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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...

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All of the Rangers and CalFire people I know never call them "controlled burns". Rather they call then "prescribed burns"... for exactly this reason.

In Australia (or at least, the West of it) we call them "Hazard Reduction Burns".

I'd rather experience frequent uncontrolled burns in areas that do regular controlled burns than even a single uncontrolled burn in an area that doesn't.

Without prescribed burns it's only a matter of time until we experience another 'Big Blow Up' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910

This unfortunately has happened more than once in NM. The Cerro Grande fire started in similar circumstances and almost burned down LANL.

IIRC they actually had to temporarily displace the radioactive glass from the original Trinity tests as it was in danger from the fire.

Canada recently had a "controlled burn" that was made by an international association. They weren't trained on Canadian forests properly, now it's a huge wildfire.

Which was this? The Banff one [may 4] doesn't seem related to this, and if anything seems to defend the practice by example - 31 hectares burned, 28 of which were planned, and only three horse stables were damaged despite weather changing suddenly and spreading the fire.

If you think 24,000 people evacuated and 3 extra hectares burned in an populated area isn't a failure, I don't know what to tell you.

It also caused other fires in the area, which weren't announced since it would make them look bad.

If you look at the wildfire map, it doesn't seem to be noted: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3ffcc2d0ef3e4e0999b0c...

AB governance is terrible right now.

Yes, and this is (at least today) unsolvable.

It's still got a much higher expected value to do prescribed burns have some of them turn uncontrolled than do nothing, or do what is happening now (pretend we can control for every variable).

Weather forecasting is pretty amazing these days, along with modelling, has changed the equations compared to decades past. It becomes a question of how much risk are you prepared to take vs how often you want to do a prescribed burn (sometimes favourable conditions (still, humid, not raining) don't show up for months or years.

Of course, this is discussed in the article.

It should be addressed in the headline. Controlled burns can prevent wildfires. There, I fixed it.

Ok, we've canned the title above. Thanks!

How often do they get out of hand? Like in terms of percentage?

The article cites a link and claims 1 in a 1000.

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