Article:

> The Forest Service now admits that suppression backfired; excluding fire created an unnatural build-up of dry brush and overcrowding of trees that’s partly fueling today’s mega-fires.

In a fantasy book from 1998, the third book in the Circle of Magic quartet [0], a green mage gets extremely pissed off at a fire mage who between him and his father had been preventing forest fires for decades. By the end of the book, just such a "mega-fire" formed in the built-up dry material on the forest floor.

It kinda seems to me like this is a decently well-known effect that the government has been just been slow to acknowledge...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_Magic

> It kinda seems to me like this is a decently well-known effect that the government has been just been slow to acknowledge...

I think the problem is that with controlled fires, there is always a risk they could get out of control and burn down some properties, which will probably end the career of any politician who supported the decision/policy to not suppress that fire.

Suppressing fires is safer in the short run, while creating problems in the long run.

Maintenance burns getting out of control has happened several times in the past. That's the reason they changed what they called them from "controlled burns" to "prescribed burns". They got tired of the "That fire wasn't very controlled hahaha" jokes.