Officials are banking on a history of prescribed burns in Sequoia National Park to help keep destructive flames from reaching the towering trees of Giant Forest.
firefighters are hoping a delicate and specialized tool will help protect the beloved behemoths: more fire.
The practice of prescribed burns is not new. For centuries, many of California’s indigenous communities considered it essential for forest health and employed it to great success, said Don Hankins, a professor of geography at Cal State Chico and a person of Miwok descent. With prescribed burns, “you can select the time when it’s going to happen, you can have greater control over what the outcomes of those fires are going to be, and then change the shape and the way that future fires will interact within that landscape,” Hankins said. “With wildfires, we don’t really have a choice of what those impacts are.”
Wallace said Friday that controlled burns in Giant Forest would be implemented if all other lines of defense fail. With so much unpredictability in a wildfire, including wind and topography, burn operations are a highly effective means for regaining some control.“It puts fire on the landscape in a lower intensity,” KNP Complex incident spokeswoman Katy Hooper said. “It cleans out that debris and litter, so if a fire then does come into an area, there’s no more fuels to be able to help.
As California has grown more populous, officials have suppressed more and more fires in a necessary effort to protect people, homes and infrastructure. The U.S. Forest Service employed a “10 a.m. rule” through the 1970s, which prompted crews to put out every wildfire by 10 in the morning after a blaze ignited.Forest Service changes ‘let it burn’ policy following criticism from western politicians
“In the past, fires burned through sequoia groves sort of like clockwork,” said Nate Stephenson, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, noting that some big groves might have seen fires every five or 10 years.
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