“Fighting Fire With Fire” makes sense to specialist

by Dan Davidson

July 11, 2004

“Fighting fire with fire” is an often repeated cliché, by that’s what Terry Curran does for a living and this Fire Science and Prescribed Burn Specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources says it really does work.

Actually a PB Specialist isn’t necessarily concerned with fighting fires.

Terry Curran sees fire as just Mother Nature at work. he does his best to protect people from the collateral damage caused by her housekeeping.

“A prescribed burn,” Curran explains, “is where we intentionally ignite a fire, for management purposes - usually silvacultural purposes, or ecological purposes.

“Some species of plants and animals rely on fire so we do prescribed burning in Ontario for slash reduction, to facilitate (forest) regeneration, and (to create) habitat for certain species. There’s a ... butterfly that relies on fire for lupins. A lot of the animals prefer fire areas - moose browse around the edge.”

It turns out that “burning out”, as used against fires, is just one type of prescribed burn.

“I suppose,” Curran said, “that that is where I got most of my experience, was in prescribed burning. That enables me to ignite wildfires.”

In the case of a fire, the purpose of a burn is to establish a blaze under controlled conditions and use it to deprive an advancing fire of fuel, or to redirect the fire.

Forest fires, Curran says, are no longer seen as an absolute evil to be prevented. Much to the confusion of those of us who grew up with Smoky the Bear looking sternly at us under the words “Only You can Prevent Forest Fires”, natural fires (which include nearly all the Yukon’s fires this summer, for a change) are part of the circle of forest life.

“They are natural. It’s probably the main renewal of the boreal forest. Fire’s always played a role.” Lightning had caused all but three of the fires in the Klondike at the time of this interview.

Unless certain types of trees die, other types never get their turn to dominate the landscape, and the flora and fauna that prefer their habitat never flourish.

“If you left a stand of trees and you excluded fire, sooner or later it’s all going to fall down and dry out, and then it becomes a fire hazard. Fire eventually gets into it.”

Still, the objectives of the Wildfire Management group and the Ontario Incident Team to which Curran belongs are clear. They are to make sure that no one gets hurt (firefighters or civilians), that human values (buildings, roads, transmission poles, etc.) are protected and that the disruption to the social and economic fabric is kept to a minimum.

“Aerial ignition” is a phrase that’s being used a great deal in all discussions of field actions against the fires in the Goldfields Complex.

Curran heads up one ignition team.

“We backburn from values so that the fire doesn’t impact them, and try to limit the spread of the fire.”

The team will act to remove the fuel that leads up any value and remove it so that advancing fire can’t use it.

“That takes a lot of planning,” says Curran. “We have a fire behavior analyst who looks at the fuel types and the weather. We plan on what type of conditions we want to burn it out, what wind direction, what relative humidity. It’s a carefully planned operation and we’re continually planning ahead for the next day.”

The aerial crew works from helicopters, using a “heli-torch”, a 45 gallon drum underneath a chopper that contains a type of jellied gasoline which clings to the targets. It takes the crowns out of the spruce trees. Crown fires are among the most dangerous types, racing along an high speeds and virtually creating their own favourable weather with the heat of their conflagration.

Another machine drops pingpong balls filled with potassium promangonate and glycol, which ignite once they hit the ground.

They are also ground crews using hand torches, but they work in smaller areas.

Control of the fires which the team sets can be influenced by the choice of burn pattern, or by using the wildfire’s natural convection to suck the controlled fire into it, and also lift the embers into the air where they burn to ash before they fall back to the forest.

So. oddly enough, some of those really high pillars of black smoke can be a good thing.

You won’t find a lot of burnouts used in heavily populated areas because there is a danger they can escape, but for wilderness blazes far from human values, they have a good track record. Curran and his crew had been able to make some pretty good progress of slowing and stopping fires during the last week while the weather has been variable and cooler.

He expects to be challenged in the week to come, when a hot, dry spell is forecast to dominate the Klondike region once again.

Uffish Thoughts: Living a Normal Life in Stressful Times

by Dan Davidson

One of the most difficult things for folks in a fire zone to wrap their heads around is the idea that smoke can be a good thing. Smoke, after all, irritates the eyes and throat, obliterates the very sights which people come to the Yukon to see and which we who live here enjoy daily.

As it happens that same noxious fog also casts a long cooling shadow over the land, and over the fires south of our community. Temperatures under this week's high pressure ridge have been perhaps six degrees lower than forecast, 21 to 24 instead of 29.

That, and the increased humidity under the shadow, has kept our fires from flaring up as it had been feared they might during the return of

Former mayor, Glen Everitt, plants a couple of trees in his back yard. It may be smoky out here, but there are some things you can only do in the summer.

constant hot weather.

It’s been a mixed blessing. The fires haven’t been up and running, but then the fire crews haven’t been able to do all they’ve wanted, especially when it comes to aerial attack. Still, as the fire season advances things do get cooler, and the chance of a serious fire advancing on the town tends to diminish.

In spite of that possibility, folks in Dawson City are getting on with life pretty much as usual. Summer is the time for a lot of special events, and they are all planned and ready to go. The town is, as people keep saying, open for business.

Summer is also the time for housing repairs and renovations, painting, and landscaping, I don't have to go far to find examples of folks who are getting on with life as usual.

Our own house was power washed earlier in the week, getting it ready for a fresh coat of paint, which we assume we will still be here to pay for at the end of the summer.

Across the lane our neighbours are putting the finishing touches on a job that began a little over a month ago, which increases the size of their home by about a third, and adds.a magnificent deck to the rear of the house.

Many people around the town are doing yard work in spite of the smoke, particularly in the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’s new C4 subdivision at the south end of town. The area is filling up with new homes, and the oldest of these are now blossoming forth in grass and flowers.

Like many other Dawsonites, former mayor Glen Everitt is less than happy with some of the media coverage of the fires around the town. He says that some people have asked why he hasn't made any sort of public statement about the coverage the way he did in 1999.

He has simply pointed out that it is isn't his place to do that any more, not since having been removed from office in April. As a mere private citizen, about all he can is plant a tree, so he planted a couple of them on his new lawn the other evening, partly to show that life goes on.