Controlling Wildfires
In northern California—as well as in other western U.S. states—the summer wildfires have become larger and more frequent, killing people and burning millions of acres, with homes and other buildings.
Firefighters use a number of techniques to control these fires, but the most common is to create a control line—or fire line—around the leading edge of the fire. This involves removing the fuel—brush, trees, anything combustible—in a wide path around the fire, so that when the leading flames arrive at the control line, there’s nothing left to burn, and the fire just burns itself out.
Creating a control line can be done by hand with crews using hoes, axes, and chainsaws, but this is very strenuous and slow work. (Go outside sometime and scrape everything down to mineral dirt on dry, hard, rocky ground, and you’ll vow never to do it again.)
It’s far more effective to use bulldozers, but this requires both the equipment and considerable skill to remove all the organic material and scrape the ground to reach a surface that can’t burn.
These bulldozer operators are each moving a 20-40,000 pound piece of equipment, using numerous levers, pedals, and wheels that control the dozer’s speed and direction, while simultaneously directing hydraulic systems that lift, depress, and tilt the blade that scrapes the ground. This is extremely difficult to do on ground that is uneven, sometimes quite steep, and often punctuated by large rocks and trees.
Prepared Helpers
I read an article recently that described how each fire season seems to be worsening in severity and length, overwhelming the number of bulldozers and operators used by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.
In response Cal Fire has increasingly turned to private bulldozer operators, many of whom honed their skills in a past era when logging was prevalent in the area. Many of these men are in their late 60s and early 70s—retirement age—but their skills have proven to be invaluable.
One operator said he’d begun learning the operation of heavy equipment as a child. “I’d nap in my daddy’s lap while he laid road with his dozer,” he said. These men do brave and valuable work. One man was interviewed while he operated his machine ten feet from a spot where a tree exploded as the heat became intense enough.
Always Preparing Our Children
Just as the best way to put out a fire is to PREVENT it, to prepare for it, and to isolate it. The best way to raise children is to love and teach them—preventing and preparing for crises—rather than attempting to put out a fire that is out of control.
Creating a control line is far easier than putting a fire out directly with water or other flame suppressant.
Moreover, forestry departments have come to value the decades of training and experience of their bulldozer operators, men who unwittingly prepared for so many years to help perform a task that long ago they couldn’t see coming.
As parents we cannot know what is coming in our children’s lives—the emergencies, the accidents, outside influences, and more—but we can be constantly preparing them for those experiences.
We can teach them to feel loved, loving, and responsible, so that when fires do come into their lives—as they inevitably will—they’ll be prepared to contain them or even prevent them entirely.
Almost none of us was trained to raise children in a way where the fires would not burn out of control. We can’t hire someone to do it for us—not effectively—but we CAN become trained, using the assets available on RealLoveParents.com.
Further, we can ask for the assistance of “old-timers” who have more experience than we do with loving and teaching. They can love and teach us, and they can guide us as we learn to love and teach our children.
In the process, we’re getting the kind of help that will save lives, just as the “old-timers” in the western United States are helping the process of saving property and lives.
