As California continues to burn, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has partnered with state officials to try and prevent another massive fire.
In an effort to treat up to 1 million acres of forest each year until 2025, the USDA Forest Service has joined forces with CAL FIRE.
"If there was ever a sense of the word urgent... I couldn’t define it in any other way," said USDA Deputy Forester Tony Scardina. "It’s that simple that we need to get this work done as soon as we can."
Scardina said doing reduction work can sometimes prevent large fires from becoming as catastrophic as the Dixie and Caldor fires currently raging in Northern California, however, years of drought conditions coupled with a warming climate have changed how forest managers tackle the problem.
"Science is changing the types of treatments that we’re doing," he explained. "The distance the trees need to be apart may be different than the way we did treatments ten years ago."
For hundreds of years we have been putting fires out without maintaining the forests and discarding the a build up of fuel, he said during a town hall meeting in Contra Costa County. It is time to rethink that process.
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