Tag: prescribed fire

Yesterday the Rapid City, South Dakota fire department successfully suppressed a grass fire that was threatening homes, containing it after it had only burned a few acres or less (map). But then, according to an article in the Rapid City Journal:

After the fire was contained, the emergency responders decided to conduct a controlled burn in the area to prevent another fire. [Assistant fire chief for the Rapid City Fire Department Mike] Maltaverne said the weather was right and the resources were already on scene.

“We can do it in a controlled setting,” Maltaverne said. “With the recent moisture and all these resources, we can eliminate all these fuels.”

Including the initial fire, about five acres of brush will be burned after the firefighters complete the controlled burn, Maltaverne said.

We were curious if the “controlled burn” was part of the suppression process, such as a burn out, or if it was an actual prescribed fire, unrelated to the wildfire. This morning Wildfire Today talked with Captain Mark Kirchgesler, the Training Coordinator for the Rapid City Fire Department, about the fire. He had not been on the scene of the fire, but said, according to the report, that the size of the fire was about 150 feet by 150 feet (about 1/2 acre) when the first engine arrived. The wildfire had been contained or controlled before the prescribed fire was initiated. The combined size of the wildfire and the adjacent prescribed was five acres.

He said it is not unusual for the fire department to conduct prescribed fires within their jurisdiction to reduce future wildfire threats to structures. When asked who has the authority to initiate a prescribed fire on the spur of the moment out in the field after controlling a wildfire, he said it can be “the incident commander in cooperation with the Assistant Chief for Operations”. He said air quality is always considered before igniting any prescribed fire within the city.

In one sense, you might envy the Rapid City FD for their ability to recognize an opportunity to reduce wildland fuels around structures and seize it immediately, with little or no paperwork and a very streamlined approval process. Those of us that have planned and conducted prescribed fires for federal or most state wildland fire agencies, don’t have the luxury of eliminating the planning process. I only hope that their policy does not backfire on them somewhere down the road.

Every now and then I run across a wildland fire term that is new to me. For example, “pyrodiversity“, from a few months ago, or allowing fire to “visit” an area, from about 10 years ago.

Well, here’s another one, “thermal thinning”, from an article about prescribed fire on the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources web site. An excerpt:

According to [Johnny] Stowe, prescribed fire can also be used in more sophisticated ways—for example, to prune and thin stands of longleaf pine. The ability of fire to kill or topkill (which inhibits growth) of hardwoods such as red maple, sweetgum, water oak and other species that are generally undesirable in longleaf woodlands and savannas, is well known. Less well-known is the artful use of fire to prune the lower limbs of young longleaf pines; to reduce the number of trees in longleaf stands that are too dense; and to remove other pine species, particularly loblolly, from these stands.

I like the fact that they referred to “the artful use of fire”. And it’s true. Planning and igniting a prescribed fire is as much an art as it is a science, and you can’t become expert in the art of fire from books, classes, or four or five seasons of work as a firefighter. In prescribed fire, you are sometimes dealing with the micro-aspect of fire–the flame length, flame height, residence time, temperature, and how those and other factors will affect the vegetation over the short and long term. And these fire effects and fire behavior on a micro-scale can’t always be predicted using computer programs such as BEHAVE. And if you think of fire as a “dragon”, you will never become artful in using it as a tool.

Fire suppression, in my mind, is less about the micro-aspect of fire. It is a lot more about the science than the art of fire. In suppression, you are using science (whether you know it or not), aided by your experience and the “slides” in your memory bank, to predict what the fire will do and where it will be at a particular time, while you select the most appropriate tool you have available to remove or cool the fuel adjacent to or ahead of the fire.

Here is some cool flamage from a prescribed fire, possibly in Utah. It was posted by “UtahWildfire” on YouTube today. The name of the video is “Ogden Bay Prescribed Fire”. There is an “Ogden Bay Waterfowl Management Area” west of Ogden, Utah.

There are some still photos posted on Facebook by “Utah Fire”.