Revisiting why I am writing about wildfires

I have been thinking about why I have been posting about wildfires on this blog as I continue to read books about wildland fires, read incident reports of certain wildfires (e.g. certain fires that had tragic outcomes), look at web pages from various federal and state forest fire agencies, and other prowl the internet researching wildfires and the people who fight wildfires.

The answer that I came up is, at least for now, that I am using this blog to write about some of what I have been learning about wildfires and the people who fight wildfires. In a way, I am taking you along on my journey into the world of learning about wildfires and the people who fight wildfires.

Sometimes I do no more than post links with some added sentences to make the post coherent. Other times, I have posted links where others have been writing about current wildfires such as the recent Santa-Ana wind driven wildfires in southern California. Or I have posted what I hope are accurate references to sites explaining terminology used by wildfire fighters and the agencies that employ them. I hope that I am getting "it" right. I may not be. And when I later recognize that I may have gotten something wrong, then I might edit the post in question and/or write a follow-up post.

There is much that I still have to learn, and where I am uncertain about my facts or if I recognize that I still have more to learn before I can write about a particular aspect of the world of wildfires, I do not post. There has been one occasion, as happened earlier today where I posted a reference only to delete the post later when I realized that I still had more to learn about issues that I was attempting to raise. So, I decided that the simplest thing was to delete the post.

When I first started writing about the Basin Complex Fire in CA in early July, I knew very little about wildfires. I have learned a great deal since that time, and have recently become aware that I have only scratched the surface of what there is to know.