California Fires update, forest management and 8 original photos of America

The day after the smoke inversion gave us that orange sky, the particles apparently descended to our level. Although today air quality is way better than Friday, its hard to say how much. The van is covered in ash, we are inside a concrete building downtown. Based on what just happened in Paradise California, that's maybe not as much a saviour as I once thought.

Ukiah CA Nov 9 2018, photo by me

A number of comments, including from the Donald himself, have to do with managing the forests and preventing fires. I just have to think they've never been to northern california because one drive along highway 122 and no one would ever suggest forest management. It just way too big, and empty.

Mendocino, Sept 2018
photo @sloe

East coast geography is pretty flat; its all been plowed for 150 years, There are fields and houses and infrastructure literally everywhere. Once we got lost by the Bear Mountain pass, its probably the closest thing to norcal that a New Yorker has ever maybe seen.

New York City, Spring 1976.
Photo by my dad.

The average home price in San Fran is currently about a million dollars, and three hours away endless wilderness would take a million annual hours to manage. Why people cannot figure to spread out I fail to fathom, but here we are. Until norcal looks like New England, wild fires will be as unmanageable as tornados in Nebraska or sea levels in Virginia.

Jefferson Memorial from the Washington Monument.
Photo by my dad, winter 1975.

Agent Orange likely says things just to stay in the news, however there is always necessarily long term fall out from sensationalism. For the Don to suggest that he might choose to prevent federal disaster relief funding will necessarily start dialogue about subjects he didn't expect. Things said in response may become difficult to contain. Californians are tweeting about with holding federal tax payments, no one knows where it goes.

As Florida gets hurricanes, so California gets fires. Not really a question of management (no budget is big enough for that) but building systems that can withstand an over run of really intense heat. Build it right the first time, rather than build it over and over.

Don's business model is to borrow $10M now to make 20M later. Business built on borrowed money is different than asset based expansion, the hope is that the one mirrors the other, but faster. It took hundreds of years to build New England to what it is. Its a long shot that borrowed money can produce a similar result in a fraction of the time.

photo by my dad, Connecticut fall 1975

To add a rock fence like that here would first require someone to buy the property, build a house, pile and split rocks for weeks and years, and have neighbours do the same all the way to Oregon. Then California would be able to manage fires one a case by case basis. But until population density of the mountains vaguely resembles Maryland, forest management would need to employ millions and millions of people.

Liberty Island, 1976. Photo by my dad.

There are some obvious issues with paying millions of immigrants to repeatedly clear brush. Asset based business could never produce any such capital expenditure. A debt loaded public works project, on the other hand...

Montreal Dec 1975, photo by my dad
Last I heard, they were still paying that thing off, 30+ years later. Seriously.

Note on the photos:
I just got a drive full of scanned slides from when I was a kid. I'm going to go through them over the next while. These are from a family journey through a connecticut grad school, and other east coast adventures.

August 1975, South Dakota campground
that's me!