Why Finland is so good at handling forest fires. Hint: It's not because of raking.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Months before devastating wildfires caused havoc in California, firefighters from across Europe headed to Sweden as authorities there struggled to extinguish several massive blazes. Sweden is one of the continent’s greenest countries, and officials there eventually got so desperate that they ordered an air force jet to drop a bomb in the middle of the wildfire’s center to deprive the blaze of oxygen.

The strategy failed, and Sweden’s fires continued to rage for weeks. But just a few hundred miles away, in neighboring Finland, officials worried about a far different problem: not enough wildfires. “From nature’s point of view, the diversity of species and habitats suffers from too few fires,” the Finnish Forest Association recently concluded in a report.

In Sweden, officials were stymied by their neighbor’s luck: Weather maps showed that both countries were adversely affected by the same rare, extreme heat this summer.

Viewed from space, the differences appeared especially striking. As all of Finland’s neighboring countries, including Russia, battled massive blazes, the skies over Finland were smoke-free.

But it wasn’t really luck, Finnish researchers soon let everyone know. Instead, Finland has one of the world’s most successful strategies to counter wildfires, and it is now being more closely examined in other nations recently struck by large-scale fires.

Over the weekend, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto was forced to clarify that this strategy does not consist of raking, however. He was contradicting his U.S. counterpart, President Trump, who said Saturday as he was touring California’s wildfire areas that Finnish authorities “spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”

“You’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forests, it’s very important,” Trump said.

The Finnish president confirmed that he discussed wildfire prevention with Trump, but rejected the suggestion that raking ever came up. The forest service in Finland does carry out controlled burns of the forest floor mostly to clear away underbrush and also promote new saplings.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-finland-is-so-good-at-handling-forest-fires-hint-its-not-because-of-raking/ar-BBPSfXG?li=BBnb7Kz

[maxsolomon]

1. CA is not Finland, but it does have methods in place.

Napa, CA, for instance, requires that properties are maintained; lawns cut and brush cleared. They inspect and warn and fine. Despite this, last year huge areas of the town burned to the ground.

The coastal scrub ecosystem that burned in 1000 Oaks/Malibu is not "rakeable". It consists almost entirely of dry scrub. It will burn, sooner or later, as it has for millenia. The only solution is to disallow construction in it, the way that hurricane-exposed coastal communities should not rebuild.

In the Sierra foothills (Paradise), look at the footage: the trees are often still there; it's the homes that are burned to the ground. Would non-combustible materials (metal, concrete) reduce the damage?

In the High Sierras, I've camped in Lassen NP where selective "raking" programs were being used. Hugh piles of underbrush and downed logs were pulled together in "teepees" for winter burning. Outside of the campground, there are millions of acres that are "unraked", and aren't going to be tended to anytime soon.

What starts the fires? Logging operations, electrical transmission lines, sparks from truck chains, idiots smoking or tossing firecrackers (Columbia Gorge). Humans are the spark, and they're not going to be banned from the woods.

The same problems apply throughout the dry West: the east side of the Cascades in particular. Climate change makes the woods drier. This issue is like Rampage Shootings: it's not going away.

[Wounded Bear]

4. Not all fires are human started...

lighting starts it's share of fires, too. And as the strength of storms increase, lightning strikes increase.

[maxsolomon]

7. yes - don't know if that's the cause of the Camp Fire or the Woolsey fire, though

do you?

[Wounded Bear]

9. Reports I've heard are that it was started by power lines...

high winds downed some lines or something, and it sparked.

Was an article in the local paper on it.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/how-a-brush-fire-erupted-into-californias-worst/

PULGA, Calif. — Before there was a spark, there was the wind.

On the morning of Nov. 8, as the sun rose over the isolated mountains in the Sierra Nevada, gale-force winds tore through the canyon. A fire outpost on the Feather River recorded blasts of 52 mph — a bad omen in a national forest that hadn’t had a satisfying rain since May.

From his station bunk at the head of Jarbo Gap, Capt. Matt McKenzie of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection woke to the sound of pine needles pelting the roof.

At 6:15 a.m., a Pacific Gas & Electric high-voltage line near the Poe Dam generating station 6 miles away malfunctioned. A report of fire came at 6:29 a.m.

I didn't mean to say you were wrong, just that your statement was incomplete.

[Blue_true]

5. Southern California has lots of housing that sit at the edge of gullies

that have dense brush and small trees. The gullies are habitat for things like rabbits, mice, bears, rattlesnakes, ect. It is beautiful to look at, but if a lawn goes dry and a gully catch fire, everything will burn.

