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Short term, there's really not much they could have done better. These were extreme conditions and they were bound to cause fire to a large extent in the current context of peri-urban development and forest mismanagement.

Long term, things could have been different but it would require major political and social changes in how we build cities and how we manage our wildlands. Happy to go into more detail if you are curious.

For this particular event I think the extreme weather conditions are a greater contributor than forest mismanagement, which yes, has happened for over 100 years not just in California but throughout the entire US. But both are factors.

As far as the feds vs the state... much of the forested land in CA is federal land, so ultimately I do think they have to take responsibility. On the other hand, since proper forest management hasn't been standard practice in the US since the genocide against Native Americans, there's no clear delegation of responsibility here. I'm sure the state could get federal approval to take actions in forest service land, but they generally lack the budget.

In general, CAL FIRE and the USFS both know what needs to be done in order to manage our forests better, and they are already taking these actions on a small scale. People who levy this criticism often imagine that professional government foresters are just idiots who don't understand their own field, but this is far from the case. The reality is that there's just no way these agencies can do fire prevention activities on a large enough scale to solve the problem. Again, they would need much higher budgets to focus on these things, and might need to abandon the focus on fire-fighting activities since this is where the vast majority of money goes currently. They would also need the ability to do controlled burns without worrying excessively about the consequences like they do now.

Overall I don't think there is really a realistic path to better forest management in the US unless there are some major political and cultural changes. I think empowering individuals to do controlled burns without a need for major oversight from the state or feds would be one change. Bringing back large herbivores to control tree density might also help without a need to huge amounts of human labor but this is far more speculative.