Prescribed fire at Chicago Botanic Garden

Here is a 4-minute video of a prescribed fire at the Chicago Botanic Garden along the Skokie River Corridor in early December, 2009. Can anyone guess why I debated about placing the video on the site?

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Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire.

4 thoughts on “Prescribed fire at Chicago Botanic Garden”

  1. This could be a video on how not to conduct a prescribed burn.
    Yes it was a small easy burn and would most likely go along fine dispite the lack of PPE. But if a series of small things went wrong and it turned out bad, it would not be pretty. I’m sure many burns like this occur with out incident but the potential is there. Perhaps a local forestry agency could be invited in to assist and get some live traing along with much needed safety assistance. Good luck reinforces bad habits. I like to tell my students, That good safe habits prevent bad luck.

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  2. Yea, definitely lack of PPE. In my experience (at least in the Midwest) small conservancies have very limited budgets, often using volunteers for these burns, most of whom have very little knowledge of fire behavior. (The burn bosses I’ve worked with are knowledgeable but generally the volunteers have not had s130/s190 or anything like it).

    So there are two things at play here that pose a potentially dangerous combination.

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