About 60 firefighters and expert land managers gathered at the Chester Community Center this month for a “Fighting Fire with Fire” workshop and acted predictably when the time came to light a fire.
They called it a day and went home.
It seemed an anti-climactic and somewhat disappointing finish to the Oklahoma Conservation Commission and Oklahoma State University training session, especially given the $15,000 state grants available to the attending fire departments if they witnessed an actual burn. However, instructor John Weir said choosing not to strike a match was, in the end, instructional and somewhat fitting because “sometimes making that hard decision not to burn is the better part of valor.”
He said planning and preparing to burn an acreage is no small effort, but sometimes it is best to wait. He used the example to emphasize these fires are “prescribed burns,” a different idea than what is conveyed by the commonly used term “controlled burn.”
With decades of experience applying fire to landscapes as the OSU Extension Specialist for Fire Ecology, Weir said lighting up against poor conditions leads to additional hours of hard work and unnecessary risk for a lesser result. The idea is to make the fire do the needed work, namely, clearing eastern redcedar stands and brush that degrade the environment and pose a wildfire threat to rural communities.
Terry Peach Act at work The seminar for fire departments of Major and Dewey Counties was the second of several events planned as one facet of the $3.5 million Terry Peach North Canadian Watershed Restoration Act passed by the state legislature last spring.
The act established a redcedar study area in the watershed that includes several counties upstream of Canton Lake and created community fire control and redcedar eradication efforts that, officials hope, will serve as models for future use statewide.
Oklahoma Conservation Commission Executive Director Trey Lam said the training sessions and experiences of putting on prescribed burns bring together local fire departments and prescribed burn associations who can later help residents and communities carry out beneficial burning. Conditions during the first seminar at Greenfield in October allowed for an afternoon carrying out a burn.
The commission also created a redcedar technician team as part of the act. That team relies on fire departments to direct community protection plans, Lam said. The four-person crew uses tools like skidsteers, mulchers, and clippers to create “brush-free zones” around communities, efforts that might include using prescribed burns as well.
The state will send the crew to the towns to do the work at no cost, but the job requires a fire department’s prescription.
“You all know of the areas, the drainage areas, wildland areas, where you know if the fire gets in those cedars, it can threaten the community,” Lam said. “We’re not charging for it, but we’re only creating fire breaks as they are determined by the fire departments.”
After communities in the designated area are all protected, the program can expand to developments outside those towns, like fairgrounds or other important structures, he said.
“We just want you all to take what you learned here and apply it out there, to know we can use fire to control fire, to protect our communities, and start whittling away on these cedars,” he said in his parting statement to the group.
Seminar agenda The training, led by Weir, hit on everything from the details of what gas-diesel fuel ratio works best in a drip torch to a broad environmental history lesson on how redcedars, a native but invasive species, have become a costly nuisance statewide.
“‘No management’ is a land management choice,” Weir said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people have made that choice on redcedar, and it has proven to be a costly one.”
Discussions focused on the best times of year to carry out controlled burns, strategies for planning a burn, liabilities that come with lighting a fire, the differences in costs and effort required to maintain grasslands compared to overgrown cedars, and how prescribed burn associations operate and can work with local fire departments.
Weather, naturally, was a final topic of the day with the cancellation of the planned burn.
The choice not to burn seemed obvious, with north-northwest winds of 11 to 14 miles per hour, gusting to 20, outside the community center door, but it was more than that.
Weir pointed out that while a 20 mph wind is not always ideal, it’s manageable in the right situation. Unfortunately, the burn area planned for the day needed wind from the opposite direction.
He pointed out that a change in regional weather patterns created “variable winds” that day, which are never good. The winds gusted from all points on the compass from the northwest to the northeast.
“We really don’t want it swinging around on us out there,” Weir said as he dove into a 10-minute session on fire planning and weather monitoring tools available through Oklahoma Mesonet and National Weather Service apps and websites.
The fire departments each left with one free drip torch and an assurance of future sessions and directions to connect with local conservation district offi ces or burn associations to attend one of what likely will be many prescribed burns in the coming weeks and months to gain eligibility for the $15,000 grants.
The Oklahoma Ecology Project is a nonprofit dedicated to in-depth reporting on Oklahoma’s conservation and environmental issues. Learn more at okecology.org
