She did, but they didn't know about the paperwork at that time so it was a wildfire and they're laying low to avoid going to jail for arson. On the bright side, hey, free video idea! Let's make a video about the paperwork, pretty important stuff there
I am a wildland firefighter (tactical landscaper) - great job! I wasn't going to watch this, then decided to just to see how you did and I'm impressed. Even considered using this in training. I am also an agency UAS pilot and training for aerial ignition from a drone. How about a video about that?
I had been wondering how exactly the fire is set. Not gonna be some chump with a match :D is it multiple places at once? Do you add some fuel to make sure it sticks?
@@CptCh4os Drip torches filled with a mixture of gasoline and diesel, seen at 4:23, are the most common ignition method. Every fire engine and crew truck has a few of these, and beyond prescribed fires we'll also use them for backburns on an actual wildfire, to remove unburned fuel (trees, grass, bushes) between a fireline and the wildfire. It's typically done next to a road, constructed fireline, or other holding feature. If the burn unit is big enough, we'll break it up into smaller sections and do one at a time to make holding easier. OP is talking about aerial ignitions with a PSD machine, which uses plastic pingpong sized balls filled with powdered potassium promagnanate, and injected with glycol right before being dropped. The chemical reaction produces a lot of heat. Its typically done from a helicopter, but drones are becoming more common. There's also the helitorch, which is essentially just a gigantic drip torch with a 55 gallon drum and a pump that's slung underneath a helicopter. Think flying flamethrower. Aerial ignitions are best for large units that have a lot of inaccessable interior space where it would be unsafe or impractical to commit people into. We've all got a few fusees in our packs too, basically just road flares. They're not really that useful for prescribed fire, but we carry them so we can (if ordered) all individually light our own backfires, or prepare a deployment site in the event we get trapped and have to deploy our fire shelters. There's also a gun that can launch mini flares. I think that's all the ignition methods.
@@zax39104 ATV drip torches which look incredibly fun and I'm very jealous of the people that get to use them. They can cover a lot of ground for a staggeringly low personnel cost (holding aside) without needing a flight plan like a PSD on a heli would. The bread and butter of almost all burns everywhere is still going to be a handheld drip torch though. Dead simple to use, easy to control the fire intensity with, dirt cheap compared to anything mechanized, and every handcrew and engine already has *at least* 2 - 5 not including safety cans for extra fuel.
Thank you for managing the land. I just wish yall would notify the public more when yall do a prescribe burn. I say that because there’s a fire in central Florida that was sending out smoke but couldn’t find anything about it. Mind you, I lived in Colorado during the Marshall wildfire and couldn’t escape.
@@mattwhaley1865it won't let me post a link but if you Google "whyprescribedfire", the Florida State Forest Service has a website with a map of all current/active burns. I think some counties also let you sign up for notifications.
bro I'm so deadass, that's exactly the job I want in life please tell me how you got there!!!! I'm in university right now, but idk exactly how to get there in the end.
The cheapest way to do mechanical thinning is to give crosscut saws, axes, and mattocks to a boy scout troop, buy them pizza, and tell them to go nuts.
Not at scale. We are talking about millions of acres that need fire. The fire return interval for the Great Plains was between 2-5 years (rainfall dependent). That’s a mind blowing amount of fire on the landscape that’s absent. Prescribed fire has a cost of dollars per acre compared to mechanical clearing which can run hundreds to thousands per acre.
That's nice. As the video says, mechanical thinning is certainly not as effective as a prescribed burn, but in some cases burns aren't an option. Mechanical thinning IS an option, and it's better than nothing. I was a boy scout, and I've done volunteer mechanical thinning. Hiring a crew to do it may be prohibitively expensive, but we did it for free, and we had a great time. It's a genuine option for land management agencies to contact the local scout troops and organize a mechanical thinning volunteer event. I understand that mechanical thinning by volunteers alone is not nearly enough for the entire country, but when it is an option, it is effective.
@@Elessar_Telcontar I’m a Boy Scout. My response host a jamboree (very large camp) and use the same plan there you go hundreds of Boy Scouts concerningly excited to be given and allowed to use chainsaws.
All videos should have auto-generated captions. If you're seeing them without captions it's probably because you're watching shortly after it's uploaded, they take some time to get added!
