Day 678: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: wildfires

@mariannewest in #freewrite

I was once helping extinguish the wildfires in Taiga (it's a very dense forest in Siberia). Taiga spread on many miles around and has a very scares population maybe one person per 100 square miles. Our brigade was working on the construction site building a local hospital. So we were taken off and sent to help extinguish the fire.

We were given shovels to hypothetically cover the burning trees and bushes with soil to prevent oxygen access and thus limit the spread of the fire. But it was of no use. The forest was so dense that one could hardly move there, and the crust of needles and leaves was probably a couple of feet deep. So shoveling it to fire didn't extinguish anything, but only adding move fire and smoke.

Wildfires in California is a different matter. Every year people over there experience them. Paradoxically they start right before massive sub-tropical rains that also bring much damage. I think that unlike Siberia that is so scarcely populated, California could have devised some sort of scientific defense against wildfires. I don't know, maybe building a system of sprinklers. Surely this would be very expensive, but it will save a lot of money in the long run for wildfires cost so much in trees, infrastructure and even in human lives. But as usual, we never have the funds to do things right because all the funds are spent on fixing what's broken. )))