THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - A Forest Fire Threat Right Here

CATSKILL - The memories of those awful California forest fires are still fresh. It’s so important to learn from such misfortunes, and that includes those of us in the Catskills. Did you watch the news from California and wonder if it could happen here? We sure did. But the Catskills are not Los Angeles; the hazards have long been a lot less here. Why is that? There are several reasons. For starters, we just don’t see many forest fires in our region. It’s too rainy here for that. The two of us cannot remember seeing even one of them these past 45 years. California has witnessed a serious multiyear drought, far, far worse than our recent dry spell. Southern California has those peculiar Santa Ana winds, and we do not. Then too, California has seen an influx of people crowding into heavily forested landscapes. Large expensive homes have been built in what had been almost wilderness woodlands. Critically the woods were left as natural as possible in between all those new homes. That includes an understory that includes a forest debris of dry twigs, branches and of course abundant leaves. There is much less of this sort of development here. But here we have turned much of our wilderness into the Catskill Preserve – back in the 19th century. 

So, when you add it all up, the danger of devastating forest fires is just so much less here. But, still, you can never say never; it could happen. It’s been dry lately and the threat has risen. We need to think about that – we need to be ready. If you live in an apartment in the middle of Stamford, Windham or Catskill then there is no immediate threat. But if your home is on 15 acres of forest anywhere throughout our region, then there are real concerns. That describes our home, so we went out and looked around. It was a real eye-opener. See our first photo. There was all that dry forest debris. It’s called “ladder fuel.” When it’s on fire, its flames climb up the dry drought-stricken trunks and spread into the forest canopy. That’s a real forest fire!

The professionals deal with this with the purposeful starting of “prescribed fires.” They burn away all that debris and remove the threat. But they have the expert and experienced staff needed to do this sort of thing. We don’t. But the other problem is that these fires require government approval and that takes three to seven years. (Somebody once said, “government is the problem,” didn’t they?) So, we are not going to ask for help. We have set about physically removing as much of this debris as possible. See our second photo. It might take us three to seven years to finish the job, but we are determined to lessen our fears of seeing our property burn to the ground. Do you live in the woods? Then you might go out, look around and think about all this. Have we done this correctly? We don’t know. If you have some better ideas let us know on our facebook page.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page at “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”