The BC wildfire service should watch this. They did a prescribed fire last year right before a wind storm with a small fire break and basically burnt town a small town
Unfortunately, as the wildland urban interface expands it becomes harder (more expensive) to implement prescribed fire successfully. Depending on the prescription there may only be a handful of days a year that meet your conditions. Usually the hardest burn is the first one since you are dealing with a hundred years of fuel build up a much denser stand. We are playing a game of catchup and it requires skilled crews to begin.
@@Elessar_Telcontar nah brah, they did the burn as a precaution to prevent the nearby fire reaching from the community. They didnt plan it well, it did not work out, and probably made it worse than if they left it alone.
@@pizzagroom6221That doesn't sound like prescribed fire. That sounds like back burning, less a planned months ahead burn more an oh shit the fire is coming, we need to lower the fuel load before this raging inferno gets to it.
@@PheonixRise666 Yeah I agree, backburning is used for bushfires here in Australia too. Controlled burns are usually done in winter, backburns will be fine the day of a bushfire, so usually in summer
I love that you showed Leah's wooden sculpture from Stardew Valley as the representation of "Conceptual Art". It's emblematic of the game's hopeful aspiration to self expression as a community value and reminds me more than a little of dadaist sculpture by Hans/Jean Arp.
I'm an 'advanced firefighter' and mitigation crew member (a person who prepares control lines for prescribed fires) in Australia and I wanted to take a minute to explain some things. Also, certain information/rules will be different per location. Firstly the language: 'prescribed burn' is the official term however hazard reduction is the common term. A backburn on the other hand is when firefighters burn the bush when a wildfire/bushfire is approaching to protect assets (anything people want to save including fences (fences are a big part)) usually burning from the interface (urban meets bush). The start is generally correct, if you see fire, call the emergency services however if there is a HR, only call if there is an unattended fire. When Same is talking about fuel, this is called 'active fuel' but his definition is spot on. Total fuel however is... the total fuel in the bush from the surface level fuel to the crown fuel (tree tops). When referring to "outlawed the on purpose fires" he means bushfires and large pile burns (different places have different size rules). This is unless it is within the official 'bush fire season' or there is a 'total fire ban' in which it's best to ask your local fire authority before lighting. In the next part "more frequent and less intense fires", Sam is sport on, in Australia we aim to burn a piece of land every 7 to 10 years with small to medium intensity HRs. From my experience, mechanical thinning is almost not heard of except for plantations, as once I plantation is on fire, it won't stop. As with the goats... we have been trialling them for a while and it appears to be working. Wildland Urban Interface: we just call it the urban interface however I'll leave it to an Amercian expert to clarify American language. Before I start with the HR discussion I'll disclose that this is only advanced and not expert-level knowledge as I'm not qualified to 'plan/conduct prescribed burns' Sam showed an image of an area that was going to be burnt, obviously prescribed burn maps are a lot more complex and can take years to fully understand. Also, HRs will often go for multiple days and nights, often burning in the day/afternoon and monitoring at night however it's not uncommon to burn at night in calm conditions. Paperwork is one of the biggest parts of a HR, and yes smoke (how much, intensity and where it goes) plays a critical part in the planning. Season: while typically in Australia we go for Autumn or Spring as it's not too cold nor hot, if the conditions are right outside that bandwidth, we'll still burn. The fuel moisture range (which is from Fuel Moisture Content (FMC)) is calculated using time of day or month, temperature, relative humidity (RH), wind, drought, canopy height and coverage and total fuel loads. This put into a calculator spits out a Fire Behaviour Index and Rating, flame height, spotting distance, rate of spread, FMC and intensity. In Australia we like the FMC to be between 12 and 20, the golden rule for RH is close to or just below the temperature and temperature between 15 and 30c (good luck burning below 10c down here) however these figures change per fire authority. The day is a big factor, sam is correct about the wind and resources. While our agency is big enough to have multiple bushfires going, a campaign fire would stop the HR, if not the resources then the weather itself. Resources (firefighters) are huge at a HR especially if it's near the urban interface where they'll try to have a truck for every few assets, this quickly adds up. Time is important, we want to light up either early morning or later in the afternoon. The day's heat and wind can be extremely dangerous thus we tend to avoid having the most intense fire around lunch to mid-afternoon. Comms for a simple