The Spanish learned to do similar, other early settlers learned it to, but built things all over. Fire was more and more feared. By the 1950's fire control was pretty good, but controlled burns where still done. But then lawyers started suing every time a control burn damaged anything. Cal Fire permitted less and less controlled burns. By the 1980's many at Cal Fire would adamite controlled burns where needed. By 2000 most of Cal Fire was ready to do controlled burns. But air quality and global warming worriers brought it all to a halt.  With less grazing, logging, and no control burning we have today's mega fires.  

Most everybody that made a living from grazing ,logging, or gathering of natural resources in any way had this figured out. We just have a 100 citydots for every country person.    

  Need that to keep all the electric cars moving.  An the air conditioner going, the weather folks keep telling them it's a 100+. And LA and SF need to be cool,  even though both have a beach and generally never get over high 80's.

I lived in Southern California for decades. Seems like after a fire the brush grows back quickly, and within 3 years the same hillside is ready to burn again. They also have mountains where the sugar cone pine trees grow. They go up in flames every now and then, and most survive.  The giant Sequoia trees have fire scars, they live for 1000 plus years. So you know they have lived through a fire or two. The way it is.

According to one Canuck in the local rag, the BC wildfires are the result of climate change.

Thing is, a burning tree does NOT add 'carbon units, or bad CO2'..it's just naturally giving back what it took.....

Over 3 decades ago a plan was hatched to reduce wildfires (or man made) to a small section of forest(say 1,000 acres).simple,efective, cost was zero,would save ALL the homes and lives.....no one listened,read or acknowledged it.

What's never,ever reported is the mess the Chinese are creating as they spew 40% of the entire World's CO2 into the air, and of course trillions and trillions and trillions of 'smoke particles' that float,gee...over here....

 Everybody on TV is hoping that will be their big break and Hollywood will be calling.  So if they where working real fire smoke and steam could cloud the picture.  For the second  of your questions they are looking for bigger flames to make a more dramatic  picture.  But we are talking government workers,  an you are expecting  common sense???? 

To Brian's comment it is the dead broken off pieces of brush that builds the heat to really get living brush to burn hot. I know people that where contract workers for Cal Fire on the Santa Barbara Ca fire in December 2017 that then had the flash flooding few weeks latter. They where on the east side in the wilderness area where that fire burned into areas burned 5 to 15 years before. They said fire just died as it got into the living brush with no build up of dead twigs on the ground. I believe Cal Fires current thinking is about 20 years to build up enough dead stuff under the living brush to make a hot fire. But it is WILDFIRE so nothing is for sure.