How do Permies feel about “prescribed burns”?

I’m surrounded by loblolly pines here, the burns keep the forest very healthy

Here in Florida we have a unique "scrub" zones, well, we did, mostly destroyed for residences, that have been lit ablaze by things like lightning for time immemorial, as well as a few other zones that are often burned. There's a video on YouTube about gopher tortoise burrows housing hundreds of species or more during a fire.

Those tortoises are slowly becoming endangered. I used to see them pretty much every day ~3 years ago, I haven't seen one in over a year. They were one of my favorite animals that exist, they look like old grouches wearing a shell-diaper. I love them. Now they're dead.

Yes. Florida used to have prime longleaf pine forests. That is where gopher tortoises thrive. They are considered a keystone species because many other animals depend on them. We highly value & protect the tortoises. I saw a baby a few days ago. That is very rare.

Mike Barkley wrote:Yes. Florida used to have prime longleaf pine forests. That is where gopher tortoises thrive. They are considered a keystone species because many other animals depend on them. We highly value & protect the tortoises. I saw a baby a few days ago. That is very rare.

I really love them. Sometimes even seeing one alive would make me weep because I know it's nearly inevitable it will be killed. A huge construction project was held up for weeks as they relocated some of them. What good did that do? They will likely just walk into the road now because they have no idea where the heck they are.

I don't understand how this society continues on. I would rather be a poor peasant than the leader of a company that involves itself in things like that. It's not about denying the right to progress. It's about taking it slow, throwing caution to the wind, and coming up with a better way, because that's just not the best we can do.

With all this cold weather it seems like a good time to show some fire pix. We did a fuel reduction burn this weekend.

It had a few moments of adrenaline. The edges were already lit & burning inward as I went into the interior spewing fire behind. Encountered some really thick underbrush & many vines with spikes. Not a good time or place to get stuck. Donated some blood getting out of that mess quickly. It is clear in there now! The deer & turkeys can move freely through there again. Gopher tortoises can move back in too.

Looking at the pics, that's a pretty scary burn zone. Except, if you leave it accumulate, it's a terrifying firestorm zone that destroys everything. Good job.

As always, the devil is in the details. Done right, they can be a good thing.  I have also seen many acres and buildings  pointlessly destroyed by people who didn’t know what they were doing. A guy I knew in MN managed to burn down his newly built, uninsured house by burning off brush without giving his actions adequate thought.  It’s a good idea to figure out in advance what actions will be needed if things do go sideways.

Agreed. Something like this is not to be taken lightly. Remember the Chattanooga fire about 5 Christmases ago? That was started by a couple of teens tossing matches around. Don't do that! It destroyed half the city & one of the most scenic areas of the Smokies.  A huge amount of preparation & planning go into a controlled burn. Everything from clearing & making firebreaks to studying the fuel loads & the weather. Not just the current weather but the weather prior to the burn & the predicted weather after. Temperature, humidity, surface winds, winds aloft, time of day, all of it matters. We always play the “what if” game & have plans B, C, & D ready just in case something goes wrong.

Those pix don't really do justice to the thick underbrush on the backside. Along a creek that hasn't been burned in several years. Pine needles were hip deep in some places. Highly flammable cogon grass too. An area nobody would want to walk through in warm weather due to water moccasins. It was a dirty job but someone had to do it. No pix because there just wasn't time to play around in that area. Spikey vines were trying to kill me. Would have been excellent pix though.

This place is all about preserving the trees & animals who live here. Except the wild pigs. We eat them.

We did another fuel reduction burn today. Heck, every burn is a fuel reduction burn. Forest fires quickly get out of control when they reach the upper canopy so that's the main thing to prevent from ever happening.

I left the time stamps on these pix to try to show how ladder fuels work & how fast they grow. From a small 1 foot flame to 20 or 30 feet today. In seconds. These longleaf pine tree canopies are about 100 feet up so they were in no danger. They actually need occasional fires to thrive.

As crazy as some of this might look it was a calm & easy task today. Very wide firebreaks with plenty of people & watering equipment. We started with the usual backing burn (upwind movement) along the perimeters. Then just kept an eye on the progress.  

Anything left standing after today except the pines is dead now but just hasn't fallen down yet. It will all green up again very quickly. A little slower this time of year but in springtime it only takes a few days. Will be raining hard in about another hour. Perfect.