burn plan include the overall incident controller, division commander (DIVCOM), sector leader (SECLEAD) and the crews plus any additional units. I won't go into the specific units as there are far too many for the comments section however to clarify when Sam said "raining hellfire from a helicopter" however showed a clip of a water bombing helicopter. We do use what's called 'aerial incendiaries' which "drop" fire from a helicopter to ignite hard-to-reach locations. The last HR I went to was divided into two sectors (small burn), each had its own aerial incendiaries helicopter and water bombing helicopter which were managed by another helicopter who was the Air Attack Supervisor (like incident control but in the sky). Holding plan is where my specific expertise comes in. As it implies this is about how the fire will remain contained in the prescribed area, while there are many ways to contain the fire, different types have their strengths and weaknesses and there is rarely a guarantee that it will hold. We have open areas such as Asset Protection Zones (APZs) which is often short grass/rock at least 30m wide spanning the perimeter of the asset, truck trails, roads or anything else non-flammable suck as a lake, river, sea or ocean or a proper control line. A control line is a 1-3m wide area of bare earth (soil/rock) trail which has no vegetation up to 2m high with canopy separation using chainsaws, brushcutters, polesaws, blowers and rackhoes. Crews will usually man these trails/control lines to prevent spotting (fire jumping a containment/control line) and blackout (put fire/heat near the edges using chainsaws, rackhoes and/or water/foam). The rest of elements 16/17 are too complex for regular civilians and are just a problem for fire/mitigation crews and the prescribed burn planner so I won't go into it. Element 18 is different per agency but is usually determined by the incident controller or the Fire Control Officer (FCO1 or 2) who is the fire chief and second in charge of the fire district (whoever signed off the HR). The name of the HR is usually the name of the area or a nearby road. Assembly of people: what is shown is a very simplified list of all those involved, I won't explain them as it will take too long. In the end, HRs are a long, complex and very expensive but important process of which Sam gave a surprisingly good summary in a 9-minute RU-vid video... even if he didn't mention any of the post-burn processes.
@@hadinossanosam4459 Oh lmao that first reply was two sentences? This is why you need to use proper punctuation lmao. You can even get a spelling and grammar checker for your browser so that it checks any text field for you, the same as a word processor would. I used it to edit this comment 😆
This is genuinely terrifying. The valley I live in is the number one valley that is being watched in Colorado. We have so much standing dead. Some of the forests have an 85% beetle kill rate, and we have not been hit by a major fire in a very long time.
Studies mostly show that dead trees are great for woodstove-burning, but drought-stressed living conifers are the fire hazard. Needles, twigs, small branches, but mostly the volatile inflammable terpene-laden sap explodes when heated by the tree afire next to it-
I love this new style of videos lately, more detailled, slower paced and with especially lovely graphics and animations !! Keep the good work HAI production
Hey HAI! I am a forester and wildland firefighter in Colorado. This video is excellent! You did a really good job of covering alot of hard topics. Keep up the good work.
Really insightful, especially understanding prescribed fires and the complexity of planning and executing them. Now I can explain why fire management focuses on "little burn now so no big burn later".
California cut back on these in state and federal parks in past and it combined with bad power line maintenance cause most fires in cali in recent years
it's by design, they know exactly what they are doing. how else are they supposed to make everyone believe the world is dying and the only way to fix it is by giving Al Gore billions of dollars
Yes I remember PG&E and SoCal Edison the utility companies for California get blamed for not reducing fire hazards and some of it lead to Calfire team and civilians getting killed.
It's still strange to me that hazard reduction burns aren't normal in other countries. But I guess other countries' trees aren't _quite_ as keen for fire as those here in Aus!
it is crazy that i am in a masters program that had a seminar that talks about fire, and how it propagates. I get this video is more about logistics but still. love the vids keep up the work!
I assumed this was a Wendover video from the thumbnail. I'm actually quite knowledgeable about the topic, I'm actually a Type 2 Wildland Firefighter. I wish you would have talked more about how important these fires are for wildlife, though.
Yeah, that is my only complaint as well as someone who is working toward becoming an ecologist, though I suppose you can only cover so much in a 9-minute video. Fires are especially important for a ton of threatened native prairie, wetland, woodland species here in Illinois, and I really appreciate all of the controlled burns that folks like you take care of.
