Prescribed Fire: How to Survive on a ‘Fire Planet’
A dive into the risks and benefits of a controversial yet integral practice used to help prevent catastrophic wildfires
Hi all, welcome back to the latest edition of Burning Questions. I’m Galileo Defendi-Cho, a biochemistry major and environmental studies minor who took a journalism class called “Reporting on Wildfires” at Colorado College in the fall of 2023.
This piece will be a little different than previous installments. Instead of multiple relevant, timely topics about wildfire, research, and reporting, I’ll be diving into just one: prescribed fire.
You’ll hear from firefighters, burn bosses, wildfire reporters, and scientists — and I’ll offer some analysis of research about the efficacy of prescribed fire in preventing larger, more destructive blazes.
Fire professionals gather in Colorado Springs
Earlier this month, the 30th annual Colorado Wildland Fire & Incident Management Academy met here in Colorado Springs. The reason: continuing education for fire professionals so they can better handle wildland fire for the safety of all of us here in Colorado.
Roughly 1,000 emergency responders in a variety of fire and fire-adjacent fields enrolled in more than 50 courses, ranging from subjects like anticipating wildland fire behavior to attacking wildfires from the air.
One such class was the Certified Burner & Intro to Agency Burn Boss course, taught by Kirk Will, the unit chief of prescribed fire and fuels with the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control. The course certifies fire professionals to execute something called “prescribed fire” — a practice involving intentionally setting small sections of the landscape ablaze in a way that, when done properly, is effective at reducing the risk of out-of-control wildfire.
If you think that sounds risky, you might not be alone. While many people are accepting of prescribed fire, especially when they are familiar with the practice and its purpose, others might still be averse.
Despite the frequency of negative public perception of prescribed fire, according to Will, “public opinion is not an obstacle. Everybody has the right to speak up, everybody has the right to express their opinion, and everybody has a right to have their concerns addressed.”
But, “the more people know the better,” he says, and he believes educating the public on the process and motive of prescribed fire is important.
The rest of this piece will attempt to do that.
‘Built to burn’: The state of our forests
In a recent email, Nicole Vaillant, a fire management specialist with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, described ecosystems within the western United States as “fire adapted” and “built to burn.”
Depending on the ecosystem, she said, burns naturally occur as frequently as every 10 years, or as infrequently as every 200.
But since a WWII-era fire suppression regime established by the U.S. Forest Service known as the 10 a.m. policy came into place, decreeing that any fire reported should be put out by 10 a.m. the following morning, many fires have been extinguished as quickly as possible, depriving landscapes that actually depend on fire from its useful properties.
Mitchell R. Burgard, a fire consultant and former Forest Service fire manager who spent 32 years on wildfire crews across the country, described in a 2023 phone interview what happens to fire-dependent landscapes when they’re deprived of fire: forest overgrowth, especially of “ladder fuels” — shrubs and smaller trees that can help a fire leap from ground-level to the crowns where fire is most destructive, killing even the largest trees.
Burgard depicts fire as “nature’s tool for reducing fuel loading,” and without fire present in these landscapes in its natural intervals, modern day forests have far more fuel to burn than they naturally would.
Meanwhile, “We have forests that have … ten times more trees than they had naturally,” said Michael Kodas, senior editor at Inside Climate News and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, reporter and author, while addressing a class of Colorado College journalism students in the fall of 2023. “These forests have become much more flammable.”
In short, an increase in fuel load and density has primed many of our western forests, including here in Colorado, to burn catastrophically.
What is ‘prescribed’ fire?
Prescribed fire is the practice of intentionally burning forests and other wild landscapes at lower intensities, in safer conditions, and through controlled means and measures.
“Prescribed fire benefits the environment when applied where fire would naturally occur,” says Vaillant of the Forest Service. “It mimics lower to mixed severity fires.”
In some cases, such as in the ponderosa-pine-dominated forests of Colorado’s lower elevation wildlands, this means burning only grasses, shrubs, and smaller trees in the understory, while giving the larger, mature trees space to thrive. In other cases, such as in the lodgepole-pine-heavy forests of northern Colorado’s higher elevations, it means burning down entire stands of trees to be replaced, as might naturally occur every 150-plus years.