The first 2 pix show more ladder fuel action from yesterday. Roughly 40 or 50 feet tall in seconds. The 3rd pix shows why. That stuff
is cogon grass. It's a non-native invasive species that grows tall & burns very hot & fast. Some of it was about 6 feet tall so when the
burn reached underneath taller yapons it launched flames upwards. The paddle is a tool used to easily control edges. Made out of
high temp rubber or some sort of fireproof material & is used to smother the flames. Actually paddling the flames just makes the
situation worse.

Some specific trees such as the young oak in the next 3 pix get great care to spare them from the inferno. It was bush hogged
around in advance. Then the surrounding area was thoroughly soaked with water. Then I sat on it with the fire truck until the
fire passed.  

It often goes into the night. Sometimes night pix are cool. Sometimes they're junk. The workday is occasionally very long but
in my opinion it's much better than uncontrollable wildfires.

Wow, Mike. I know it's the right thing and you're on top of it, but I have to confess those photos scare the dickens out of me.

Douglas, I guess in a convoluted way that's the point. Actual out of control wildfires are very scary & deadly.
Back when I experienced half of Texas on fire it really opened my eyes to the danger. The heat was so intense it
would carry embers 10 or more miles through the air so the fire was jumping faster than crews could catch up. I
lived in the hill country where there are canyons overgrown with cedar. It was during a drought. When a spark landed
in a canyon the fire would roar up the canyon, spill out over the top, & burn all the houses in it's path. Entire
neighborhoods were just gone. Entire forests were consumed. Prevention would have gone a long way in saving many of
those houses & forests. Obviously not everyone has a fire truck or whatever but homeowners can clear shrubbery &
debris from close to their buildings & manually remove excess fuels from their property. It seems some states &
managers of large wild areas are gradually starting to realize the repercussions of dangerous policies that have
been the norm. Those pix from yesterday were from an area that hadn't been cleared in about 5 years. Now just
imagine how much worse it would be if it hadn't been done for 50 or 100 years & nobody was there to do anything
about it. We all see it on the news every summer. Especially in the hotter drier states.

Mike Barkley wrote: It seems some states & managers of large wild areas are gradually starting to realize the repercussions of dangerous policies that have
been the norm. Those pix from yesterday were from an area that hadn't been cleared in about 5 years. Now just imagine how much worse it would be if it hadn't been done for 50 or 100 years & nobody was there to do anything about it. We all see it on the news every summer. Especially in the hotter drier states.

This is a big part of the massive forest fires British Columbia (Canada) has endured in recent decades. The push for mono-culture forestry made a bad situation worse.

They have figured out locally, that chipping and shredding small stuff, but leaving large logs on the ground to decompose slowly and naturally, can decrease the fire risk - I guess that's Mother Nature's Hügelkultur!

But I think Mike's observation about short rotation small fires in ecosystems that benefit from that management style is now becoming better known, but it's too easy for an over-grown area that hasn't been managed with fire to get out of hand and I know of permies that lost their homes and out-buildings to just one such fire. I don't know what the solution is for areas that are beyond the danger point. There are places where they're reducing fire load by using biochar kilns on trailers which they can move to an area. So long as they don't remove all that carbon benefit from the forest floor, it might be an interim measure for dangerously heavy levels of burnables on a forest's floor.

If ash is let to set in wood stove, it will rust as it draws in moisture out of air. Tell me if I’m wrong, but humidity is raised by pressure being lowered, this is due to h2o being less dense (heavier atomic weight), then n2 or regular atmosphere. But also I’m questioning it seems to condensate? One of my first big fires, was during a dry period, never rained on ash, when removed had a line of water across soil…

This may not be what all wish to hear, this is microbial biomass is usually reduced during fires, sometimes for decades, even during prescribed burns. This is my theory dealing with that. Nasty bacterial conditions, cause high pressure, therefore drying an area, to suppress microbial growth, if it cannot suppress it via drought, it is burnt to somewhat sterilize the area. This increases the conductivity of earth, a conductive landform lower pressure. In the paper I read, it was making it a negative, that microbial biomass was reduced. To state a clear situation, if I had 50 dogs, this would also increase microbial mass, I think at least. Microbial biomass maybe a poor standard especially when considering what the mass could be coming from and possible consideration of what also maybe clean. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468584421000301

* typo! H2O atomic weight 18 less dense then, N2 equals 28

How do I feel about prescribed burns? Well, if today had been dry just imagine how bad this overgrown area would have been if lightning struck & nobody was around. It rained hard 24 hours ago. It was plenty hot enough even with that.

