By Scott McMillion
 

The rain has finally stopped, but Ben Renfro is stuck inside on this sunny Florida morning, pushing paper and licking his pencil. He knows he has to do the paperwork — has to, that is, if he wants to set the woods on fire today.

Renfro runs a firetruck for a living, managing a crew for the Bureau of Land Management in Prineville, Oregon, on the dry side of the Cascade Range, where wildfire is no stranger. Over the years, he has learned a thing or two about putting out fires.

But he has traveled to Florida to hone a different set of skills: He’s learning how to start fires and how to make them behave.

Today, Renfro is a fire-boss trainee. He’s here to learn more about managing prescribed burns — fires deliberately set and carefully controlled for the health of an ecosystem. That’s why he’s spending three weeks surrounded by the tools of the trade: weather stations and pumper trucks, drip torches and chain saws, hard hats and computers. And especially, it seems, by paperwork and rule books.

“All this stuff has to be done,” says Ron Pevny, a fire-effects specialist for Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve. “It’s just as important as lighting the match.”

Pevny, who sports a multicolored wildfire tattoo over his entire right arm, sets more paper in front of Renfro and begins showing him how to calculate where the smoke from the day’s planned burn is likely to drift. Before long, the two men are hopping from computer to work table to telephone, tallying up all the information they need to calculate wind speed, relative humidity and the type of vegetation awaiting ignition from their drip torches. They check maps to see if any homes or highways might be smoked out.

With the paperwork — weather forecasts, burn plans and smoke-dispersal models — finally out of the way, Renfro and his crew of six firefighters get the green light to head out and put some fire where it needs to go.

Where it needs to go is an overgrown patch of Big Cypress National Preserve. The proposed burn site at Big Cypress poses real challenges for the team: A hunting cabin and some outbuildings don’t need to burn, and neither does the large government storage building, nor the power lines serving those structures. Surrounding all of this is vegetation so thick that a tall man in a bright yellow firefighter’s shirt can disappear at will.

In a fire-prone Florida habitat such as this one, all of this greenery is going to burn sooner or later. The goal is to make it burn on human terms now, during the wet season, to thin out the plants and save the buildings and power lines before a wildfire takes them later, when it is hot and dry, and there’s no crew on the ground directing the path of the flames.

This is the “wildland-urban interface” — the city fringes and other places where people build homes and other structures in fire-prone landscapes. Think California’s hillside and canyon suburbs, where nine people died in the wildfires of 2007. Think Colorado, where the Hayman fire burned 600 structures in 2002. Think millions and millions of acres all over the country.

Despite the risks, Renfro says he isn’t twitchy about his impending burn. At least not so far. “I haven’t seen the project yet,” he says, “so that may dictate where my hair stands up.”

After an hour’s drive over dusty gravel roads, Renfro and the crew take a first look at their target: palmettos and cabbage palms the size of camp trailers, saw grass and Brazilian pepper trees and slash pines, all of it crowding up against the structures. Team members are clad in fire-resistant Nomex clothing, and their bright yellow shirts are smeared with soot from previous burns. A swamp buggy carries water and a hose. Firetrucks wait nearby. A helicopter with a bucket can be there in nothing flat, promises George Sheppard, assistant fire management officer at Big Cypress, whose crew is backing up Renfro and his team on the burn today.

This patch of ground hasn’t seen a flame since the 1980s. And more than 10 years without the kiss of fire is a long time in the woods of south Florida, Sheppard says. There are a lot of pent up Btus in the brush, itching to escape. The crew is here to free them, preferably with a controlled hiss, not an explosion.

Gloved and helmeted, the crew is ready. The sick-sweet smell of the fuel in the drip torches carries in the slight breeze. A carload of tourists visiting Big Cypress drives by, craning their necks. Thunderheads promise drum music later, but they are far to the east. The weather report had said it was a good day to burn.

“Let’s light her up,” Sheppard says.

And the flames whoosh.

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Nature picture credits: Photo © Josh O'Connor/USFWS (Controlled burn);  Diagram © Steve Sanford