These speakers will literally shake the car and the cars nearby with the sound and feel of the bass thumping….

In reality, however, these are not the best car speakers unless you are trying to lose your hearing….

I half kiddingly tell new clients from out of state that they’ll do more time for killing a salamander than they will for drunk driving.

Federal emergency declarations usually allow for expeditious fire clearing. You can use a blanket FEIR (federal environmental impact report) for clearing areas that have been pre surveyed and tagged.

Mechanical brush clearing is a fine idea, but the terrain here rarely allows for it… and there are already lots of fuelbreaks in the easy areas.
Herbicides don’t work well at all on the more flammable types of chapparal and at best they work but just leave a 15 foot high dead bush for the next 10 years.
Goats just eat a tunnel since the trunk wood is so hard and oily.
Controlled burns cannot be implemented on a large scale. Chapparal smolders in humidities above 30% and under 30% the fires can get out of control. Chapparal has evolved to burn hot and fast.
The Air Quality Management District rules do not allow burns on most days. Fire regulations based on humidity and winds work to deny most of what is left.
Convict hand labor with chain saws and chippers is the way to go… but that is often opposed by environmental groups or even a lawsuit brought by a landowner.
In the end, even a 400 meter fuelbreak lasts less than a minute in 70 MPH winds with 5% humidity.

My advice is do the best you can on clearance… get rid of the plastic trash cans, Rubbermaid type tool storage, wood fences, fire wood, junipers and Italian cypress from under the eaves. Close the doors and windows, get the pets, kids and important papers in the car and get the hell out before the firefighters do. If you see the professionals rolling up the hoses, you are risking your life.

The tragedy is that this shows that not much has changed even after previous warnings from experts that environmental rules were on a collision course with fire safety in California and many other places, because they prevented the removal of “excess fuel” for fires from dense stands of trees and vegetation. Southern California homes were lost in 1993 after the federal Fish and Wildlife Service told homeowners that mechanical clearing of brush would likely violate the Endangered Species Act. The reason: it could alter the habitat of a newly-listed endangered species called the Stephens kangaroo rat.

Some exemptions were made, and clarifications were issued, but landowners still face the lingering risk that the simple act of building a firebreak can send them down the river if an endangered species is anywhere near their property. California’s Blue Ribbon Fire Commission, which had been created after wildfires in 2003 by then-Governor Gray Davis and whose members included Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as well as state legislators of both parties, concluded that “habitat preservation and environmental protection have often conflicted with sound fire safe planning.”

I’m just recalling that clearing brush and trees from concrete storm water channels was stopped for years in OC because enviros filed lawsuits that claimed that the marsh grasses and trees that sprouted in the flood channels had created a riparian environment that must be maintained for the benefit of the creatures that now called them home.

The significant impairment of the flow of flood waters and the danger to nearby residents caused by these dense patches of growth was claimed to be of secondary interest. Isn’t that what taxpayer supported federal flood insurance is for??

In my college years in the early 1970′s I was an environemntal politics major, but as I realized that the environmental laws were being usurpted by others bent on stopping suburban and rural development for idealogical reasons I left the fold. If you look at the stands taken by groups like the Sierra Club, NRDC and others they have strayed far from the path of protecting the environment, and use environmental issues to fill their coffers for unrelated political action.

Marshall: If you clear brush around your property you could go to jail!

terrig: Whose dumb idea was that?

ScottyDog: At Lake Tahoe they will fine you if you do not get permission to clear brush from the environmental agency and they rarely issue permits.

And somewhere last week, I read that at least one development had a codicil or some such thing prohibiting brush clearing. And the Sierra Club et al have filed lawsuits interfering with clearing brush and dead trees.

Welcome to California. Fire clearance rules in California are pretty strict with high fines for not keeping brush back from structures – and the county will send in a crew to do the clearance and bill you for it. However, in some areas either the Coastal Commission or enviros can control what you do on your own property.

I owned some 1-1/2 acres of raw land that was zoned for semi-rural residential development in Sonoma county near SF. It had native grasses growing on it that we wanted to keep cut back, but the enviros filed an endangered species act lawsuit. It said that the tiger salamander might live on the property and that anything we did to alter the landscape might cause the extinction of the critter. So, for almost two years we were prohibited from clearing the brush while a tiger salamander survey was done in a wide area of the county to determine if in fact our land was the last refuge for said creature. Meanwhile the brush grew to over 6 feet in height and should it have caught fire, the nearby condo complex would have gone up in flames. Guess who would then have been sued for negligence in maintaining a safe property? As soon as the ban was lifted we sold the land and invested elsewhere.

OT
Last week the OC Register reported that the county wants to repair weakened existing levees along the coast near some residential developments before the hoped for winter storms come. Because the levees are within 5 miles of the ocean, the Coastal Commission must grant permission to act. Requests were filed months agao, but they are creeping along in that bureacracy as we approach our rainy season. The county board is now expected to OK the work immediately without the Coastal Commission permits and just pay the steep Coastal Commission fines later. So we have one government agency delaying another government agency from acting in the best interest of the citizens and then agency #1 forces taxpayers of the other agency to pay fines for having done the right thing. Arrgghh!

On October 29th, 2007 at 11:05 am, terrig said:

At Lake Tahoe they will fine you if you do not get permission to clear brush from the environmental agency and they rarely issue permits.

Marshall is correct.