"You have live fuel and you have dead fuel…"
What we have to do is get rid of the trees, and you have to get rid of the fuel on the ground. So you have live fuel and you have dead fuel. We can thin it mechanically with chain saws and those sorts of things. And there's all kinds of logging equipment for mechanical equipment on big pieces of machinery that'll come and thin for you. But basically, some sort of mechanical thinning, getting rid of, thinning the live fuel out, or certain species of the live fuel, however you want to do that, to reduce the density of the crown. Then, you also have to do something with the dead material on the ground. If you have small projects like around towns, that the city of Flagstaff's doing, or I'm sure you've seen where they clear out power lines and so on, they have chippers. That works very well, as long as there's a place to take the chips to.
...When you're dealing with Mother Nature, Mother Nature backlashed every time. That happens. But you can have the best laid plans, all those things, but when the wind changes unexpectedly—and it does—I mean, you can have it planned - When it changes unexpectedly, you're in a world of hurt, if it will cross your line, as it did in Cerro Grande, and it did with the firefighters who were unfortunately killed here the first part of the week in Washington. When it's unexpected like that, you're going to have some disasters. So I mean, you're going to get burnt by your fire.
The other thing is with fire, it's very imprecise. When you're mechanically thinning, you can say, "I want to leave that tree, cut this one, this one, this one, leave that one, and cut this one, this one." Fire doesn't do that. And you can kind of see, well, if I have a fire of this intensity with this temperature, this relative humidity, and this wind, it'll take out all of these trees and leave these. Well, that's in a plan, but at two o'clock in the afternoon when that fire happens to get to that little spot, it may not be exactly that way, so you end up maybe losing some of the trees, or all the trees that you wanted to keep. And it may not even burn the ones you wanted. So it's very imprecise, but it's what we have. You can't minutely manage every acre of a national forest when you're dealing with millions of acres. It's just there isn't enough money in the treasury or time to get things done. As I said, we're decades behind. We have got to do projects on a landscape scale basis. It's going to be risky, but it's the only way that I know of to get it done, because we're going to continue to lose hundreds of thousands of acres to wildfire every year, and every year we wait, it just delays it that much longer.