I hope you are dry… they’re really having a BAD time out there where the BIG rivers run even BIGGER!
It’s tough just to look at all the destruction that comes with heavy rains – tornadoes and – wildfires.
This week I read a re-cap piece on *why* we have such horrible wild fires. Apparently we are our own worst enemy when you get down to studying the “why” of forest fires. The problem is: “We’ve gotten too good at putting out smaller fires before they burn up too much stuff.”
But guess what? That leaves a lot of combustible stuff on the forest floor… as they years go by with us rushing to these smaller fires and putting ‘em out quickly… we leave lots of fallen limbs. … trees that should have been ‘culled’ … generally we’ve stopped the fires but left LOTS of fuel for the next fire lying around.
When I was in high school in
Anyway… we did our thing. When we were ‘called out’ we abandoned our books and the classrooms, put on our overalls – the Principal was our LEADER ! WE got paid $0.25 cents per hour from door to door… (being the Truck driver I got $0.35 (J) and got out there and sweated, and dug firelines and were generally hot tired and dirty when we got back… The galvanized- back pack water pumps we used mainly for drinking water -- but we usually put the fires out by surrounding the fires – digging out the burnable stuff and keeping it away from fresh fuel. We put ‘em out right away… usually in a matter of hours… except when it took longer!
We didn’t know it – we were STOCKPILING WOOD out there in the forest to burn all that much hotter and higher when the next conflagration came along.
So… now they teach setting back-fires sooner… and “controlled” burns to get rid of “slash” and dead wood on the forest floor… and are gradually, they hope,
cleaning up the forests so when a fire does occur it won’t be so devastating to housing and other commercial targets. I’ve not been on a fire line in a long time… but it sounds reasonable to me. It just seems to happen in the news so often that you see fires and floods come in close sequences that are destructive to property and dangerous to people who live in wooded areas which are difficult to get to—and generally shelter a lot of tinder dry wood and stuff in the forests.
Well… at least the foresters discovered what they were doing wrong and what needed to be changed.
Even as I write this there are tornado warnings along the NE corner of
See you tomorrow (DV)
Cordially, IN HIM
Jack
“JUST A MINUTE”
CONGRESS IN RECESS – TOO MUCH HAPPENING – CONFUSION REINS
Just a Minute:
Gov. Barbour ducking out leaves the race without a ‘good ole boy from the South.’ (Newt Gingrich, Pennsylvanian, is more Professor or Speaker than Southerner.) Gov. Rick Perry has won statewide office in
Other contests also are unsettling: Richard Lugar turned 79 on April 4th and wants to be
This coming contest is going to be a fight from any angle.
<> I’m Jack Buttram (END)
Jebco Editorial Service
www.wmuu.com
E-mail n4zhk@arrl.net
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