Is it not possible to do controlled burns to eliminate some of the debris. That's what they do here in south Florida.
It is, but it’s wildly unpopular...
"Wildly unpopular" with whom?
Home owners, the forest service, state agencies, you name it. Fire is dangerous, and accidents happen:
“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”
https://www.kqed.org/science/1994972/forest-service-halts-prescribed-burns-california-worth-riskAnd local communities may oppose a controlled burn, he said.
“It’s hard to wag a finger too much at agencies,” he said. “Getting prescribed fire on the landscape at the scale we’d like is very difficult.”
Some of these concerns are rooted in fears of what could go wrong in a prescribed fire. The U.S. Forest Service has said that over 99 percent of these fires go as planned, but mistakes can be destructive. In 2022, the agency lost control of two prescribed burns in New Mexico. The fires merged and grew to become the largest recorded fire in the state’s history, destroying hundreds of homes.
However, experts say that avoiding these burns can also have consequences.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/us/california-controlled-fire.htmlThen there is different agencies that have to coordinate, and red tape as far as the eye can see. The palisades fire is on state park land, the Eaton fire is on federal forest land, and Bel Air has little difference in risk profile, but is pretty much all private land. Who's job is it, what happens if someone screws up, how do we coordinate the burns, how do we even do enough if them, who pays for the exteralities of everyone having to breath smoke for a week? It's easy to say "we should do controlled burns" and we
should do them obviously, but it's one of those things where there is asymmetric benefit to them for the people who live in extreme risk areas, and it's always somebody else's responsibility. Most people with real concerns just choose not to live in high fire risk zones.