[M4v3R]

There’s actually stuff being done about preventing Wildfires in the US, controlled burns being of these things, creating “fuel breaks” (gaps that prevent fire from progressing) is another, and there’s a LOT more. But a lot of time that’s not enough and the reason for that is like with every other government effort - bureaucracy and endless paperwork. It can take months before a project can even start because the forest management has to compile all the necessary paperwork. But they are really passionate about doing this to prevent as many wildfires as possible.

Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.

[fragmede]

fascinating. what about the paperwork makes it take so long? is it the coordination between all the relevant agencies and landowners?

[M4v3R]

You have to gather a lot of information and answer dozens of questions before you start a project. In the planning phase you have to do scoping, make a public notice, consult the local communities, take wildlife, insects, wetlands, native tribes and many more things into account (which require gathering all sorts of data from national databases). There are multiple people inside a National Forest’s office that are working on all this.

Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase.

The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.

[putnambr]

This is hearsay, but folks in Colorado tend to complain about federal air quality guidelines prohibiting controlled burns during the times of the year that it makes sense to do a controlled burn. During the winter, air quality guidelines dictate you can't exceed a certain amount of wood smoke in an area for example. NEPA studies might be another.

[adgjlsfhk1]

the fact that if you do a controlled burn badly, it's a forest fire that kills people and does 10s of millions in property damage

[fragmede]

that doesn't explain why the paperwork takes so long at all.