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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

In the same way that the Japanese reactor incident was self inflicted, sure. Life is unsurprisingly more complicated. And a large portion of what made this possible is growth always tends to build things that are not resistant to problems not constantly faced. Is why many trees in my yard have to be aggressively pruned or they will fall under their own weight.

Like, I get it. Much of this could have gone differently. As much as it annoys folks to say, much likely could have still gone the same way, given conditions that actually existed. Arm chairing this is a fun private exercise. Casting blame, though, jumps over to something else.

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It's also not necessarily the case that we can reinstate old burn practices successfully. Zero-fire policies and climate change have made it harder to run prescription burns. And when we do, these fires today burn hotter, larger, and more completely than historical fires once did. How quickly our ecosystems can recover from large scale prescription burns is an open question, nevertheless whether we are able to run enough to make a difference. There is some evidence to suggest they don't recover as easily as they once did.

It's a thorny problem. There's good reason to believe we could have been in a better situation today, but we should be skeptical of overly simplistic approaches to correction.

> It's also not necessarily the case that we can reinstate old burn practices successfully.

I thought I saw somewhere that they actually planned to do burns but determined that it was so dry they couldn't do it safely. I couldn't really blame them for not endangering people's lives and waiting until the situation improved and the burns could happen safely, it just sucks that the fires happened before it could be done.

But perhaps this was 5 years too late. A burn much sooner would’ve been much safer regardless

>the New South Wales fire service most recently adopted rule 10/50, which gives homeowners the right to clear trees within 10 meters of a home and non-tree vegetation within 50 meters of a home, without approvals. No friction!

You can look at it as really complicated but quite likely the above rule change could fix/have fixed most of the problems.

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