The last two days of February saw record-setting high temperatures and two wildfires in the Mark Twain National Forest. One was started by an arsonist, the other by downed power lines.
While firefighters contained the blazes within 48 hours and the damage was limited to 1,000 acres, the burns underscored the importance of the U.S. Forest Service’s use of prescribed burns. Those are intentional fires designed to thin out the forest and clear dead leaves to help keep the habitat healthy.
The Mark Twain includes more than 3 million acres across southern Missouri and doesn’t see the kind of large wildfires that have increased in frequency in the western U.S.
Chris Olds wants to keep it that way. The district ranger for the Salem district south of Rolla oversaw a prescribed burn last week in an area of the forest adjacent to one of the February wildfires.
He spoke with St. Louis Public Radio’s Jonathan Ahl on a road in the forest where one side was the site of a prescribed burn in progress and the other side was land damaged by one of the wildfires.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jonathan Ahl: Can you explain how the prescribed burn area helped contain the wildfire?
Chris Olds: Everything around the wildfire to the north had been prepared to be burned. So we were able to use an existing prescribed burn footprint to manage an actual wildfire incident. And so we were able to let it burn all the way up to this forest service road that had already been cleared, and then we had the road here to the west and then we were able to box that fire in so it couldn't get any bigger. There is definitely a little bit of luck, but I give a lot of credit to our fire program. They do a lot of work on the ground and on the landscape to prepare different large blocks of land across the forest to be burned, every year. So if it wasn't this block that was prepared, it might have been the block to the east. So there are what I'll call points where we can catch it, in the forest, to keep it small, get it contained so it doesn't take out large chunks of, of federal land, private land or state land.
Ahl: So what's the difference between what happened on this side of the road and what's happening on that side?
Olds: On this side there were a lot of environmental factors that allowed it to burn very hot and not in a controlled way. What's happening on that side of the road is, it's prescribed. So all the prescription requirements were met. We can manage it, we can control it, we can do everything we need to within our means to keep it within the area. We need to keep in this area. On the other side, the winds were too high, it was too dry, the fuels were too dry. It was not a good day for us to burn, which is why we didn't burn it that day. But somebody else thought otherwise and set it, and so we had to get on it, contain it as quickly as we could.
Ahl: With climate change, we're going to see more dry conditions, we're going to see more 80-degree days in February. How does that impact the way that you approach managing the forest fighting fires that aren't intended and the way you do prescribed burns?
Olds: It's continuing to use the best available science to manage the landscape to the best of our abilities. It's not what we used to do five, 10, 20 or 50 years ago. It may not be the right tool for the job now and may not be the best way to approach forest management today. But there's a lot of science out there, there's a lot of data out there, and it's using that data-driven information to help educate and inform us on when, where and even how frequent do these prescribed burns need to occur. Also, what other tools should we be using in conjunction with prescribed fire? So, for me, it's looking at it from a more holistic view. It's constantly being a student and learning as we go and, using the best available information and science that we can get to educate ourselves, educate the public and educate anybody that's willing to listen.
