Today I am going to give urban planners a break and write about junk science related to western wildfire. In 2002, Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon all saw the largest fires in their recorded histories. The national total number of acres burned that year was also a near record.
“Why so many large fires?” asks a Forest Service white paper. To answer, the paper quotes a General Accounting Office report: “The most extensive and serious problem related to health of national forests in the interior West is the over-accumulation of vegetation, which has caused an increasing number of large, intense, uncontrollable and catastrophically destructive wildfires.”
