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Comment by JacobThreeThree | Hacker News Reader

>fires are more and more common and more and more devastating

Maybe some individual fires are more devastating, but the statistics don't really bear out the "more and more common" narrative.

According to the US forest service, the 5 year average for both number of fires and acreage burned is lower than the 10 and 15 year averages.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firest...

Same story in Canada where the number of fires and total burned acreage has been decreasing slightly over the past four decades.

https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb

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this is amazingly wrong. Fires occurred in California since 2017 of voracious nature. It made world headlines.

According to more up to date reports I got to from that website, none of those years were exceptionally bad. The worst one recently (2020), was slightly worse than 2017, and approximately equal to 2015. It seems to be a trend of more moderately bad years (and, probably just them happening in California when they normally happen elsewhere, so more headlines). Not particularly large individual years.

It does look like the 10 year average has come up a bit, as 2010s report lists the 10 year average at ~6.8 million acres and our current 10 year average is ~7.2 million.

Full report (PDF warning), page 13 for what I'm looking at: https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%2...

Link to more reports for other years: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive-services/intelligence

These numbers seem to support the grandparent comment that the absence of controlled burns was causing more fires that covered more area. 2023 was a ridiculously low fire year, and at least one reason for that is the last few years of destructive fires finally kicked in the political will to do controlled burning. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2023

imagine for a moment, a firetruck driving down a street at 12 miles per hour; next to the truck is a dog from the firehouse, running along side.

What you describe is similar to "the dog decided to turn left at the corner, so things are better now"

The sheer number of people involved in fire response, and the deadly and immediate nature of their work, has natural links to military style leadership and organizational behavior.

No way, at all.. is "more controlled burning recently" the driving factor in the new stats.

The budgets and the size of the destruction, are hard for a person to think of.. in California

Real devastation was caused by "catastrophic" fires, burning at higher temperatures than previously recorded. Extensive forest die-off preceded these events in California. This is not over in one or two rainy years, since recent shrub growth is subject to die-off in a dry year and will burn.

You clearly feel very strongly about this, but maybe try not to assume that you are the only person who reeeeeally gets the scale of this stuff.

OP referenced North America, not California.

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