Big Cypress has released their second in a series of three films about prescribed fire in the south Florida Park, titled, Burn Boss: A History of Fire and People in Big Cypress.
Here is their description:
The job of the Burn Boss is difficult. Perhaps the toughest in all of professional conservation. To be the Boss of Fire, you must be willing to take responsibility for one of nature’s most powerful forces: Fire.
Jennifer Brown and Into Nature Films worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Big Cypress National Preserve to tell the history of the National Park Service’s most accomplished fire program. With beautiful cinematography, fascinating interviews, and tantalizing story, this film highlights the colorful people and places in the wild heart of south Florida, narrated and written by Rick Anderson, a descendent of Florida pioneers. Rick has dedicated his life to the use of fire for the land.
Last month the first film in the series was released, “Fire Swamp”, that explains the relationship between fire and the swamp.
The manager of the Twitter account for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge wanted to make it clear that the photo was taken during the implementation of the prescribed fire.
The refuge is in the Florida panhandle, southeast of Panama City. (map)
Produced in in partnership with Injunuity, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has released “Native Fire,” an educational video about prescribed fire.
It covers Native American’s historic use of fire and addresses how traditional practices in the southern plains have influenced its modern-day application. In the video, fire research specialists speak to this history and address some of the complex challenges facing land managers today.
The 13-minute video also explains why fire is an essential and timeless tool that is necessary for maintaining and restoring ecosystems that evolved with fire.
Burning a field of sugar cane in Hawaii. Photo by bob Bangerter.
A class action lawsuit was filed in Florida Tuesday over the health effects of burning sugar cane fields.
The four people at the front of the room where the legal action was announced included, in addition to an attorney and a state legislator, Frank Biden, brother of former Vice President Joe Biden, and former Jacksonville Jaguars running back Fred Taylor.
Fields of sugar cane are sometimes burned before manual harvesting in order to remove the dry leaves and chase away or kill any lurking venomous snakes.
Below are excerpts from an article at the Sun-Sentinel:
There have been more than 100,000 cane field burns in Palm Beach County since 2004, according to former state Sen. Joe Abruzzo, who now serves as the director of government relations at the Berman Law Group, which filed the suit.
According to Abruzzo, there are also 700 hospitalizations for asthma in Palm Beach County for every 100,000 residents. That’s significantly higher than statewide numbers. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the hospitalization rate for asthma in Florida is 142.4 out of 100,000.
“The sugar companies, they have to take responsibility for this. If nothing more, they need to promote awareness and get down to the bottom of these health issues because the community is dying,” Taylor said. “The black snow that comes from the sky, people are breathing that stuff in. They’re getting sicker and sicker every day.”
The lawsuit accuses U.S. Sugar, Florida Crystals and other sugar producers of negligence, liability for any damages caused by the burning of the fields, and trespassing in that hazardous waste landed on the property of members of the class-action suit, among other things. The suit asks the court to institute a medical monitoring program for residents of Belle Glade, South Bay, Pahokee and nearby areas, as well as asking the court to force sugar companies to stop any future crop burnings.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Bob. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
The U. S. Forest Service is planning to streamline the environmental reviews of certain prescribed fire and forest management projects, including logging.
Below is an excerpt from a June 12 article at NPR.org.
Federal land managers on Wednesday proposed sweeping rule changes to a landmark environmental law that would allow them to fast-track certain forest management projects, including logging and prescribed burning.
The U.S. Forest Service, under Chief Vicki Christiansen, is proposing revisions to its National Environmental Policy Act regulations that could limit environmental review and public input on projects ranging from forest health and wildfire mitigation to infrastructure upgrades to commercial logging on federal land.
Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen testified about the White House’s proposed budget for FY2020 on May 15, 2019.
“We do more analysis than we need, we take more time than we need and we slow down important work to protect communities,” Christiansen told NPR.
The proposed rule changes include an expansion of “categorical exclusions.” These are often billed as tools that give land managers the discretion to bypass full-blown environmental studies in places where they can demonstrate there would be no severe impacts or degradation to the land.
John Gale, with the conservation group Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, says that if applied carefully and narrowly to certain projects, these exclusions could help lower the fire risk. But he’s skeptical because the administration recently rolled back protections for clean water and wildlife…
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Rick. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
Trying to compare the acres treated with prescribed fire in California and Florida is like comparing apples and penguins. In addition to California’s significant regulatory issues, the vegetation there is more explosive (in some areas), the terrain complicates ignition, and the road systems and access can sometimes be challenging. By comparison Florida is flat, access is usually much easier, and the fuels are not as difficult for an experienced prescribed fire crew to safely ignite.
But with the increased wildfire activity in recent decades and pressure from many sources to treat hazardous fuels and rake the forests, more attention is being focused on prescribed fire as one way to mitigate the effects of climate change. However the number of acres treated on federal lands is directly related to the funds appropriated for that purpose. And those dollars have been relatively flat for a number of years.
Climate Central put together some interesting graphics. (Click on the images twice to see larger versions and more tweets in the thread.)
Prescribed burns reduce wildfire risks — but the U.S. spends little on them. The Southeast is the leader in managing land this way while the West lags badly behind, fueling deadly infernos.@ClimateCentral research collaboration with @uidaho’s @pyrogeog: https://t.co/PKCEdKaUDOpic.twitter.com/stK2zR6jXQ
An example of a crew logo worn on hard hats and t-shirts. This is the logo of the Laguna Hotshots, created in 1974 by Kyle Rayon, wife of Howard Rayon, one of the Squad Bosses on the crew. The oak tree was chosen because it represented the trees most commonly found on the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California.
