Tag: prescribed fire

Firefighters are still working to control the Meridian Boundary fire in Crawford County in northern lower Michigan which has consumed 8,790 acres and burned 12 homes, damaged two others, and destroyed or damaged another 39 outbuildings. The fire is 65% contained with a fire line around 95% of the perimeter. There have been no reported injuries.  The evacuation order is still in effect but an update on that status will be issued later today.

The fire started when a resident with a burning permit was burning leaves on a day when Red Flag warnings had been issued for some areas in northern Michigan.

The Range 9 fire that started on Camp Grayling military base was controlled at 1,040 acres Tuesday night (map of the fire). It started when a controlled burn, called a “controlled pre-burn” on the base, escaped. Camp Grayling frequently conducts these burns, executed by military personnel with little or no formal National Wildfire Coordinating Group wildfire training, in order to reduce the threat caused by fires started on their firing ranges. If a fire occurs down range while a unit is training, they must stop training until the fire is controlled, thus wasting valuable range time. It is believed that four privately owned summer cottages were destroyed when the fire burned outside the base.

A map of the Meridian Boundary fire southeast of Grayling is below. Click on it to see a larger version.
Continue reading “Update on Michigan fires, May 20”

According to a spokeswoman from the Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, the Range 9 fire was caused by a “controlled pre-burn” which got out of control on Camp Grayling. Major Dawn Dancer said the Department of Natural Resources and Environment was aware of the controlled burn “and ok’d it”. After igniting the burn at noon on May 18, a day with Red Flag warnings in the area, the wind increased at around 2:30 to 3:00 p.m. and the burn got out of control. After it burned about 1,200 acres, most of them on the military base, the fire was controlled by 9 p.m. the same day. It is believed that four privately owned summer cottages outside the base were destroyed.

Another fire that started on the same day in northern Michigan, the Meridian Boundary fire, is still uncontrolled and has burned about 7,520 acres.

We have never heard of a “controlled pre-burn”, but judging from the context in information provided by the military, a “pre-burn” appears to be a prescribed burn, or controlled burn. The personnel at Camp Grayling conduct an average of 20 pre-burns each year at Camp Grayling. So far this year they have successfully completed eight pre-burns for a total of 9,000 acres.

Here is a map of the Range 9 fire that started on Camp Grayling.

On May 10, 2000, a fire that began as a prescribed fire in Bandalier National Monument burned into Los Alamos, New Mexico. In its most extreme state on May 10, the Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire was carried by very high winds, with embers blowing a mile or more across the fire lines to the north, south, and east, entering Los Alamos Canyon towards Los Alamos, New Mexico. The towns of Los Alamos and White Rock were in the fire’s path and more than 18,000 residents were evacuated.

By the end of the day on May 10, the fire had burned 18,000 acres, destroyed 235 homes, and damaged many other structures. The fire also spread towards the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and although fires spotted onto the facility’s lands, all major structures were secured and no releases of radiation occurred.

The Cerro Grande Fire was the largest, most destructive wildfire that New Mexico has ever known. The fire swept across 47,000 forested acres in Bandelier National Monument, the Santa Fe National Forest, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos County, and the Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Indian Reservations, causing about $1billion in property damage. Over 280 homes were destroyed or damaged and 40 Laboratory structures burned.

The fire had a major effect on prescribed fire operations nationwide. For more info.

We have not heard very much about prescribed fires or fire use fires at Bandelier National Monument since the disastrous Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which began as a prescribed fire then escaped and burned 235 homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This interesting article from Fire Engineering describes a fire use fire at Bandelier and has quotes from Dick Bahr and Tom Nichols, who both work for the National Park Service in Boise. Here is an excerpt.

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By STACI MATLOCK

Last July, people in Los Alamos and Santa Fe looked toward Bandelier National Monument and saw smoke in the air.

Rather than stomp the lightning-caused San Miguel Fire out quickly, Bandelier National Monument let it burn, a counterintuitive move for an agency that only nine years prior had set the blaze destined to became one of the most destructive fires in recent memory. But it was an example of just how much fire management has changed in the last few decades.

Bandelier’s superintendent, Jason Lott, let the San Miguel Fire burn because the weather conditions were right. Fire resources were available if the park’s fire staff needed help, and the fire occurred in an area park staff had already mapped out as needing treatment to reduce flammable forest material. The San Miguel Wildland Fire burned 1,635 acres in the park and Santa Fe National Forest. It left behind patches of burned and unburned vegetation, exactly what forest ecologists like to see. Bandelier’s fire staff only tamped down the fire when it threatened cultural resources or entered risky areas. “Our goal is to allow lightning-ignited fires to burn naturally within fire-adapted ecosystems when we can do so safely, effectively and efficiently,” said Lott at the time.

In centuries past, nature took care of periodically cleaning house in Bandelier and other southwestern forests, sending fire through every 10 to 25 years to kill weak trees and reduce plant debris on the forest floor. Archaeologists and anthropologists have found evidence of ancient native people setting fires to stimulate grass growth.

Then, after the 1871 fire in Peshtigo, Wis., that killed more than 1,000 people, and the Great Fire of 1910 that burned more than 3 million acres in Washington, Montana and Idaho and killed 78 firefighters, wildfire became an enemy to be stopped. From the early to mid-1900s, fire suppression, grazing and logging interrupted the cycle. Western forests became dense and overgrown. “We’ve changed the landscape so that it doesn’t necessarily function as it traditionally did,” said Richard Bahr, lead fire ecologist for the National Park Service in Boise, Idaho.

Bahr said land managers began letting fires burn out naturally again after the 1960s. They were easier to control because the climate was moister and cooler through the 1980s.

Then three factors combined to make forest fires more complicated and more expensive to fight, Bahr said: millions of acres of overgrown forests, more people living in them and a drier, warmer climate.

Tom Nichols, chief of fire and aviation for the National Park Service in Boise, said there are three parts to forest fire management — prescribed burns, suppression of fires and letting the fire burn out on its own as in the case of San Miguel.