If you live on the East Coast then you take the wind for granted. On the Pacific Coast, the winds blow fast and furious, especially as you go up in altitude. Its very hard to control a burn here on most days, especially given the water cycle here. There is vastly more fuel in October and November than earlier in the year as the last rains are about 6 months past.

Controlled burns are probably done best during a short 1-2 month window when ground cover is dry enough, but those are also typically high wind months. To have any control of a burn here you need to be lucky (low winds for a few days), it needs to be a very small prescribed area, and probably needs to be at less than peak fuel.

This all amounts to a very small window for doing a prescribed burn. Given how big many of the forests are, and how much of the state is covered with them, I don’t see how you can have much of any control over a prescribed fire started there.

Certainly not without the heroic effort it takes to put out wildfires. I don’t know how we can ask firefighters to risk their life for a prescribed burn.