‘Build it again, burn it again and repeat’

The Idler Fire north of Moscow last week burned nearly 120 acres of wildland and claimed a barn and a home before it was contained. One University of Idaho wildfire expert said work done by her students may have helped make the blaze more manageable for fire crews.

UI senior instructor Heather Heward, also an adviser for the Student Association for Fire Ecology club, said club members have been doing “firefighter for hire” work on a pair of Moscow Mountain properties for the past couple of years. She said the club, as well as some students from a prescribed burn laboratory class she teaches, have been helping to thin fire fuels on these properties, which may have slowed the flames and made them easier to quell.

“The work that we were doing was just removing smaller trees or less desirable trees, and piling them and then in the wintertime, burning the pile — and then going back and doing it again,” Heward said. “Often, because there was so much build up of fuel, we would use the same place that we built a pile in the first place — build it again and burn it again and repeat. That’s been our pattern for the last several years.”

While they do raise money to pay for expenses and annual trips related to fire ecology, Heward said the club members don’t get paid directly for their work. She said the club pays for its activity through donations and each year, she takes between 10 and 15 students to the Southeast to work with land managers there and help with their prescribed fire program.

She said unlike the American West, states in the Southeast have robust wildfire management programs that include a strategy of lighting controlled fires to help thin undergrowth and curtail vegetation that would otherwise run rampant. She said this helps keep fire activity in these regions manageable by depriving fires of a thick, unnatural buildup of these wildfire fuels. She said this kind of fuel buildup usually causes fires to grow larger more quickly and to behave more erratically.

“As humans, we’ve effectively taken out a natural disturbance agent, which is fire, and in the lack of fire, fuels continue to grow,” Heward said. “You either can take them out manually with mechanical treatment, or you can wait until they burn again, which is what they will do eventually.”

Heward, who is also chairperson for the Idaho Prescribed Fire Council, said these strategies can and should be adapted for states in the West. The work done by the Student Association for Fire Ecology Club on Moscow Mountain is a model for how some of that work could potentially be done.

She said the Idler Fire did burn the properties her students worked on, but she said it’s likely that work helped to keep the fires relatively approachable as “surface fires,” rather than allowing the flames to easily climb into the crowns of nearby trees.

Surface fires have shorter flames, are lower to the ground and are easier to halt with firelines dug by a bulldozer or by hand, she said. Surface fires are also a lot less likely to shed embers into the wind, potentially sparking more fire activity in nearby areas or structures. Heward said while their work or “treatments” certainly didn’t stop the fire, it’s possible they helped slow the spread and bought a little time for people to evacuate.

“That’s the strange thing with fire is that it isn’t often this wall of flame that comes and consumes a home,” Heward said. “It’s the embers that come from these torching trees — or even torching brush or grass — that then accumulate in or around the home and that’s what causes the home to ignite.”

Heward said the first thing people can do is work to protect their own homes, particularly if they live in close proximity to fire-prone wild spaces. However, she said wildfire experts are finding more and more that communities working together to prevent conditions ripe for fire is even better.

“One home having very defensible space pales in comparison to the effectiveness of having a community that is treating their fuel,” she said. “Just like COVID, you start with your own self. You look at your house, and you say alright, what can I do? Can I clean my gutters? Can I move this pile of wood? Can I trim this tree?”

Heward recommended property owners visit idahofirewise.org to learn about their local landscape and how to defend their land from wildfire.