Nature Conservancy Magazine: Autumn 2008 - Fire School

Ignitor
Lighting the Way
Controlled burning offers a relatively inexpensive solution to reducing the threat of wildfires: Burn now on human terms — with crews and firebreaks in place — rather than later on nature’s terms.

Burn
Spring Cleaning
Western wildfires are frequently in the news, but the South is no stranger to fire. Most vegetation types in Florida — including slash pines and palmettos — have a natural fire interval of three to seven years.

Go Deeper

The Nature Conservancy's Global Fire Initiative
The Global Fire Initiative develops solutions that allow fire to play a role in places where it benefits nature, and keep fire out of places where it is destructive.

"You can have a little smoke now or a lot of smoke later."

— Jim Durrwachter, director of the fire school in Florida

The Fire Cycle: Fuel, Fire, Regeneration
Watch a forest burn, recover and flourish in a matter of 2 months.

Enter the Drip Torch

Since nature will burn, and people don’t like wildfire, controlled burns have become a primary tool in the struggle to find an ecologically sound compromise. Done properly, they help restore natural ecosystems, reduce the risk of runaway wildfires and save money.

“You can have a little smoke now or a lot of smoke later,” says Jim Durrwachter, the director of the fire school and a man who’s spent most of his career lighting controlled burns around Dixie.

The work is difficult, and it can be dangerous. But it’s critical. Across the nation, 39 million acres of Forest Service land carries potentially dangerous fuel loads. And that doesn’t include the national parks or state, private or other federal lands.

But there has been progress. In 1998, the year after the fire school opened its doors, prescribed fires singed fewer than 1 million acres across the nation. By 2002, the annual area burned had risen to more than 2.6 million acres.

Here in Florida, with the long growing season and all the sunshine and water, the natural fire interval is three to seven years for most vegetation types because everything grows so quickly. Stand still for a year or two, and the foliage will grow over you and cover you up. Stand there a little longer and a fire will set you free, singe your ankles and maybe your knees, but also turn you loose.

Since fire is in such constant need in Florida, it’s a natural place to teach prescribed-burning techniques. It’s got a nearly year-round fire season. It’s got a wide variety of ecosystems that need a periodic torching. It’s got billions of dollars worth of homes and businesses and orchards and power lines that emphatically don’t need torching. It’s got a lot of people who see only the smoke and inconvenience a fire causes (you’ve got to deal with them). And it’s got a lot of people, like Durrwachter, who are good at dragging fire where it needs to go.

Though costs vary by habitat type, prescribed fire can cost from $12 to $344 an acre. Mechanical thinning costs as much as $1,200 an acre. Fighting a wildfire can easily cost $2,100 an acre. (While careful timber harvesting can be part of a low-cost solution, logging often leaves behind damaged trees and piles of slash and debris that can add to the threat of severe wildfires.) “We’re not out here just burning the bushes,” says Durrwachter. “We’ve got a reason for it.”

People in the wildland fire business understand these facts. And for years, many of them packed their things and headed to Florida during the winter months, hoping to get in some practice with a drip torch or to watch how the Southern crews used fire as an effective, relatively inexpensive tool. The burn crews tried to accommodate the visitors, but the system was haphazard at best. So in the fall of 1997, federal fire specialists Joe Ferguson, John Fort and Pete Kubiak sat down to figure out a better way to help train visitors.

“They got together over a couple of beers and drew it out on a bar napkin,” says Carolyn Detwiler, an administrator who’s been at the fire school since its earliest days. “They wanted to offer formal training instead of a few people coming in for a few days.”

The idea was hoisted up the pole, bosses saw the flag and didn’t just salute — they budgeted money.

Now, a decade later, the fire school still brings firefighters to Florida, gives them a couple of days orientation, then sends them into the field for nearly three weeks, where they practice being fire starters, drip torch in hand, firetruck and helicopter in reserve. And the Conservancy pitches in, helping to fund one full-time employee at the center. It also opens up its preserves and provides support from Conservancy fire crews to help show the pods of students how to do the job.

The students are broken into teams of six, under the supervision of a field coordinator, and drive to whatever’s ready for fire. They work with resident crews from the state of Florida, the federal government, tribes and the Conservancy. They put in a lot of road miles, see a lot of fire and teach one another their best tricks. Burning techniques depend on the land manager’s goals: It might be simply to remove overgrown fuels and protect some structures; it might be to improve forage; or it might be to foster a rare plant, one that can’t blossom except under just the right conditions.

“You probably figured out there’s a bunch of pyromaniacs down here,” Durrwachter says in his melodious Southern accent. “It doesn’t look complicated, but it is.”

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