For those of you interested in taking a look at the King Fire, this is probably the best website I have found:
http://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/4108/
Look at the burn map, is the burnt area smaller than, equal to or larger than Lake Tahoe? (Hint: click on the minus sign on the left of the map to compare.)
Unfortunately, the FS does not have money to thin the 400% (more than historical) trees which are overburdening the citizens national forest lands and to reduce the forest floor fuels (i.e., the dead trees and logs on the forest floor).
They only have $70,000,000 to fight the fire which would have erupted anyway by lightning, negligence or intent in the tender box that they created.
Expect more of this.
And remember, since the removal of tariff's on Canadian forest products and the rise of the environmentalists, we no longer have a logging industry in California (there were five logging mills in Placerville, CA when I was young).
San Joaquin County just added 35 more no burn days to their calendar.
But, without a logging industry, there is no way to remove the dead logs. (The forests just keep growing...*)
So, our forests will burn either one log at a time in our fireplaces or a forest at a time.
Either way will release smoke and carbon into the atmosphere.
The latter way kills animals, sanitizes the soil, and burn's people's homes.
Which way is the most productive way to burn?
* And there is nothing "natural" about the kind of fire that occurs in a forest which has 400% more standing trees per acre than it has had historically and has 40 years of accumulated fuel on the forest floor.