Mtns) of coastal OR, WA, and BC with yellow cedar (3600+ yrs) and western red cedar (2000+yrs) survived by suppressing the fires as they approached with tannins in their wood and billions of gallons of water stored in the soil and their ecosystems’ biomass. Smoke clouds would hold in their evapo-transporated water (many thousands of gallons per day), and the soil would look like it was steaming. I have seen this on hot, smoky days in the Olympic coastal rainforests and the coast redwoods. Many other similar microclimates survived as well through the west coast but many millions of acres burned, including most of the relatively fire resistant Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, and nearly all the fire prone or pyrophytic spruce, pines, hemlocks and true firs. Knowing what tree species mean about the past of a place by inference from to their fire ecology can be very helpful in understanding how fire would likely behave in the future. Of course though, climate change makes anomalous phenomena more likely.
However, even in recent record setting fires that had tragic results in places, go look at the burned areas and take note of how the lower valleys and north slopes are often green and largely unharmed. These areas are shadier, cooler, less windy and hold snow longer, then receive its runoff. We can strategically and regeneratively create such areas below and/or upwind of our structures, which shed a great deal of water. We can store that water from times of abundance, ideally mostly in living systems, and that will slow and potentially deflect a fire that would otherwise torch a dehydrated, desertified landscape that has been designed to shed all its water and burn all its biomass. I have said it a thousand times, but the loss of biomass on the pacific coast due to logging and development has had an immense impact on the water and fire cycles of everywhere downwind, which is the rest of the continent. 10’s of billions of gallons of evapotranspiration per day have been lost.
We do need to manage forests better, and that will involve cutting a lot of smaller trees that were planted much too densely and with too little diversity, then burning some for heat in efficient ways, some for biochar, using them for building materials, and if nothing else for soil building in hugelkulture, animal bedding, and then as mulch. Greater Community access to excavators and efficient woodchippers would make these jobs more doable and therefore they’d get done more often. I also think market demand for woody debris, woodchips, compost, or otherwise underappreciated “forest products” that accumulate as dangerous fuels in the unhealthy mono crop plantations across the country that really don’t deserve to be called forests at all.
In the before times when I managed only a couple acres, I got involved in the local fire safety council, and shared some of these ideas to some folks with mixed levels of receptiveness. I oughtta get back involved with them, if for only the selfish reason that they have an industrial wood chipper and I have some uses for it. This is an underutilized resource and if we could get neighbors with equipment involved we could significantly reduce understory fuels around us while increasing our soil water holding capacity at the same time. I can also rent an excavator for 1500$/week, and if I run it for 70hrs in that week I pay less per hour than I would owning and maintaining it. I’ve heard it’s much cheaper in less remote places. I got to learn how to run one working for the parks service, and for something simple like hugel building a beginner with good coordination and reasonable caution can pick it up pretty quickly. My wife built a hugel 50’x7’x7ft in a couple hours on her first time driving it.
This is all just my opinion based on a flawed memory
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