Well it looks like we may finally exiting the fire season of 2017. Many questions are on the minds of the people that reside in this area of the nation.
The first and easiest question is how did it start? The answer to that is simply a lightning strike. Now the questions become much more complicated. I have found the answers given by the ‘EXPERTS’ leave a lot to be desired.
There are three things necessary for a fire.
Oxygen
Fuel
Ignition source
In our forest we, not surprisingly, have the first two in abundance and Mother Nature supplied the third. Firefighters worked day and night to limit and contain the fire. The information shared at fire meeting after fire meeting dealt with what was being done to eliminate ladder fuels in order to accomplish that goal.
The Reverend Michael Garrity of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies tells us that the fire would not have been prevented by any amount of logging. Lightning strikes occur all over the earth, so Garrity and his cohorts are correct, but they neglect to mention that due to the lack of logging and active forest management we had a catastrophic fire that almost cost us our town, not due to the fire itself, but due to the excess fuels their interference perpetuated.
Where Garrity and his people claim to want to protect the forest from the horrible general public, (the actual owners), it is important to recognize that by litigating against Forest Service logging and fuels mitigation projects these people have created the conditions for a fire storm that left us with a 160,000 acre scar that will be with us a lot longer and much more damaging than a road or ATV trail.
The endangered animals they were so interested in protecting, if that was their intent, now lie suffocated or burned to death in their dens or nests and the jewels in our Crown of the Continent have been turned into charcoal.
Thanks a lot, all you obstructionists.
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