I have American Indian ancestors who lived in Northern California. Some of us still live there. Anyway, my tribe's primary diet consisted of acorns, since California has a LOT of oak trees. And acorns are edible (and nourishing) if you leach the tannin out of them. California Indians practiced forestry management using fire as the main tool. So the whites are johnnie-come-latelies when it comes to fire as forest managment.
European settlers came late to a lot of things (i.e. methods of crop rotation and soil preservation measures, waterway damming, conservation of game for hunting and management said games' grazing practices, etc.). They didn't listen to the diverse people who had tended the land for centuries before them, and it really does show when you look into the history of land management in the Americas. Lots of unneccessary harm and missed opportunities. On a side note, I've always wanted to try American chestnuts and acorns. I've heard thay they can be pretty darn good, although the former is very rare nowadays and the latter I keep forgetting to try.
Well duh the forests of the west coast US are made of trees adapted to lighting on fire. Both natives on the east coast and Europeans were far less burn- happy because of the climate and vegetation
We call this backburning in Australia and have been using it as long as I can remember to manage our fire risk. There's an interesting story about using fires to create "balds" in the Bunya Mountains in Queensland by the Aboriginal people. These fires weren't necessarily about reducing fire risk but had created important ecosystems. This was stopped after European occupation, however the National Parks are working with the local Aboriginal groups to resume the practice to preserve the ecosystems. It's an interesting take on how humans can be part of nature instead of working against it.
Isn’t backburning usually used near an active bushfire? To burn up the fuel right before the bushfire reaches it to help stop the fire. I’ve normally called them controlled burns, but you can also call them planned or prescribed burns.
@@SagealeenaYeah the Rural Fire Service (RFS) calls these Hazard Reduction Burning. A lot of Australians will commonly know it as back burning but it's not correct. The confusion is why a lot of people got very angry when they found out the Greens wanted to outlaw private backburning where farmers were setting parts of their fields on fire as bushfires approached but since they're untrained their backburns tended to successfully protect their own properties at the risk of setting their neighbour's alight
I've just been learning about how we do this in Australia and it's very similar. We call them Planned Burns here and it's such vital work. Also if you ever want to do a video about the logistics of Biosecurity, hmu.
I always wounder why we're always behind on prescribed fires and now i know why they're tedious set up. I know a lot can go wrong and you need safety margins and factors to consider its safety but 250 pages worth of paperwork is a lot for a single fire or even just a set of fires in the area.
My uncle used to help with these, he would drive around the perimeter on a atv with a water tank reporting in now and then on the fire and being ready in case it did get out of control. There are like a gazzilion variables for the right conditions to do it in, it's all really complex and awesome!
Australian bush has adapted to require fire to reproduce and stay healthy - and indigenous people have been systematically using fire to care for country for at least 60 000 years! Because colonisers came and stopped it, there’s a lot of underbrush, the trees haven’t reproduced in the right way in 250 years, and you can see it in increased bushfires. Burn offs in off season are essential for safety.
Admittedly my background is structural fire fighting, not wild land but saying that fire crews would ever want to work going downhill, that is from higher up on the hill than a fire is crazy to me. Heat, flame, smoke, and the super heated gasses from a fully developed fire travel upward and if you came at them from a high angle of elevation you would have your turnout gear fail in seconds. Love the videos though!
I believe it's that they want the fire to spread downhill as it would spread faster uphill. Ideally the fire crew don't have to get involved in the majority of the burn, they're just there to stop it going beyond the set boundaries. I'm not a fire fighter of any sort though - just what I got from watching the video.
Man you structure nerds are cool and badass as fuck. Im a career wildland guy but I did structure academy last year for my vollie department, and I've never had more fun than going through all the live fire evolutions and doing the blacked out victim searches. Cutting fire line downhill with fire below is indeed a risk for the reasons you stated and requires some serious approval. But igniting downhill is, for all the same reasons, safer. The fires always above you and when you're done igniting, you're at the bottom!
@@zax39104 Thanks for sharing your expertise! I always thought about transitioning over to wild land but the lack of hydrants/urban water supply infrastructure makes me a bit hesitant haha, if only trees had standpipes! Major respect to you and those in your field, stay safe out there!
