California leaders say sweeping DOGE cuts will make wildfires worse

Hopland, California – I watched it as a cracked fire in awe -kissing slope in the distant North California, and I would help swallow a long, golden grass -covered slope. Then the wind changed slightly and the intense gray smoke slope, which waved harmlessly, turned and swallowed me.

I was blind and coughing in seconds. The most intense heat I felt seemed to tear the only one exposed in my body: My face. As the flames approached, I supported them in a few meters until they were stuck in front of a long fence, which had no place to go.

In this case, I would be alone. However, I was together with Len Nielson, the Chief of Burns, who prescribed the California forest and fire protection department, which was cool as the other side of the pillow.

Like a pilot, which allowed passengers to fix the seat belts, Nielson suggested that I would not wrap around my face with fire -resistant fire -resistant hanging from my bright yellow helmet. Then he told me to take a few steps to the left.

And like this, we entered the suffocating smoke and gentle morning sunlight. The temperature seemed to have fallen a few hundred degrees.

“It was uncomfortable, but it could be tolerated, right?” Nielson asked with a reassuring grin. “The prescribed fires are very much about trust.”

Dripping gasoline on dry grass and deliberately felt wildly reckless for someone who involved in the California countryside, especially the state’s very often the state’s interview with survivors of catastrophic fires. However, as Nielson said, “Good Fire” is necessary to reduce the existing fuel for bad fever that makes headlines. The principle is as old as simple.

The landscape burned regularly before the European settlers came to California and insist on suppressing the fire at every opportunity. Sometimes lightning fired the flames; Sometimes they were indigenous people who use the fire as an obvious and very effective tool to clean the unwanted vegetation from their fields. Whatever the reason, most of the land in California was widespread once a decade.

“That’s why it was relatively calm, N Nielson said, dancing as the flames made and we just turned around a few meters. “There was no big fuel load, so there was no chance of being really busy.”

Considering this, the state set an ambitious target to burn at least 400,000 acres of wild nature every year in the early 2020s. Since the agencies, including the US Forestry Services, Land Management Office and the National Park Service, have approximately half of the total land of the state, the majority of these will have to be managed by the Federal Government. And they have more than half of the state forests.

Cal Fire Crew members established a burned burned near Hopland in Mendocino district.

(Josh Edelson / The Times For)

However, California officials are concerned that their ambitious goals will be prevented by Elon Musk’s budgeting White House Advisory Team, which will be prevented by deep interruptions to these federal agencies, called government efficiency or Doge department. In recent months, the forest service has lost about 10% of the labor force to collective layoffs and ignitions. While the firefighters were exempted from personnel deductions by order of Doge, employees who managed logistics and cleanse countless regulatory barriers were not to get permission for the foreseen burns.

“In my opinion, California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said,” In my opinion, it is an objective fact that California will be less safe than the forest fire, “he said. In the first period of President Trump, he remembered how Trump accused the state’s fires against the state officials who said that the forests could not “scratch” enough.

“Fifty -seven percent of our forests are the owner and managed of the federal government, Crow said Crowfoot. If someone fails, he argued that he was the president.

The US Ministry of Agriculture Spokesman Larry Moore, who controls the Forest Service, said that business cuts will not affect the agency’s efforts to prevent fire.

Moore continues to ensure that it has the most powerful and most prepared Wildland Firefighters in the world, Mo said Moore with the forest service. The leaders of the agency “are determined to preserve the basic security positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”

Cal Fire Crew members draw the direction and scope of a burn foreseen in Mendocino district.

(Josh Edelson / The Times For)

However, last month Gov. Gavin Newsom added $ 72 million to the state forest management budget to close the gap expected to be released by federal agencies. However, forest fire experts say that it is only a decrease in the bucket. To safely prescribed the prescribed burns, to ensure that local inhabitants and regulators are on the ship, and the back of the curtain Cajoling takes too many boots.

Since people accidentally make a testis when you drink from an elementary or old human house, burn plans should clean the important obstacles offered by California Environmental Quality Law and Air Quality Regulators.

Most of the first -class grapes of vineyard owners could be a little too much “smoky için for wine lovers. When the big day finally happened in early June, more than 60 firefighters, more than one firefighters, at least one bulldozer and a firefighter helicopter, appeared in the case of something wrong.

They gathered at the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center, Students are informed about farm and wild ecology.

