The massive blaze at the edge of Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains has scorched an area larger than many U.S. cities - with some of that land in the very location pinpointed by the U.S. Forest service for eight projects aimed at clearing and burning brush and small trees that help fuel wildfire.
The projects, which were approved by the U.S. Forest Service but never funded by Congress, would have thinned the woods in about 25 square miles (65 square km) in the Groveland District of the Stanislaus National Forest, much of which was incinerated by the Rim Fire.
About 9,000 acres were suitable to be deliberately burned as fire prevention buffer zones in 2012, the Forest Service said in a document provided to Reuters. But reductions in funding for fire prevention efforts by Congress in recent years coupled with stringent air quality standards that limit the timeframe for such burns have hampered efforts to carry them out on a larger scale.
Last year, the Forest Service had funding to burn 449 acres in the Groveland District but did not reach that target, said District Ranger Maggie Dowd....
The Rim Fire viewed from Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park, August 27, 2013. Photo by King of Hearts, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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