Maggie Kurbhaker
speaker
25 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2018
last heard Aug 2018
Maggie Kurbhaker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I am consistently amazed at the way that our record keeping in a really meticulous, accurate way doesn't go back very far.
I did a story a couple of years ago about tornadoes in the US and
Over and over, basically, I was told that I shouldn't trust the numbers before the 1980s.
That is something that you hear a lot with natural disasters.
We have had more than 40,000 fires total this year, year to date.
We have burned more than 5,600,000 acres.
One of the things that I think is really interesting about this is that the number of fires is actually lower than average.
So right now, we're about 7% lower on the number of fires than the 10-year average, while we are about 28% higher on the area burned than the 10-year average.
So the amount of land that's getting burned is bigger and bigger and bigger.
But the number of fires is smaller.
And that's in keeping with these long term trends that we've kind of seen over the last 30 years or so.
30 or 35 years ago, the norm was really to put out as many fires as possible as fast as possible.
But forests are supposed to burn occasionally.
You know, you have some of these trees that actually need fire to reproduce.
So without these regular small burns, what we ended up with was this buildup of dry, tender leaves and sticks and branches down on the forest floor.
And over time, that has helped to make these fires we couldn't put out bigger and hotter and spread them further.
And at the same time, you know, we just stopped trying to put them out so quickly.
Particularly in the last 15 years or so, it's become more normal to just let fires do their thing.
You know, we have a more natural means of fire management now, which is better for these forests.
It's also better for the firefighters who were putting their lives at risk, trying to keep these fires small unnecessarily.
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