Wildfires

[graveyard johnny]

10 hours ago, Saintslass said:

Surely these fires must be arson related?  

well if they are I would track down a mr  billy joel, that guy seems to protest his innocence too much and its always the ones you least suspect

[damp squib]

On 6/29/2018 at 10:46 AM, iffleyox said:

"Could" doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there..... apparently the fire is in a "no burn" area mandated by English Nature on land owned/managed by the RSPB and United Utilities.

Hobby horse jumpers of both sides seem to want to leap to conclusions. At the moment, the one thing it *doesn't* look like given the land ownership is anything to do with grouse shooting.

Without taking sides at all, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-44648348?SThisFB includes the line from the Professor of Applied Biology at Liverpool University:

"United Utilities and the RSPB didn't think a big fire like this would happen to them but I've been predicting this for 15 years.

"Leaving the land alone causes much more damage than controlled burning because there's more heather to burn so it gets hotter and spreads to the peat, which in turn spreads the fire.

"It wasn't a matter of if, but when, and that when is now."

I realise this post is very old but the idea that "there's more heather to burn so it gets hotter and spreads to the peat, which in turn spreads the fire" is missing the important fact that a fire is far less likely to start in the first place if there is more vegetation as the root systems retain large volumes of water within the soil that would otherwise run off or evaporate.

An even more important contributory factor to wildfires though is that working grouse moors need to be drained. Peat bogs should, in their natural state, be waterlogged year round. Unless there is an unusually prolonged period of drought in summer a wildfire should not be starting on an upland blanket bog.

A final point is that heather only predominates on an upland moor "left alone" during the earliest years of recovery. it is quickly overtaken by bracken and gorse and then pioneer tree species. Once forests are established on an upland they will almost never dry out enough for fire to spread, provided they are native deciduous woodlands.

We have a very warped idea of what a "natural" landscape is. Most of the uplands in Britain and Ireland are man-made ecological deserts as a result of sheep farming and, even worse, grouse moors. I suspect our distant ancestors, living in the temperate rainforests of North West Europe, would have never seen a wildfire in their lives.

[bobbruce]

1 hour ago, graveyard johnny said:

well if they are I would track down a mr  billy joel, that guy seems to protest his innocence too much and its always the ones you least suspect

I was with Billy the other night and I can assure you we didn’t start the fire. 

[Bedford Roughyed]

Has been lots of wildfires over the last few weeks.  Very dry for the time of year.  

 

[Bedford Roughyed]

The fires on Marsden moor knocked the air quality down for 10's of miles around.

More fires tonight -

 

[Steve May]

12 hours ago, Bedford Roughyed said:

The fires on Marsden moor knocked the air quality down for 10's of miles around.

More fires tonight -

 

Having lived in the Colne Valley for thirteen years, including eleven in Marsden itself, my feeling is that moorland fires have increased in frequency enormously in that period. 

I also think that the pattern of rainfall has changed.   It seems that the rain is now less frequent but much heavier when it comes.

That is purely my feeling, I’d love to see some actual weather data. 

[Bedford Roughyed]

7 minutes ago, Steve May said:

It seems that the rain is now less frequent but much heavier when it comes.

That is what the science predicted over a decade ago, and seems to be being proved true.

Some of the stats will mask what is happening, rainfall is often averaged to a month for example.  This does not show if the rain fell in a day or over a month.  

Rochdale was close to flooding (parts did) in March, but it was dry within a week on the moors.  The rain in these intense rainfalls tends to run off straight into the rivers, rather than soak the ground.  

[Bedford Roughyed]

Scotland -

Wales -

 

[Steve May]

7 minutes ago, Bedford Roughyed said:

Rochdale was close to flooding (parts did) in March, but it was dry within a week on the moors.  The rain in these intense rainfalls tends to run off straight into the rivers, rather than soak the ground.  

In March the steam that flows through my back garden overflowed onto my lawn.   Now it’s almost dried up.  

[Griff9of13]

Not just moorland.

 

On my doorstep.

[Copa]

You guys should ask Australia for hints and tips. A 1 million acre fire isn’t unusual here. They can get up to 10 million acres.

They suck. I hate them.

