2002 was the year of the actual largest fire in recent Colorado history. By May 18th of that year, the fire season was in full swing and testimony at a Senate Committee warned that lots of people were building new homes in places that were doomed to burn. Ten years later they burned.
People do stupid things like build houses in the middle of a pile of kindling wood, and later blame their stupidity on global warming.
IMPLEMENTATION OF NATIONAL FIRE PLAN IN COLORADO
———-
SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2002
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Energy and Natural Resource,
Golden, CO.……..
Now, Brandi, if you take that map, maybe, and hold it up next to the next one, the next one is the year 2000, just 4 years later, the year that Los Alamos burned. By the way, we had a very bad start. By the end of May, we had burned over one million acres with a total of 8.4 million acres for the year, and look how green that vegetation is. Look at the difference between those two areas of Colorado just in that amount of 2
years.And we have a third one, too. And this one is 2002. And if you’ll look at the lack of moisture we are facing this year, look at how brown we are, and it’s only May. How little snowpack there is, too, between even 2000 and 2002. It’s clearly, you know, when you read the papers and you see the news about the great floods, they’re sure not here. You can see how green it is in just around the Mississippi Valley area, Mississippi Delta area, but clearly, here in the Rocky Mountain range from Canada to Mexico, it is a dry, dry year. That doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but in the relative difference between what we had just a couple years ago and now, that should give us a big indication of what we might be facing this summer.
One thing I don’t show, of course, on any of these maps is all the new homes that are being built in high-fire areas asColorado grows in population. We’re the fourth fastest growingState, as you know. And many of the people in our inwardmigration, they came to this beautiful State because they want to be near the mountains, and they want to be on some nice
secluded dirt road right out there where they land butts upright up to the national forest.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
Colorado’s ‘Epic Firestorm’ Reveals Danger of [OBAMA] Air Force Cuts
The Weekly Standard
A C-130 fitted with the Modular Airborne FireFighting System (MAFFS) can drop 3,000 gallons of fire-retardant material in 5 seconds, and reload in just 15 minutes. This tempo is crucial to containing wildfires like the one devastating Colorado Springs. However, of a current fleet of nearly 380 C-130s, only eight can be fitted with the MAFFS—and four of them are already in the skies over Colorado. With another fire looming in the north of the state, there is no excess capacity to help protect civilian areas. That means thousands of exhausted firefighters on the ground are without enough of the crucial support they need to control the fires.
All this raises concerns about President Obama’s defense budget, which cuts 65 C-130s from the fleet over the next four years. While that will leave 318 C-130s, the demands on the fleet are not shrinking in Afghanistan or other places. Nor did the Air Force have much choice in the matter.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/colorados-epic-firestorm-reveals-danger-air-force-cuts_647897.html