There is no mystery here, the reasons we are getting these huge uncontrollable burns worse that we need to given all of the dead trees from the drought and then the follow on problems such as out of control bark beetles are well known. Part of it is that people have been allowed to build and often not build very well where they should not be, the lands around the structures have too much fuel because of bad practices, we dont do anywhere near as much logging as we need to do to keep the forest healthy, we dont burn as much biomass for electricity as we used to, we dont do enough mechanical strip clearing in a systematic way to provide preset fire brakes because it is expensive and people dont like how it looks, we dont do enough burns to clear out fuel because people dont like the smoke and now would yell "GLOBAL WARMING!" at their politicians who allowed it, we dont keep the trees around power lines properly cut back because of costs and power company negligence, Cal Fire always puts out fires ASAP instead of letting them burn so more fuel builds up, in both state and federal agencies Forest health projects keep getting raided for firefighting so the budgets are shrinking and are unstable, the warning systems and prudent citizen advice/direction has long be very sub-par because of bureaucratic bungling. inter-agency cooperation has long been poor because of bungling, efforts that need to take place in Washington rarely to never happen because of lack of interest and because Washington is generally a very broken down corrupt place where just about none of the work that needs to get done ever gets done blah blah blah.
What is wrong is known, when we are going to decide to be better is not....we have a guy at DP who claims to be a 30 year experienced expert who told me the other day (Yesterday?) that the experts know what to do, it is the poor quality work from the politicians that is the problem....that is my message as well.