Get a few years of experience on a handcrew or engine so you have a good base knowledge of firefighting, then move to a federal helitack crew. Get qualified on the helicopter and show you're not a bagger, and they'll open your PLDO taskbook. Hope your ship gets assigned to some prescribed fires, and you'll go up with a qualified PLDO and a firing boss. Complete the taskbook over the course of a few burns, and you're now a glorified flight attendant for a finicky robot. There's also wildland fire modules (nerdy, ignitions-oriented handcrews) that use drones for PSD, but I have no idea what that path looks like. If you're not a complete bagger you could feasably be dropping balls a handful of years from now; the old guard is retiring and we're desperate for warm bodies, so there's never been a better time to join the U.S. Forest Circus, the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, the Parkies, or even Fins n' Feathers.
Thank you s much for the video! as a operator in the same field I really appreciate this! but mechanical thinning isn't done by hand, its done by machines. we use masticators to chew up the under brush, both n steep terrain, where we can also use tracked and leveling feller bunches along with dedicated masticatoin machines. we leave behind shreds that's burn quickly and are all on the grounds, so if a fire goes through it never has a chance to climb any of the trees. hand thinning is just that, hand thinning. Again Thank you so much for touching on it!
Then eventually you get to a point like some seasons in Australia reach, where the heat, wind and dryness are so extreme that hazard reduction burns don't even make much of a difference. At that point, as seen during the summer of 2019-20, the freshly prescribed burned areas burn just as quickly as anywhere else. Naturally those conditions are becoming more common due to global warming.
Same thing often happens in UK on many Moors to get rid of the rank heather. This is normally done in the cooler wetter months so there's little risk of fire spreading, and is done in small areas each year typically in a 20 year rotation, which creates a patchwork effect of different growth stages of heather to benefit different forms of wildlife that thrives best when the heather is at those different stages of growth. If this is not done then the build-up of dead & dry material will eventually result in the whole moor becoming rife with dry, rank heather where nothing grows and which only benefits a tiny subset of animals who prefer it that way. And worse will eventually (and inevitably) result an uncontrollable wildfire which risks local wildlife and damage to nearby homes & businesses. .....this was always traditionally done by gamekeepers at no cost to the taxpayer as the fresh shoots of heather are preferred by the Grouse that the estates wish to encourage. This also brings with it tons of benefits to all other forms of wildlife. --- Sadly though, some moors have the gamekeepers and shooting estates kicked off or have been taken over by folks who are anti-shooting (eg. RSPB). In many cases rather than use the profits from shooting to manage those moors to keep wildfires in check, and for the benefit of local wildlife (including the wild grouse that generate the income to pay for it all) they leave them to "rewild". This inevitably results in a huge build-up of flammable dry mass which eventually catches fire and rips through the area, devastating it completely. Whenever you see a huge uncontrolled moorland fire in the UK it's invariably on moorland where the gamekeepers have been banished by anti-shooting interests and the moor has been left to wrack & ruin.
I have never seen better forest management, including with the use of prescribed burns, than in the Coconino National Forest while going to school in Flagstaff AZ. I have never seen worst forest management than in Cibola National Forest (Sandia Mountians) near Albuquerque NM.
You forget that none of this gets done without it being solicited and put on contract. Didn’t see a contracting officer on that list of people you had in yellow.
Styropyro acts the same way as fires. I there isn't anything for a while, he is most likely not dead, but instead planning a nefarious plot to blow up his old truck or something.
I'm given to understand that a lot of the existing federal firepeople are retiring and they need a new generation, which means that once you have a couple years in a normal city fire department on your resume, the feds will totally be happy to take you to work on fire helicopters. Good luck!
Controlled fires are interesting, but what I'm really concerned about is how without humans, forests naturally build up fuel that inevitably leads to fires. So apparently, occasional fires are intended to happen naturally. How does that cycle play out, and what purpose does it serve?
It plays out whenever a lightning strike happens, or volcanic activity, or just plain old spontaneous combustion from anaerobic decomposition like in compost heaps. Occasionally but randomly occurring who's frequency is dependent on season, elevation, vegetation type and density. And its purpose is to clear Deadfall and return certain elements to the soil facilitating and allowing a new generation to grow and flourish.