Not enough "resources" to fight California wildfires

[intrepidity]

I will never understand this.

It's one thing if fires burn out of control because there's too much smoke for aircraft to attack by air, and remote terrain makes ground assault difficult or impossible. There are some valid reasons.

But what is happening in California right now is fires are being left to burn "because of lack of resources!"

Money. Not enough MONEY to stop the burning down of old growth California Redwoods.

What the actual fuck is wrong with us?!?

I will never, ever wrap my head around this. Ever.

Hey Bill Gates, Elon Musk, (et al), all you filthy, filthy billionaires, just go fuck yourselves and choke on your dollar bills!

[RockRaven]

1. A lot of the brute force manpower is prison labor, much of which is sidelined due to covid

quarantines within the prison system. Because mass incarceration is a massive number of people in close proximity. During a respiratory virus pandermic. What could go wrong?

This is a generational/systemic fucked-up situation. Predates Gavin, predates Jerry Part II, predates Arnold... Relying on prison labor to fight fires is immoral, to begin with. And unwise, as we are now experiencing.

Yes, the acute situation also requires more equipment and highly trained specialists than are available, so some mutual aid requests are inevitable. But there have also been local media reports of manpower shortages in Northern CA related to prison quarantines. That is wrong on so many levels...

[NNadir]

2. If you study redwoods, in particular sequoias, one can learn that fire is an important...

...part of their life cycle.

Fires in an era of climate change is another thing, but fire has always been a factor in redwood ecology.

If one goes to King's Canyon NP, Sequoia NP, Yosemite, one can see that many surviving sequoias have huge burn marks and are still quite alive.