Clearing of brush, cutting of trees, building fire breaks, insisting home owners clear a defensive space around their houses or lose fire insurance, all of that could ensure that fires will be smaller, better contained, and less destructive.
But you're right: fires are inevitable and getting to be a bigger problem.
It is not that simple.
BC has had several million acres consumed in the past four years. Last year there were 1,800 plus fires, all but three or four caused by nature, breaking out hundreds of miles away from habitation and within days become a "crossover" threatening and sometimes destroying towns, and whole cities.
It's easy to say to clear underbrush, but when you have millions of acres of prime, SPF Apex forest all on virtually vertical hillsides it's simply not possible to clean anything....and where would you get a thousand dump trucks to haul it away. Many places still have old growth trees because man can't work at those angles safely.
Since the mid eighties we have been letting them burn, as we learned then fire is part of the forest cycle, and burning is necessary for some trees to release valid seed.
Second, the picture at the top is a complete joke. NO FIRE ever started at the top of the tree, they are so filled with water even hit by lightening they would simple steam out.
Fires, as you noted start on the ground, in that rich, decaying debris field and they work upward, first burning the old back, becoming hot enough to steam off the moisture above. Once it peaks (if it does) it now causes a change in climate, the forest is an extremely low pressure zone, with cold air dying to get in, causing unnatural winds that drive the fore up the mountain side through the debris. One wind from a fire last summer was clocked at over 120 km (about 70mph)
These winds pick up debris and spread it on the wind, starting with coals, but soon becoming basketball sized. Then the fire takes on it's own personality...causing its own winds there is no accurate way to predict where it will go. It is burning for all of its 200 ft height and always seeking new fuel. "Hell" is considered a fire moving outward in all directions. They are hot enough where the moisture contained in the tree gets steamed off, the fire can crown - meaning it jumps from tree top to tree top.
In fires last summer and the two years before firefighters often told of driving away from a fire on a highway at 60 to 100 k and losing ground to it. And then there are the exploding trees. The trees in the coastal rainforest have adapted,m they take all the water from the spring and store in their trunks. Sometimes the water in tee will become trapped, it expands from the heat and then blows out. Some of them can travel three lengths of a football field jumping rivers and ponds.
It takes maybe three blowing onto rooftops to destroy a town in minutes.
They sometimes become so hot they ground the bombers and helicopters as the heat turns the water into steam before it hist the ground.
Why it has become so much worse than 40 years ago is cause for debate, but the numbers don't lie, we don't get enough freezing in the winter to kill off insects, not enough rain in the spring and the average summer high is climbing. The tinder gets dryer and dryer.
When I first started covering news here I had never heard of a "crossover fire", now they are routine.