Well we have 400 million acres of forest up here... has anybody got a spare rake? ��
The whole concept of raking forests is now a worn out joke the world over that is tired and long past being funny. The sad part is, there are apparently still folks that actually believe such drivel.
Back in the 80's when I was still working in aerial fire suppression had the opportunity to watch one of those monsters from ground zero. We were up following a lightning storm moving thru our district in the interior of BC, plotting the lightning strikes as they came down. Watched one go into a patch of beetle kill around 2 in the afternoon, then within 5 minutes we had a pinpoint smoke coming up, so we called for an air attack to nip it in the bud. The tankers were already airborne and diverted to our location, took about half an hour for them to arrive. When they did arrive, the fire was roughly 600 acres, crowning and running up the side of a ridge with a wind behind it. At that point, not much 3 loads of retardant can do to slow it, so they went on to the original target and we just watched this fire from the air. By nightfall it was roughly 10,000 acres. That one was about 20 miles from the nearest logging road, with two rivers between the road and the fire, so no possibility of getting heavy equipment into the fire line. It was filed in the 'wait for rain' category, and we watched it daily to make sure didn't jump the river on one side, or the lake on the other side.
On the bright side, fire like that one that runs thru the tops up a hillside doesn't do much damage to the tree trunks, so they pushed in a winter road with ice bridges and Plateau Mills was cutting that timber for two years.