Indigenous people of the Western United States understood the needs of these forests. Many groups, including in Colorado, used fire to manage the lands on which they lived, keeping forests productive, grasslands ready for game, and themselves safe from a wildfire growing out of control.
Most significantly, prescribed fire aims to reduce risk of the kinds of catastrophic, destructive wildfires that we’ve seen too often in recent years by reducing the fuel available for a wildfire to burn.
And, when done properly, it’s effective.
A recent study shows it works
In 2021, researchers from the U.S. Forest Service and Penn State conducted a study comparing tree loss, an indicator for fire intensity, in areas with and without prescribed fire treatments in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California.
They found that prescribed fire reduced tree loss and intensity of fire by an average of 32% throughout different forest ecosystems, and increased the efficacy of fire suppression in these areas by >80%. Not only did prescribed fire reduce the destructive capacity of wildfire, it also helped firefighters curb its spread.
Despite an increase in prescribed fire in recent years — 28% more land was treated with prescribed fire in 2019 compared to 2011 — according to Kodas, the current usage of prescribed fire is insufficient to successfully meet the needs of a growing human population in areas at risk to wildfire.
“We need to increase the amount of prescribed burning we’re doing in the United States, four to five fold, if we're going to head off the worst wildfires that we’re going to see in the coming years,” Kodas said during his student talk at the site of the Marshall Fire burn scar in Boulder.
So, we need more prescribed fire, right? It isn’t so simple.
Playing with fire
“There is an inherent risk when you go about prescribed burning,” said Chance Froebe, a senior wildland firefighter and rescue tech with Cañon City Helitack, during a phone interview in fall 2023.
As such, fire crews take incredible levels of precaution to ensure a maximum level of safety when intentionally “putting fire on the ground” — the term used by those who start prescribed fires.
Before a prescribed fire can be considered, an appropriate Fire Management Plan must exist, which describes the state of the landscape, and determines whether or not prescribed fire is necessary or safe in the specific context.
Next, a Prescribed Fire Plan must be approved, a 23-page legal document that provides administrators with the information necessary to assess risk and inform crews on the ground about information necessary to safely execute a prescribed fire. All plans for prescribed fire must also be approved federally through the National Environmental Policy Act by the Council on Environmental Quality.
Land that is going to be burned must also be prepared. Fuel breaks — swaths of dirt without any combustible materials — are added around the perimeter of the intended burn area to prevent a fire from escaping. Often, the forest within the intended burn area is thinned by firefighters using chainsaws and hand tools, allowing it to burn at a lower intensity. These processes can take years.
In addition, the personnel carrying out the prescribed burns are highly trained.
“We’re all fire scientists,” said Jesse Moreng, a Multi-Mission Aircraft Manager for Colorado State’s Division of Fire Prevention and Control and a former hotshot squad leader, while speaking to a class of Colorado College journalism students in the fall of 2023. “We’re all students of fire.”
David Potts, a former “Burn Boss” — the title given to those authorized to plan, organize, and execute prescribed fires — described the certification process individuals must go through before they can light or approve prescribed fire. It includes countless hours of trainings and courses, and plenty of on-the-ground experience.
“They’ve got a lot of experience,” he said of those who professionally put fire on the ground. “A lot of qualifications.”
Despite all this, things can still go catastrophically wrong.
Catastrophe
Prescribed fires, even with extensive measures of control, still have the capacity for high levels of destruction.
In 2012, in Colorado, the Lower North Fork fire, originally a prescribed burn southwest of Denver, reignited from embers after wind speeds increased, and escaped its perimeter. It destroyed 22 homes, and took three lives.
In 2022, the Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires, northeast of Santa Fe, both started from prescribed burns conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, joined and grew to more than 300,000 acres, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history
These are two notable examples, but many more exist. Mistakes are made, weather changes unpredictably, and fire does occasionally escape. Fear is a reasonable response to fire, even if it is prescribed.
