The Malheur National Forest Fire Information Program
By Shannon Weidemann (McKone) on Tuesday, February 9th, 2021 in Eastern/Southeast Oregon News More Top Stories
GRANT COUNTY – (Release provided by the Malheur National Forest) Fire Information 101:
Last month we talked about the benefits of prescribed fire. This month we’ll focus on mechanical treatments.
Mechanical treatment, such as pile burning can be used on its own or together with prescribed burning to change how wildfire behaves so that when a fire does burn through a treated area, it is less destructive, less costly and easier to control. Often, mechanical fuels treatments are followed by prescribed fire to create effective hazard reduction.
Why do we burn piles? After thinning, we pile and burn the residual slash to reduce the surface fuel loading. This piled material is burned as one of the last steps in this suite of forest restoration activities prior to initiating landscape burning. We burn piles once there is sufficient moisture (rain or snow) to minimize fire spreading from the pile footprint.
If we leave too much slash unpiled, there would be a higher likelihood of more intense fire and higher flame lengths if a fire were to start. Results could be high mortality of residual trees across the landscape. We pile it to remove some of that slash thus generally resulting in lower flame lengths and moderate fire behavior should we have an unplanned ignition.
For most of the pile burning, we normally start in late October and go until the end of December or when conditions limit our travel. We need moisture on the ground to limit spread of piles burning outside the general footprint of the pile.
Firefighters ignite piles with a drip torch filled with slash fuel (Diesel/gas mix) or with mash (sawdust in a bucket of slash fuel). We follow smoke forecast recommendations to lessen the smoke that could get into towns or impact the public. We plan how we burn our units with the intention of not killing remaining trees. We may burn an entire unit in one day or burn every third pile if there are many piles in a unit or part of a unit and come back the next day to finish.
Over the past four years the forest has burned over 45,000 acres of landing piles (slash created from commercial harvest) and grapple and hand piles (slash created from small diameter tree thinning).
The average number of acres of landing piles burned is 2497 and grapple and hand pile are 8854. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) decisions where we’re working include decisions from all three districts. Over the past four years these NEPA decisions include but are not limited to: Dads, Soda Bear, Dove, and Summit. Decisions date range from 12/2008 to 9/2017. Plantation maintenance on Blue Mountain and Prairie City Ranger Districts are also included in the workload.
Already in 2021, we’ve burned 756 acres of landing piles and 7301 acres of hand piles and grapple piles. Weather and road/travel conditions have limited the ability to continue pile burning after January first. We expect a smaller contingent of employees attempting to get back out and burn piles from February through early April, all weather and snowpack dependent.
