Why does the Forest Service do prescribed burns?
A lot of the burning has to do with fire hazard reduction, centered around development, homes, towns, that sort of thing. We want to reduce the fuel loading in the forest. If you look at a cross-section of the forest, you have various levels of fuel: ground fuels, ladder fuels and the canopy of the trees. We want to reduce the ground fuels and the ladder fuels—small trees—to prevent fires from getting to the tree canopy. How big are the fires you start? The size of a typical burn for wildlife openings tends to be anywhere from 40 acres to 150 acres. Some of the larger burns we do are for red pine under-burning. We have one of those over 1,000 acres [about 1.5 square miles]. For the big ones, we light the perimeter by hand and then light the central area by helicopter. We drop plastic balls that contain potassium permanganate and glycerin, reactive materials that combust when the ball hits the ground. How do you make sure the fire doesn’t get out of hand? The goal is to keep the fire wi