We did a couple of burns this week. One was late afternoon & into the night. The last pic was in an open field with tall grasses & baby pines. That was lit upwind & very HOT. The pic was from about 50 feet away & I could barely stand there. Those flames were 30 or more feet tall. Ripped through that large field almost as fast as a person can run.

So with that last picture, do you expect most of the baby pines will survive and thrive with the burn treatment?

Is there a "too young to survive a fire" age for your variety of pines?

Mike do you all plant any fire-break trees? Mollison talked a lot about designing for fire prone areas by using particular species of trees that don't ignite easily.

He was very welcoming of foreign species though and often talking about Australia, I dunno what the situation is like in southern USA

There is a certain stage that longleaf pines are susceptible to fire. In about another month or two the small trees in the pic would have perished. As it is they will be just fine. They're not actually babies, they are several years old. They spend the first few years growing an extensive root system. Other than one brief period in their life they easily survive fire unless it is extreme & destroys the canopy of mature trees. They are relatively fireproof. They actually need the fire to reproduce & thrive.

When it stops raining I'll try to remember to go take some pix of a similar area burned last year. Those pix were posted here about last summer. Those young trees were the same size/age as shown in today's pic & look perfect now.

Smoke is just as dangerous as the flames in a wildfire. Today was especially smokey due to thick undergrowth of yaupon in places. Wanted to take a pic from the interior but didn't have time for that. Needed to get out quick & go protect this beautiful oak.

Hey look. Another balloon of unknown origin. Actually it's a forestry service airplane. Can't imagine why. Perhaps it was the huge cloud of steam we created yesterday. We had a long rain 24 hours earlier. Any excuse to go flying is OK in my book.

One of the less obvious dangers of wildfire or controlled burns is falling trees. The 3rd pic shows one that happened last night. It was a tree that had previously been hit by lightning. The base was hollowed out & it had a split up the side. When the fire reached there the sap ignited inside the trunk oven & up the split. This watergun on steroids sprayed it "out" at least twice. Then later I hit it again with 50 or more gallons from the fire truck. No sign of fire after that. BUT this morning when I went to check everything out the beast was burning again. Not a real problem in this case since all around was already devoid of fuel. The real danger is if a burning tree falls across a firebreak & the other side has fuel. Or if it falls on someone. That would hurt. Trees like this are one reason we always check status a few hours after a burn, usually several times, then again first thing in the morning. At least. We never fully trust them being out until after a long hard rain.

The last 2 pix show a similar tree that did fall across a firebreak a few weeks ago. We intentionally let that one burn because it was weak & going to fall soon anyway. Again, everything all around was clear. Plus that area is surrounded by creeks & swampy areas.

A couple weeks ago Jay Angler asked if young pines survive the fires. Here's a pic of some from the same field shown here.They are doing great a year later. They will grow much faster now that they are ending their young phase. This open field will be a nice forested area in a few years.

We did several burns in the past week. A lot of hard work. One of the tools I haven't shown here yet is a bulldozer. Not often used but always available. We keep it nearby around smaller firebreaks & particularly dangerous areas. It came in very handy during the wildfire last year. Make a firebreak ... HERE ... NOW.

Bumping this....
A lot of California used to be burned by indigenous peoples tending to their food, fiber and medicine. 5 million + acres per year. We removed them from the land, banned burning largely, logged and grazed instead, and put out every fire we could.   Fast forward 100 years, in a climate where biomass is produced faster than it decomposes - yes, wildfires (probably caused by people) will burn hot. We need to reintroduce fire on our own terms, so our ecosystems don't burn way hotter, at a much larger scale than they are used to.  Or - reconcile that fire will change our ecosystems faster than they can adapt to climate change.
Get educated about the ecosystem you live in. Chances are, fire plays an important role in maintaining it.

Get educated about the ecosystem you live in. Chances are, fire plays an important role in maintaining it.

Indeed. Just look at the recent US news. Decided to bump this in hopes it might help someone prevent a disaster on their own property.