Crews work to help maintain landscape by fighting fire with fire

RAPID CITY, S.D. — The Black Hills area isn’t any stranger to fire.

In reality, fire has at all times been a component of pure environmental upkeep.

“For us to exclude fire from the ecosystem is the unnatural state,” Fuel Specialist with the Black Hills National Forest, Chris Stover mentioned. “Fire desires to be right here, it belongs right here. So we’ve administration ignited fire, prescribed fire underneath the climate situations we would like to have out right here.”

There are 21 components that go into finishing up a prescribed fire, which embrace issues akin to climate, humidity ranges and kinds of fuels being burned.

In this case, crews are centered on the dry grasses on the bottom and huge logs left over kind the Jasper Fire in 2000.

Over 2,400 acres, crews from the Forest Service walked the perimeters of the burn space, letting the vegetation burn and making a border for aerial ignition introduced on by way of helicopter. Aerial ignition was carried out within the central components of the burn space. Ignition gadgets smaller than a ping-pong ball have been dropped over the landscape, every containing a cloth that when punctured and injected with antifreeze created a chemical response that began a flame.

The fires work to additionally help stimulate new progress. In reality, a prescribed burn within the space final week has already help convey out new grass progress, which in flip helps draw extra wildlife and exercise to the world and shield the landscape.

“The timber are a useful resource for us,” Stover mentioned. “We need to shield these timber and by lowering the floor fuels, we’re defending a useful resource.”