Like other wildland firefighter fatalities, the death of Captain Brian Hughes of the Arrowhead Hotshots last year during the felling of a hazardous tree has had an effect on many of the 15,000 wildland firefighters in the Federal government. As described in the report that was released last week, Captain Hughes and others on the crew did many things right while working to get the tree on the ground, but he ended up in an unfortunate location when the tree fell in an unexpected direction. Many firefighters can relate to that and may have been in similar situations, but had a better outcome.
Captain Kevin Mecham, a U.S. Forest Service employee and Captain on the Truckee Hotshots in Northern California, was motivated to put some of his ideas into a letter. It was intended to be read primarily by other Forest Service personnel, but we have his permission to publish it here. After the letter, below, we explain some of the acronyms, the names mentioned, and the issue regarding the “t-shirt mandate”.
My name is Kevin Mecham and I am a Captain on the Truckee Hotshots. I am writing this letter to provoke a larger discussion about wildfires and the Federal Employees whose lives are defined by them. I started fighting fire with the US Forest Service when I was 19. I was enrolled in a Natural Resources program and was aiming to have a career that was meaningful, conservation oriented, adventurous, in the great outdoors and contributed to something bigger than myself. I attended an employment outreach seminar where a Forest Service Firefighter spoke and I thought to myself “that sounds great, I’ll be outside, it sounds noble and it’ll be an adventure.” I didn’t know a single Firefighter. The thought of being a Firefighter had never crossed my mind; in fact when I was 12 my family almost lost our home in a wildfire and I remember driving through the flames with my Mom to escape and I was terrified. But, seven years later and I had become a passion driven, adventure seeking 19 year old and it sounded great.
15 fire seasons later a lot has changed. I am a husband, a father and my perception of the world has changed. Wildfires themselves have changed; size, severity and frequency have all increased. My career still parallels what I anticipated as a college student seeking a meaningful career. I am outside a lot, it is noble and it is definitely an adventure. I’ve worked on Engines, a Helitack module and two Hotshots Crews. It was Hotshoting that really resonated with me. I have enough pride and emotion about being a Hotshot that I could write more than anyone would ever want to read so I’ll keep it short. Just know that I have a lot of heart and a ton of pride in the people and places that developed me into the person that I am. But a lot has changed and what my younger self failed to foresee was the weight of the psychological toll of this profession and how unnecessarily exasperated it is by the Agency. Some of the psychological weight is part of the job. We work in the woods and the woods are an inherently dangerous place. Introduce fire, increased fuel loading, wilder deviations from weather norms, an ever expanding reach of the wildland urban interface, more state and local government working with a scale of fire and an environment they are unfamiliar with and we find ourselves in very dynamic and complex situations. But the single most vexing and compounding factor is that we are a conservation agency ran by politicians and science based academics that just happen to oversee the most effective and comprehensive wildland firefighting force in the world.
The catalyst of this letter is the line of duty death of friend and co-worker Daniel Laird and the WO and RO’s management of its Forestry Technicians. Our current management structure and its subsequent repercussions on our Firefighting workforce are not new problems. Line of Duty deaths are not new problems. But Dan’s death and the Agency’s structure have shone a glaring light on the implications of our current leadership organization. As these tragedies and issues hit closer and closer to home for the “boots on the ground” it makes the weight feel even heavier. The loss of Dan and the Agency’s proposed attempts at solving our problems: hiring / staffing, retention, fatigue management, work life balance and the aborted uniform t-shirt mandate illustrate our greatest obstacles. We are being managed by people that don’t have experience in our profession. There isn’t the necessary context to the commitment and sacrifice required to prepare for and work a tough fire season. Incident complexity has increased and demand has increased. When will the Agency embrace what we do on a daily basis? When will the Agency recognize what the public already expects of us? We invented wildland firefighting and yet the individuals making the decisions that impact us the gravest have never done our job. We have leadership attempting to manage fatigue when they don’t understand the complexities of our fatigue. I wouldn’t supervise a botany crew. I wouldn’t oversee a multi-million dollar budget. Ancient hunters wouldn’t select a gatherer to lead a hunt. How can we expect to succeed if we have people supervising in facets in which they have no experience? This is an illogical structure that would universally fail across all spectrums of humanity throughout time.
Cross-boundary prescribed fire in Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. NPS photo.
Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Park are conducting a cross-boundary prescribed fire this week in South Florida. So far they have completed 30,000 acres. Everglades is continuing ignitions today and tomorrow, April 4 and 5, 2019.
Cross-boundary prescribed fire in Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. NPS photo.
The south Florida National Parks often ignite prescribed fires with a helicopter-mounted device that drops plastic spheres which ignite after hitting the ground. It’s called a Plastic Sphere Dispenser, or PSD. Much of what the parks burn is vegetation over standing water. If the sphere lands in water it may not ignite the vegetation, but every sphere does not have to be successful.
The burn pattern in the photo below illustrates the paths of several helicopter flight lines. The direction of spread is being determined by a wind blowing from left to right.
Cross-boundary prescribed fire in Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. NPS photo.
When the PSD was first developed several decades ago it was called an
Aerial Ignition Device, or AID. When acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, became a serious health issue, firefighters dropped the AID label and renamed it Plastic Sphere Dispenser, or PSD.
