[smeej]

I hear this a lot from a West Coast perspective, but I don't understand it.

Northern New England is almost entirely forested, and it isn't managed or maintained to anything like the same degree as West Coast forests, and yet we don't have the problems with giant segments going up in smoke every year. We don't even really have suburbs. We just have towns that are mostly forests, separated from each other by areas that are completely forests with one road going through.

I'm (obviously) no expert in this, but it seems that our largely untouched forests do a lot better than the ones that are so intensively managed. I have to imagine this has been studied and state maintenance of forests isn't just some giant government boondoggle that leads to massive fires and no one's noticed, but that's how it looks from several thousand miles away!

[amanaplanacanal]

Part of it is just different climate. The west coast is mostly what is called Mediterranean, which means we have almost no rain during the summer months. By August everything is dry as a bone and ready to burn. Don't you guys get rain pretty much year round?

[mountainb]

There's just so much moisture in the plants that fires don't do that much under most normal circumstances in New England. Storm damage is a bigger concern but that just makes trees ugly/dead or has them falling on power lines and houses. Rotted trees are just wet, gross, and full of bugs -- they're not necessarily fire hazards.