[Denzil_DC]

2. Finland DID have forest fires in this summer's drought.

Wildfires rage in Lapland, more threaten Finland from the east
https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/wildfires_rage_in_lapland_more_threaten_finland_from_the_east/10316400

Finnish forest fire sparked by sunbeam through bottle in bone-dry weather
http://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2018/05/31/finland-fire-drought-bottle-forest/

That's just two reports out of many. We watched in horror from the UK (where we had our own more minor problems).

As the OP article points out, aside from its modifications to forest management programs, Finland's efforts to counter fires are helped by an extensive network of access roads and tracks that make it easier for firefighters to attend earlier, and the fact that it has well over 100,000 lakes (not to forget that large areas are under snow for a tidy proportion of the year).

Despite the article's claim that Finland is unique in northern Europe in seeing forest fires decrease massively over the 20th century, Finland's suffering - and will suffer - from the effects of climate change like the rest of us:

From climate projections (SRES A1B emission scenario) changes in temperature and precipitation have been estimated for 2010?2029 and 2080?2099 compared with 1961-1990 (8). From these estimates, changes in the number of days with a high forest fire danger in Finland were estimated for the forest fire ‘high season’, i.e. June to August. The climate change projections showed an average summertime mean temperature rise in Finland by 1.5°C for 2010?2029 and by 4°C for 2080?2099, and a general precipitation increase for most of the country. These changes would result in an increase of the probability of forest fire danger days (FDDs) by 56-75% for 2010?2029 and 71-91% for 2080?2099. The estimated probability increase was largest in northern Finland and smallest in eastern Finland. On average, the number of forest fire danger days was projected to increase by 1 day for 2010?2029 and by 7 to 10 days for 2080?2099, compared with 1961-1990. The uncertainty in this number is mainly due to uncertainty in the sign and magnitude of future precipitation change. The actual number of fires ignited, however, also strongly depends on socio-economical changes (8).

Besides a projected increase of the number of forest fire danger days during June to August, the forest fire season probably will start earlier as well due to a projected earlier end of the snow season in the boreal environment (9). Forest fire activity starts soon after snowmelt, when organic debris from the previous growing season is exposed and dried. A shift of fire activity towards the spring has already been observed (10).

https://www.climatechangepost.com/finland/forest-fires/

The article I've cited points to a move from conifers (which Finland grows en masse, mainly to service the wood pulp and furniture industries) to broadleaf as a more sustainable future strategy.

[Gothmog]

3. The Finns have a new hashtag that is great-#haravointi

Link to tweet

[Tipperary]

6. Everyone needs to read it. They are totally trolling trump.

A much needed laugh.

[Denzil_DC]

8. FWIW: "Finnish Biologist Corrects Trump On Rakes"

(Not in the best of English, but a surprisingly interesting read.)

...

– The soil and vegetation type of Finland, typical for the Boreal vegetation zone, is different than that in Temperate regions. The soil and vegetation would make any extensive raking HIGHLY unpractical and useless, up to directly damaging, in our large forests.

– Due to the climatic conditions, in most forests there is NOT just a mineral soil or a mull where the plants grow. This would be a very mechanistic view. Instead, on the (often “podzole”-type of) mineral soil here, there is typically a felt-like layer of old, brown, still partly un-decayed, fibrous humus layer, consisting e.g. of lignin of tree remains, mixed with living and dead plant roots, fungal hyphae and so on. This layer is rather acidic and can be e.g. from 5 to 15 cm thick and is very important for the forest. If it gets deeply dry in dry summers, it will easily burn, but IT CANNOT BE REMOVED BY RAKING, without damaging the forest’s root and mycorrhizal network. The forest trees absorb their water and nutrients largely in this layer, with the help of the symbiotic fungi, and the mentioned humus layer acts as a moisture buffer for the trees.
...
– The continuously falling needles and twigs, when they decay, return important nutrients back to the forest trees. Removing them regularly would deprive the trees and other plants from the bulk of long-term nutrients, not to speak of the extremely complex mesh of nutrient chains of thousands of other forest organisms, from fungi and insects to birds and mammals.

– Any small site CAN of course be raked and many people in rural houses or summer cottages DO rake their lawns and sometimes adjacent forest edges in, say, around 5 to maximally about 20 m radius from the house. The basic purpose of this is NOT fire prevention or forest management, but to keep the yard tidy, to keep the lawn mowable, to accumulate some litter to the garden, just out of custom and so on. This is not forest management, this is cleaning a yard. Such places would develop into grassy sites under the trees, not typical forest.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/finnish-biologist-corrects-trump-on-rakes

[Goes on at some considerable technical length to question why the hell anybody would rake a forest, and it all comes down to climate change in the end.]