A (flaming hot) red herring?
Firefighters, scientists, and those who choose to surround themselves with fire for a living, understand the risk of prescribed fire perhaps better than anyone. And many are still vehemently in favor of it. Why?
“The risk is higher to people if we do not prescribe burn,” says wildland firefighter Froebe, who spent time on a veteran fire corps crew in Durango, Colorado, assisting with and executing prescribed fires. “It’s not even in the same bracket of danger (compared to uncontrolled wildfire).”
Through extensive modeling and analysis of observation, the conclusions are clear: prescribed fire certainly cannot be considered “safe,” but fire intentionally lit when conditions favor firefighters — moist, cold, and calm — is by far less dangerous than wildfire that will inevitably burn through forests and communities in high wind, high temperature, and low humidity conditions.
“There’s hundreds of prescribed burns that don’t get out every year, you just hear about the ones that do,” says Potts, currently a mission sensor operator for Colorado’s Multi-Mission Aircraft, which is frequently used to gain intel on wildfires.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, 99.84% of prescribed fires go as planned, and even those among the 0.14% that escape rarely cause damage.
Prescribed fire is risky, but, says Potts, “it’s a risk that we need to take.”
Another common aversion to prescribed burning is the resulting smoke in the air, a detriment to human health. Lately, researchers have been looking into that.
A recent broadcast from the Mountain West News Bureau, a collection of public radio stations that partner on coverage, reported how “researchers are trying to better understand the public health tradeoffs” of prescribed fire and smoke exposure.
From the Jan. 19 story:
Scientists have a “decent understanding” of some of the health impacts of wildfire smoke, said Claire Schollaert, a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. She is also the lead author of a recent paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability that tried to calculate the potential smoke exposures from forest management plans in California’s Central Sierra mountains.
“But we do not have a great grasp on the health effects of prescribed burn-specific smoke exposures and how those compare to those from wildfire smoke,” she said.
The researchers looked at six management scenarios, two of which – minimal management and “business as usual” – featured no prescribed fire and less fuel thinning than the other four. Wildfire smoke pollution from those two scenarios was the “greatest,” the paper found.
Of the remaining four scenarios, Schollaert said “there are potential health co-benefits of forest management in terms of thinking about overall smoke exposure, but perhaps diminishing public health returns is the amount of prescribed burnings really ramped up.”
But even the scenario with the most prescribed fires was predicted to produce less smoke than the two with no prescribed fire.
Fire season is going to bring smoke, no matter what.
Prescribed fire means breathing what is “basically campfire smoke” from younger, smaller growth, whereas the presence of higher intensity wildfires would mean breathing heavier, more toxic smoke from mature trees and human structures.
“The amount and duration of smoke from a prescribed fire pales in comparison to a wildfire,” says Vaillant.
In conclusion: Life on a ‘fire planet’
Storms can be destructive, causing floods and taking houses, yet we don’t wish away all forms of rain. We rely on it. We know we can’t live without it. Can we come to view fire in a similar light?
“We live on a fire planet,” says Kodas, author of Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame. “Everything that we’ve gotten on this planet, including life, has been to some degree dependent on fire.”
Humans are the only species to use fire to cook, or otherwise as a tool to enhance our means of survival. The combustion engine allowed the industrial revolution to occur, and for technology to progress to where it is today. Even now, our lives rely upon ecosystems that themselves rely upon fire.
Fire is a natural part of our landscape, as integral to our survival as any storm. We need to learn to live with fire, as our planet is inevitably going to burn.
All that we can control is how.
You’re reading Burning Questions, a newsletter produced out of the Colorado College Journalism Institute with support from a National Science Foundation grant. Students produced some editions in their class “Reporting on Wildfires” in the fall of 2023. Learn more about this newsletter here. 📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get Burning Questions delivered to your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or tips by emailing burningquestionscc@gmail.com
A great read. Easy to read. Thought provoking. I love the comparison to rain and flood.