But this wasn’t a school project. A fire that began a few years ago on the surrounding hills threatened to trap the people in the center, so the burned area was only on two roads that could be used to escape.

“We are trying to create a buffer to go out if necessary,” John Bailey, the director of the center, said. “But we are also trying to create a buffer to prevent the forest fire from coming to the center.”

In Mendocino district, smoke spreads from a burn foreseen. (Josh Edelson / The Times For)

As firefighters pulled their protective yellow jackets and pants and filling the drops of drops with a mixture of diesel and gasoline, Nielson twisted and a fistful yellow lawn. He ran out of his fingers, showed it to his deputies and all shook their heads in disappointment – very moist.

Thick sea layer clouds filled the sky at 7 am and kept the relative moisture too high for a good roasting. For many years, I saw that the firefighters had been bored and disappointed for the first time, which included forest fires for many years, because nothing would burn.

The clouds were cleaned until 8:45 in the morning, the sun came out and the grass at Nielson’s fist began to break and beat. It was time to go to work.

It began with a single firefighter who would fill the sky and drag the town of Ukiah with a familiar orange fire season and walk along the edge of a cleaned way of dirt. While moving, Damla made a small flame with a torch, drew a line like a child working with the edges of a picture in a painting book.

Additional firefighters, burned black grass ribbons until the other edges of the area run. In this way, when they illuminate the center of the area, it is not important to which direction the fire went, flames – most cases – would not escape the relatively small test patch.

On the uphill edge of the patch, along the top of a back, full -protective toothed firefighters leaned over a wooden fence against the flames that climbed the hill behind them. They all did this before, and before the burning, they trusted the black strips of pre -burned herbs to stop the fire.

His things were to hold his eyes down on the other side of the back, which did not need to burn. If any embers saw them dragging them into the “green” region, they would immediately move to extinguish these flames.

Nielson and I were standing along the fence. In addition to the pre -burnt grass circle that protected us, we were on a dirt road of about four meters. For an experienced person, this was a very big buffer. I was the only one who escaped even when the smoke and flames came to our way.

Later, when I admitted how much panic I felt, Nielson said that for the first time, when they were swallowed with smoke, he said that many people came to him. It is particularly dangerous in grass fires because they move very quickly. People can be completely surprised, work wrongly, and said, “Cooking.”

Len Nielson, Chief of Cal Fire Personnel, are particularly dangerous because they move very quickly. People can lose their direction in the smoke, work wrongly and “cook”.

(Josh Edelson / The Times For)

However, this test patch was only heating. Nielson and the crew were checking to ensure that the fire would behave as they expected – pushed in the right direction with the gentle breeze and after the uphill.

“If you wonder where the fire will go and how fast it will move, think of water,” he said. The water barely moves on a flat surface, but when it goes downhill, it takes speed. If the walls enter a steep section where they approach like a funnel, it becomes a waterfall.

“Fire is doing the same thing, but it’s a gas, so it goes in the opposite direction, N said Nielson.

With this and with a few other pointers – we watched that three men drew a fire line on the base of a large, beautiful oak tree in the middle of the slope – Nielson took me to the bottom of the hill and gave me a drop of torch.

When everyone was in the position and all the security measures were fulfilled, he asked me to set a 6 -meter flame wall, which would go up the hill and consume dozens of acres in a few minutes.

“It will be a little hot here, N Nielson said,“ But it will only warm up for a second. ”

When I leaned on the torch and fueled the grass, it was heat crushing. Even though not everyone worked on the fire seem to be undisputed, I was temporary and terrified. My right hand reached forward to make Nielson’s points and lines, but my butt was out of it.

I asked Nielson how hot the next flames were. Um I knew that, ”he said, shrugging a shoulder. “I probably want to say it’s between 800 and 1,200 degrees.”

As the slope is still burning, I peeled all the protective gears, jumped into a car and followed the smoke to the north along the 101 highway. Until lunch, Ukiah, a 16,000 -person town, who bills himself as a door to Redwoods, was covered in the haze.

Everyone smelled of smoke, but the prescribed burns became very common in the region, no one looked worried.

“Do it!” Judy Hyler said, as he and his two friends out of Stan’s Maple Cafe. The veteran of the widespread destruction of forest fires since the past years did not hesitate when he asked how he felt the effort. “I prefer to be prescribed, controlled and managed more than we’ve seen before.”