So Steve, the leader for our group, walked in to our room this morning and started grousing with Rob about a notice they both got from the Flagstaff Fire Department. They both live in the same part of town, adjacent to the forest, and apparently the Fire Dept. is going to start checking the consumables around people's houses out there and advising them on any clearing they'll need to do. Sounds like a good idea to me. The more work firefighters have to put into preserving individual homes, the less resources they have to work on controlling the fire as a whole.
But then Steve brought up a good point, which had occurred to me when last year's Rodeo-Chediski fire tore through communities in Eastern Arizona. After the fire chewed those places up, there were still some homes that the firefighters or the whim of the fire were able to preserve. And so he said, "What's raking the pine needles around my house going to do when me and everyone else have pine trees all over our yards? I say let it burn! I don't want to be the one house standing in the middle of a black matchstick wasteland. Just burn the house to the ground. Start from scratch." (He's upset because he lost his wallet in his house and can't find it because they have too much stuff.) We imagined the evacuation notice going out and Steve hanging back long enough to ignite the foundation of his house with a drip torch. There's times I've wanted to do that to my back yard, that's for sure.
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