In North Little Rock forest, teams taught to control fire

Snakes, ordnance sideshows at 20th-annual burn school

Two cottonmouth snakes and an artillery shell were just part of the curriculum last week at the state's annual prescribed-fire school on Camp Robinson property in Faulkner County.

Forty-one students attended this year's school, the 20th annual, as they learned how to set a controlled fire and then how to put it out.

They also steered clear of two cottonmouths resting lazily on a path to one of the burn sites and of an artillery shell that was uncovered by a bulldozer a few hundred yards from the perimeter of a mortar range at Camp Robinson, the 33,000-acre training site for the Arkansas Army National Guard. The students immediately cordoned off the ordnance with tape and called the base's headquarters.

"How'd you flag it?" one student asked a faculty member -- a question that, in retrospect, was clearly the set-up to a punchline.

"Orange tape."

"What? You didn't have any 'unexploded bombs' tape?"

Guffaws aside, fire school is serious business to the 41 students, representing the Arkansas Forestry Commission, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the state Highway and Transportation Department, the Arkansas State Parks Division, the University of Arkansas at Monticello School of Forestry, the federal Natural Resource Conservation Service and other agencies.

Students spent the previous night developing "burn plans" and assigning roles among four 10-member teams spread out on some 100 acres of forestland, Adriane Barnes, the spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture, and a sponsor of the school, said.

A fire-experienced member would be the "burn boss;" two members would carry bladder bags filled with water, and two others would be assigned drip torches, filled with a mix of diesel and gasoline, to light fires. Remaining members would be given rakes, shovels and other long-handled tools to help control, and eventually extinguish, a fire.

Once they completed the day's work of setting fires, they returned to their classroom at the Arkansas National Guard headquarters to grade how their burn plans played out. By week's end, they had spent some 40 hours in the classroom and 12 in the field.

Scattered showers early Wednesday morning -- and high humidity around noon -- dampened the spread of a couple of teams' prescribed fires. Flames died down in sunlight, then flared up under cloud cover.

All of that is a lesson, Barnes said, because conducting prescribed fires is about knowing wind direction and humidity levels. Humidity must be above 40 percent and winds below 10 miles per hour for a prescribed burn to be safe and controllable, she said. Every 30 minutes burn teams called one of the Forestry Commission's 12 base stations for weather updates.

Prescribed fires -- ridding a forest of leaves, scrub brush, downed or dead trees and limbs and other vegetation -- help prevent the massive and costly wildfires that rage in the West every year, said Doug Zollner, director of conservation for the Arkansas Nature Conservancy. "For too long, they didn't have prescribed fires, and they're paying for it now," he said.

"Prescribed fires are one of the most effective management tools we have -- not just in mitigating potential for wildfires but also in the management of our forests and wildlife," said Zollner, a veteran of fighting wildfires across the South.

Like a volunteer fireman in small communities, though he does get paid, Zollner is on an "on-call" list, part of a statewide network with names of experienced firefighters, in the case of large wildfires.

"An active wildfire is not fun to fight," Zollner said. "It's a day-by-day fight and you don't know what's going to happen because they can move so fast and shift every time the wind shifts. Sometimes, you could be on the other side of a hill and not know exactly where the fire is."

Arkansas is 56 percent forested, with 19 million acres of trees, so there's plenty of fuel for wildfires. Last year, 1,178 wildfires in the state burned 14,652 acres, down from five years ago when 2,435 fires burned 41,783 acres.

Most wildfires in Arkansas are caused by carelessness -- such as not watching over a debris fire, Barnes said. Arson -- "pure maliciousness" -- is second, Barnes said.

While it's easy to focus on seemingly uncontrollable wildfires in the West -- California has so far spent $208 million fighting a single fire for two months this year -- there are more wildfires in the 13 states of the South and southeast, averaging 45,000 a year, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Some 8 million acres of forestland in the South are burned under prescribed fires each year -- more than in any other region.

While a prescribed fire rids a forest of the fuel that feeds a wildfire, it also makes for a healthier forest for native plants and animals and helps trees become less susceptible to insects and disease, Zollner said.

Most prescribed fires are on state and federal property, but the Forestry Commission works with private landowners on prescribed burns, depending on acreage.

"The more people we get educated on prescribed burns, the more we can use them as a tool," Zollner said.

SundayMonday Business on 10/09/2016

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