Finnish president denies telling Trump that ‘raking’ forests prevents wildfires

Nov. 19--Maybe it was a bad translation.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto denied Sunday that he had advised President Trump to rake forest floors to prevent wildfires like those currently ravaging California.

"I mentioned (to) him that Finland is a land covered by forests and we also have a good monitoring system and network," Niinisto told his country's second-largest newspaper, Ilta-Sanomat. "We take care of our forests."

But raking, he said, never came up.

"You've got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important," Trump said Saturday while touring Paradise, California, which has almost completely burned to the ground.

"I was with the president of Finland and he said, 'We have a much different -- we're a forest nation.' He called it a forest nation, and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And they don't have any problem. And when they do, it's a very small problem."

Beyond the confusion as to where this idea actually came from, experts say that comparing Finland's fires to those in California is impossible anyway.

Rather than spreading through woodland, the Camp fire began in the Plumas National Forest but traveled mostly through urban areas, Jonathan Pangburn, a fire behavior analyst for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told the Los Angeles Times.

"It started out as a vegetation fire. When it reached the incorporated area, which is definitely a lot more urban and developed of an area," he said, "it turned into a building-to-building fire...no longer carrying through most of the vegetation, especially in the upper canopies in the trees. It was not a crown fire through the Paradise area."

Trump's public comments about the deadly California fires have been widely panned, particularly as he blamed forest management for the blaze.

As of Sunday afternoon, 76 people have died in the Camp Fire, with almost 1,300 still unaccounted for. The fire is about 55% contained and has already burned almost 10,000 homes and 233 square miles.

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