[damp squib]

On 23/04/2019 at 10:56, Bedford Roughyed said:

Rochdale was close to flooding (parts did) in March, but it was dry within a week on the moors.  The rain in these intense rainfalls tends to run off straight into the rivers, rather than soak the ground.  

And and that run-off often carries the soil with it because of the lack of trees anchoring it.

We desperately need to be reforesting uplands with deciduous trees. Trees soak up the excess water from intense rainfall like a sponge and store it during dry spells preventing wildfires.

[Bedford Roughyed]

5 minutes ago, damp squib said:

And and that run-off often carries the soil with it because of the lack of trees anchoring it.

We desperately need to be reforesting uplands with deciduous trees. Trees soak up the excess water from intense rainfall like a sponge and store it during dry spells preventing wildfires.

Quite right, we generally don't have 'forest fires' in the UK because they tend to retain moisture even in a heatwave.  

Soil loss is another one of those things that's a far enough away problem that we can ignore it.  

[damp squib]

12 minutes ago, Bedford Roughyed said:

Quite right, we generally don't have 'forest fires' in the UK because they tend to retain moisture even in a heatwave.  

Soil loss is another one of those things that's a far enough away problem that we can ignore it.  

It's incredible how linked everything is. Soil loss, wildfires, flooding, the collapse of biodiversity - all for sheep farming and grouse shooting that employ a handful of people and couldn't exist without subsidies.

[Steve May]

2 hours ago, damp squib said:

And and that run-off often carries the soil with it because of the lack of trees anchoring it.

We desperately need to be reforesting uplands with deciduous trees. Trees soak up the excess water from intense rainfall like a sponge and store it during dry spells preventing wildfires.

In the Colne Valley around Marsden the Colne Valley Tree Society has planted something like 400,000 trees in the past forty years or so (including 150 on the land I own)

And yet if you look at the area they’ve barely started. 

In the Colne Valley alone I think you could plant perhaps half a billion trees or more.  

[damp squib]

4 hours ago, Steve May said:

In the Colne Valley around Marsden the Colne Valley Tree Society has planted something like 400,000 trees in the past forty years or so (including 150 on the land I own)

And yet if you look at the area they’ve barely started. 

In the Colne Valley alone I think you could plant perhaps half a billion trees or more.  

Yeah it's incredible when you look at the numbers of trees planted by Trees For Life (60,000/year) and it's still barely making a dent.

Do you know if they've removed grazers from the land? The amazing thing is just by removing or even reducing grazing, woodlands will naturally regenerate from dispersed seed far more effectively than human planting.

I really like this video which explains how reintroducing wolves (an apex predator) into Yellowstone National Park allowed forests to recover by reducing the deer population.

As bad as the UK is for deforestation, Ireland is far worse and doesn't have even a fraction of restoration that's going on in the UK 

[Saintslass]

On ‎23‎/‎04‎/‎2019 at 11:12, Griff9of13 said:

Not just moorland.

 

On my doorstep.

I saw mention of this on Twitter but didn't see any follow up.

All I could think about was the red squirrels.  What about the red squirrels?

[Saintslass]

On ‎23‎/‎04‎/‎2019 at 10:42, Steve May said:

Having lived in the Colne Valley for thirteen years, including eleven in Marsden itself, my feeling is that moorland fires have increased in frequency enormously in that period. 

I also think that the pattern of rainfall has changed.   It seems that the rain is now less frequent but much heavier when it comes.

That is purely my feeling, I’d love to see some actual weather data. 

The Fire Service put a call out on TV for people to please stop using portable barbies so perhaps the cause of at least some of these fires is a bit more immediate?  

[Griff9of13]

10 hours ago, Saintslass said:

I saw mention of this on Twitter but didn't see any follow up.

All I could think about was the red squirrels.  What about the red squirrels?

I think the squirrels are fine as this fire was away from the main squirrel reserve area. Not that they restrict themselves to just one part of the woods mind. They are quick and agile little things; hopefully any in the path of the fire would have got away.

[Copa]

Massive fires in New South Wales at the moment... the Guardian has put this graphic together to show how much of NSW has been burnt during the current crisis... they’ve overlaid it over other cities so non-Australians get some perspective..