Despite Precautions 'Controlled Burns'
Can Get Out Of Control

Abridged Story

From a news story by
CNN San Francisco Reporter Don Knapp

June 11, 2000

SETI

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Controlled fires sometimes burn out of control. The fire in this story was in Northern California last July. A Bureau of Land Management crew started it. They wanted to burn brush, which might burn. The winds blew the fire out of control. About 2,000 acres and 23 homes burned.

"Why, why did you do a burn in these kind of conditions," Glen Smith asked as he stood in the ashes of his house. "We had a week of over a hundred degree weather, and it had been windy for a whole week."

The government said the Bureau of Land Management, was at fault. It failed to look at the weather. It didn’t have a back-up plan to protect homes inside the controlled burn area.

The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) quickly said it was their fault. They started paying the owners of the homes.

This should have been a lesson to the people who set the fires. It is very risky. A sudden change in the wind can make the fire burn out of control

Fire managers say many years of keeping fire from burning on public lands decades of fire means they are ready to burn.

"These systems are going to burn...," said Scott Stephens, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In the past these forests burned every four, five, seven, eight years.

Two months ago the Los Angeles County Fire Department started using its new brush crusher. It is a 10-ton roller that stamps down brush. This makes controlled burns easier.

Fire scientists say taking out brush does not work as well as burning. They say controlled burns are needed to avoid big fires in the areas near cities. Care needs to be increased when burning near cities.

"While controlled fires can be risky, they're not as risky as doing nothing," says Stephens.

 

Additional Notes:

The most recent wildfires were in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and in Arizona at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. They were both started from so-called "controlled burns." The Los Alamos fire destroyed about 260 homes.

Go to some of the other web sites to learn more about the difficult decisions that must be made. It is difficult to decide whether they should be controlled burns or if we should just wait for a natural fire to occur.

CNN also talked to Los Angeles County Fire Department Chief Michael Freeman who said carefully planned controlled burning is conducted to prevent a fire disaster.

"In order to remove hazardous brush that presents a threat to structures, we go in under ideal weather conditions with plenty of emergency equipment and personnel," Freeman said.

The burn creates a firebreak, he said, "so that if there is a wildfire under less than ideal conditions, driven by wind and so forth, the fire will move to that break we've created through that controlled burn."

Freeman said the planning includes consideration of fuel types, winds, humidity and topography. Crews and equipment sometimes are left in the area days after the burn to make sure brush doesn't re-ignite. Freeman also noted that despite hourly weather checks, there's always the risk that winds can kick up and drive the fire out of the planned zone.

Forest fires are also a problem in other parts of the United States. This interesting report about Forest Service officials in northeastern Minnesota preparing for the catastrophic fires to come. was recently on National Public Radio. Listen to it, by going to this web site.

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CNN has been reporting the Los Alamos fire.

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