On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) stated that there needs to be a “huge” amount of work to reduce material in wildlands that fuel fires and “We need to increase the rate of planned burns and other types of reductions in our wildland fuels by a factor of potentially ten or more.”
Whitesides said, [relevant remarks begin around 12:40] “So, the number one piece is that we need to reduce the fuel load in our wildlands. And Stephanie, the amount that we need to do is huge, right? We need to increase the rate of planned burns and other types of reductions in our wildland fuels by a factor of potentially ten or more. We have a huge job to do because of years of over-suppression.”
He continued, “We also need to make sure that our wildland firefighters are compensated well. It’s a tough profession, and we don’t have a lot of people going into that profession now. We need people to do that work. We also need to work harder to protect our own communities, to protect our own homes, especially in the American West. We need to make sure that people are protecting, with the commonsense things that we know work, clearing out the vegetation around the house, making sure that there [are] no things that could burn into the house. And then the third thing, in my opinion, is looking at new technologies that might help us with days like today. We know that science says that if you don’t get to these fires on a very dry, very windy day, within about five or maybe ten minutes, then you lose the capacity to put it out quickly. And so, we need to think about ways where we can monitor the perimeter fires much more precisely, 24/7, and then be able to act on those perimeters when we have new starts that have high intensity.”
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