Cleansing the Earth with fire: Why wildland firefighters set flame to thousands of acres of national park land every year

USA – OGDEN DUNES — The afternoon sun cast an orange haze through the smoke as a bright line of fire zig-zagged across the hillside.

“It looks like there is a car on fire, it’s so thick,” said Micah Bell, pointing to a black cloud spreading across the wetland.

Though flames crackled all around and ash floated through the hot air, the wildland firefighters weren’t racing around with hoses.

This burn was prescribed.

As a steady line of flames licked at the dry cattails and phragmites, firefighters traveled through the smoke carefully monitoring, but not dousing, the fire.

Bell, a fire prevention and education technician with Indiana Dunes National Park, said every year some 10% of the 15,000-acre national park will be “treated” through prescribed burns.

“Fire is part of the land here,” Bell said “Before we were ever here, fire helped shape the landscape.”

Before colonization fires were commonplace, started both by lightning strikes and by different Indigenous tribes. Cultural burning was used to promote plant growth, create game habitats and reduce the risk of devastating wildfires.

However, in the late 1800s the National Park Service, NPS, began instituting fire bans based on the belief that burning was destructive. The rise of Smokey Bear and the “Only you can prevent forest fires” tagline in the 1940s solidified fire as dangerous and total prevention as the only option.

As scientists began to study fire more, the ecological benefits of prescribed burns led the NPS to change its fire policy in 1968. Bell said prescribed burning was first used at the Dunes National Park in 1986.

“We learned that not all fires are bad and that Smokey Bear’s message was somewhat damaging to us,” Bell said.

Prescribed burns help “cleanse” the land, Bell explained. The goal is to burn the landscape in patches, creating a sort of mosaic that maintains some wildlife habitat. Regular burns help control invasive species, reduces understory that blocks sunlight, trim dead growth and return nutrients to the soil.

The science behind prescribed burning goes back to Darwinism.

“Survival of the fittest,” Bell said. When dying plants and branches are burned, more nutrients can be devoted to sustaining healthy growth.

“To go out there, put fire on the ground and then look behind you to see what it has done, and then go out a year later and see that the land is amazingly green and luscious, … it’s pretty cool,” Bell said.

Wildland fire crews won’t set flame to the same location two years in a row. Most are burned every five to seven years, allowing ample regrowth.

Fire also helps maintain biodiversity, opening up the landscape to different kinds of habitat. Bell said prescribed burns are helping restore Dunes’ landscape to “what it should be.”

The roughly 50 million acres of black oak savanna that once stretched from Michigan to Nebraska, has dwindled to just 30,000 acres. Composed of prairie mixed with fire-resistant trees, if black oak savannas aren’t burned regularly, trees will shade out prairie plants.

With the aid of prescribed fires, the Dunes National Park is working to restore 1,045 acres of black oak savanna habitat.

Because the National Park is known for its biodiversity, Bell said there are certain rare plants firefighters cover with foil protective tents before burning the surrounding landscape.

As the number of extreme wildfires increases across the country, prescribed burns are becoming more and more of a necessity.

Intentionally burning up dead leaves and dry brush reduces the amount of wildfire “fuel,” Bell explained. With fewer woody branches littering the land, wildfires don’t get as hot or as big.

Firefighters spend weeks preparing for burns, clearing leaves from things they don’t want to catch fire and creating bare paths called “control lines” by stripping the land to mineral soil, which is not flammable.

On the day of the burn, Bell said conditions have to be “in the Goldilocks zone.” Not too dry or too wet, and not too cold or too hot. Crews always work against the wind so the fire doesn’t spread too quickly.

If the right weather conditions are met, wildland firefighters will start putting up warning signs before attending two briefings. Potential ambulance routes, EMT locations, traffic control methods and, of course, where the fire will start all has to be carefully planned out before a single flame is lit.

Once the burning actually starts, it’s an extremely precise process.

“When people hear ‘fire,’ their mind flashes to somebodies’ home burning down,” Bell said, adding that none of the prescribed burns at the Dunes have ever gotten out of hand.

Firefighters walk in a steady line holding a drip torch: a metal canister filled with a diesel-gasoline mix and a wick that extends out of the top.

Bell described the process as “like pouring liquid fire.” This fall crews hope to complete seven prescribed fires, totaling more than 1,400 acres.

With intense training requirements, high physical demands and the looming risk of injury, Bell said being a wildland firefighter “takes a lot of heart.”

“None of these people are here for the money,” Bell said, looking out over the smoking hills that lay before him. “Wildland firefighters are in it for the land.”