Some rough calculations show that if the Day fire burns 200,000 acres, it will release 5 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Further, if the Day fire burns an entire month, how much will it cost taxpayers? I live in Fillmore, and rangers have told me that it is very difficult to contain this fire because the terrain is so rugged.
A few questions occurred to me. What if the state cut a few roads through the wilderness and created some manmade lakes or reservoirs of water in strategic places. Would this not help us in containing future wildfires? Doesn't this have a double effect of saving taxpayers money and reducing greenhouse gas emissions?
I also wonder why, during the rainy season, so much water flows through the Sespe River into the Santa Clara and then returns to the ocean. Isn't there a way to keep more water inland to increase the water supply that it always in short order during the dry season?
Whenever I hear talk about global warming, the only action items mentioned are to reduce emissions. Can't we also extract greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by increasing the number of trees? Instead of clustering people in high-density regions, why can't planners spread the population out into undeveloped wilderness areas, create new water supplies and plant lots of trees? It seems that if every community in our country would do this, it would reduce traffic and consequently reduce auto emissions, as well as increase the amount of vegetation that extracts greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
— Edward Wassell, Fillmore
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