You know all the people that build in flood plains and then go "QQ, my house flooded"? We have a similar problem with wildfire in California. California is supposed to burn. But these foolish builders lobby the fire services to spend billions attempting the impossible: to break the natural cycle of fire. This often backfires (heh), for instance when fire suppression results in an unnatural accumulation of fuels. A book called "Living with Fire"
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520255895?tag ... NZ4WX1SQ3&
covers this subject well.

From the pictures it would appear to me that 1 square foot of your railroad contains FAR less fuel load per square foot than the surrounding landscape, or even, I'll bet, those "shouldn't have been built" homes.

So it sounds like they are trying to use your railroad as a "fire break" without paying you. Not sure the 5th Amendment lets them do that, least of all via sentencing you to menial hard labor. Futile labor, since when the wind picks up, it's just going to repopulate all that debris, right? Well, the wind is what drives wildfire in California.