Why don't they just knock shit down and till up the earth in a wide band around these towns to make themselves a fire break?
Towns are constantly expanding their borders in order to get more tax base. Areas inside a firebreak are less desirable to build in, because people like big trees near their homes, so it makes it harder for the city to expand. Additionally, you have to rebuild the firebreak over and over and over as it keeps growing brush on it, and also because next year's town is bigger than this year's.
The smarter option is clearing the deadwood and underbrush from the forested areas. If forest fires can't turn into raging infernos fueled by those things, they're easier to contain and fight. In nature, the underbrush is normally what burns as most California big trees have bark like asbestos, if you visit the big redwood trees in Yosemite their lower trunks and covered in burn marks that couldn't get through the bark. But that has its own problems. I lived in Oakhurst, California, about thirty years ago when they tried something similar.
In order to clear things out, the city council brought in a logging company to cut out all the deadwood and clear the brush. We got an absolute torrent of propaganda from the local green party about how they were there to clear-cut Yosemite, sabotage, the works. Before the logging company could move forward, the entire area burned down and we got more propaganda about how the loggers were trying to kill the forest so that there would be more deadwood to harvest from the burned trees.
Thing is, a Japanese tourist heading to Yosemite with a camcorder caught the arsonists on tape... and it was the green party leadership that started the fire. They decided if they couldn't stop the council, they'd burn it all down instead and use the fire to score more political points.
apnews.com
