Above: Prescribed fire on Ft. Bliss in New Mexico, April 11, 2016. Photo by Shawn Giorgianni.
In the past, wildfires have escaped from the artillery practice ranges on Ft. Bliss in the New Mexico Organ Mountains near Rucker Canyon with some of them burning onto Bureau of Land Management and White Sands Missile Range property.
On April 11 personnel from the Fort Bliss Fire and Emergency Services Division completed a prescribed fire that will reduce the chance of a fire spreading outside the Doña Ana Artillery Range.
Fort Bliss is a U.S. Army post in New Mexico and Texas headquartered in El Paso, Texas. With an area of about 1,700 square miles, it is the Army’s second-largest installation, behind the adjacent White Sands Missile Range.
Last week personnel from the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted seven prescribed fires totaling 1,770 acres at Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. These photos are provided by the NPS.
On April 6th, 2016, wildland firefighters from multiple agencies worked with personnel from the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area to help reduce the number of invasive plants on 200 acres near Walpack Center, New Jersey. They expect the treatment will give native plant species the chance to repopulate and thrive.
— Shasta-Trinity NF (@ShastaTrinityNF) April 8, 2016
On Thursday, April 7th, the National Recreation Area Management Unit of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in northern California conducted a prescribed fire on Green Mountain, north of Redding near the confluence of the Squaw and Pit Arms of Shasta Lake.
When we read the tweet above we called to get more information. Andrea Crain of the Shasta-Trinity NF said they had a few small spot fires across the intended border of the unit they burned yesterday, but it was still within the project area. The largest spot fire was about a quarter acre.
Click on the pictures a couple of times to see larger versions.
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(UPDATE at 6:43 p.m. MDT, April 8, 2016)
John Waldrop sent us this photo of the Green Mountain prescribed fire as seen from the Pit River Bridge on Lake Shasta.
Green Mountain prescribed fire as seen from Lake Shasta. Photo by John Waldrop.
Homestead National Monument expects to ignite a prescribed fire using an unmanned aerial system, or drone.
Above: University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers Dirac Twidwell, left, Sebastian Elbaum, and Carrick Detweiler with their unmanned aerial system for supporting prescribed burns. Elbaum and Detweiler are professor and assistant professor of computer science and engineering, respectively. Twidwell is an assistant professor and rangeland ecologist in UNL’s School of Natural Resources. Photo by Craig Chandler / University Communications.
The prescribed fire at Homestead National Monument four miles west of Beatrice, Nebraska will include a live test of a University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS). The UNL system is a greatly scaled down version of a manned helicopter aerial ignition device. A multidisciplinary team of UNL experts in micro-UAS technology, fire ecology, conservation and public policy is developing this unmanned aerial system for supporting prescribed and wildland fire operations. We first wrote about their fire-igniting drone at Fire Aviation in October, 2015.
The park has received all of the approvals necessary to use the drone on this project, including the NPS Regional Office, their Washington office, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Jim Traub, National Park Service (NPS) Unmanned Aircraft System Specialist, said:
UAS’s in firefighting have the potential to reduce direct risk to firefighters doing ignition work while reducing costs and making an aerial resource more widely accessible to wildland firefighting efforts. The National Park Service is pleased to facilitate this unique and innovative opportunity with UNL, for this test of a sUAS in a fire situation.
Homestead National Monument of America, the NPS Midwest Region Fire and Aviation Program, and the NPS National Aviation Offices are collaborating with UNL’s Nebraska Intelligent Mobile Unmanned Systems (NIMBUS) Laboratory and the Department of Interior Office of Aviation Services (OAS) for this operational test and evaluation of the integration of sUAS into wildland fire operations. The goal with the Homestead Prescribed Fire is to conduct a live test of the sUAS consistent with the intent of 2015 UAS Technology Overview approved by then NPS Associate Director of Visitor Resource Protection, Cam Sholly; Department of Interior Deputy Assistant Secretary, Kim Thorsen; and Office of Aviation Services, Director Mark Bathrick.
Their system uses the same principle for the ignition source as the much larger devices used in full sized helicopters — plastic sphere dispensers. The spheres look like ping pong balls, but they are manufactured with a chemical inside. When the dispenser injects a second chemical into the ball it creates an exothermic reaction causing it to burst into flame about half a minute later after it has been ejected from the machine. When the helicopter, manned or unmanned, drops the spheres, they can ignite any receptive fuels on the ground about 25 to 40 seconds later.
Now that Homestead National Monument has all of the plans and approvals in hand, they are just waiting for a weather window that meets the criteria in their prescribed fire plan. They hope to get it done before May 15 of this year.
I asked the park Superintendent, Mark Engler, if he was worried that the drone might drop a sphere outside the prepared control lines:
No, I know we have to be alert that that could happen, but we have already put in a fireline, and we made it extra wide this time. We took an extra step and actually removed the cut grass [from the line after it was mowed]. We think the risk here is very low. And because the risk is so low, we feel that this is an appropriate place to conduct this test.
A control line for a prescribed fire at Homestead, spring, 2016. NPS photo.
The park has been using fire for years to help maintain and restore their tall grass prairie. They have identified a 26-acre unit for this particular project. Homestead first started using prescribed fire in the 1980s. Mr. Engler said they have the “oldest restored prairie in the National Park Service”.
The plans call for 15 people to be actively involved in the burn, plus the crew operating the unmanned aerial system.
Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore applied prescribed fire to about half a dozen units yesterday live-streaming from the scene two or three times on Facebook. The recordings are preserved and we posted a couple of them here.
The units the park worked on were in the West Beach area, a portion of the 600 acres they expect to burn this spring. The park is on the south shore of Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana.
Photos and videos by Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
