42
Carly checked the plan that the three ICs had cooked up. They stood in silence around the picnic table while she inspected their additional markings.
“Tell me.”
“If the fire comes this far east”—Rick pointed at Carly’s blue line—“they’ll have a good chance of stopping it. We’ll cut fire lines, as wide as possible, from one clear-cut to the next. As soon as they cut the full line, they’ll go back and cut it deeper.”
A two-hundred-foot-wide swath along six miles. It was a task of impossible scale under any other conditions. But by connecting the old clear-cuts, two-thirds of the way was already cleared. The cleanup and salvage of such a massive amount of cutting could take months, but a hundred percent of the timber would be recoverable instead of the typical ten or twenty percent tha
