A Complex Burn on a Hot Day

[00:00:00]You have heard the story of the moth and the flame. What a fool I'd be to play with fire again. Though there's a fire still in my heart, why should you try it until you seem to forget? Then I put it out with tears of regret.

[00:00:20]>> Our riddle for the day is submerge.

[00:00:23]Will you submerge yourself in service on earth? Have you come here for a reason and a purpose?

[00:00:32]Aha, Chikawaka.

[00:00:35]>> This daily telling is brought to you by me, Starlight Compost.

[00:00:42]>> Headed to the North Bloomfield Road area, Nevada City today for a late season burn with first rain. Uh burning permits are suspended in BU County now unless you uh go through uh some special channels and have a burn plan. This video is going to be about burning into summer, burning into hotter and drier conditions. Uh what it takes to get permission, what it takes to pull it off safely. So, here we go.

[00:01:23]Baby, you set my soul on fire.

[00:01:27]every morning and every evening.

[00:01:33]And maybe we can't get any higher, but if you like to take a ride, we can discover what we're hiding.

[00:01:44]It sure looks good.

[00:01:54]All right. So, if you've been watching the Lookout for a while, you've heard us talk about Grass Valley, Nevada City.

[00:01:58]Here's the Bay Area down here, Sacramento. And then you go up in the foothills above Sacramento and Orville in here to Grass Valley. All these yellow dots represent structures. And so, um, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Ala, Sierra, Kfax, all these areas kind of along the foothills are kind of within commuting distance to Sacramento, California. And also, it doesn't get as hot in the summer up here. So, they're desirable places to live, but they're some of the worst fire hazard and uh wildland urban interface really anywhere. And so, there's been a lot of attention on reducing fuels in the areas adjacent to and around Nevada City and Grass Valley. And there's, you can see there's a lot of people living out here in these thickly forested ridgetops.

[00:02:41]And so this project here is about 15 acres in an area where there's a lot of structures and an inaccessible canyon out beyond it.

[00:02:52]And one unique thing about operating in Nevada County is that there's all sorts of massive disturbance on the landscape from previous gold mining. So our burn unit here actually is kind at the head of this old mine and they washed all the little stream gullies out, washed them out with water. And so you've got all through this unit that we burned, you've got this really kind of weird lumpy topography that makes it difficult to work here. And it makes it difficult to do things like thin out here with the mechanical thinning machines or other machines we usually use to cut brush.

[00:03:24]The scale of disturbance in the landscape out here is extreme as you'll find anywhere. And then in and around all these areas, there's a lot of structures. So just um having that crazy amount of disturbance in the historic landscape really um continues to affect our options for managing these lands.

[00:03:44]Basically this landscape has been thinned by hand by the same crew that I was burning with yesterday and there were piles um scattered through this landscape. No work's really been done um recently on thinning the neighbors.

[00:03:59]And so we were burning here up to property lines and on the other side of the property lines were really heavy fuels. And then down onto this property down here there's really thick manzanita um with pine needles draped all over it.

[00:04:12]Some of the most dangerous fuels we've got. Anyway, we started up here above the road. We um burned piles and lid off the upper line. And once this upper unit was um fairly well secured with fire kind of burning in from the control lines, then another crew came and started lighting down here below.

[00:04:38]I'm at the bottom corner of the area we're burning today.

[00:04:42]It's about 13 acres. It's been there's been piles that have been burned here already. This lower part's pretty open.

[00:04:48]in the upper part. It's got a lot of piles and a lot of heavy fuel. It's about uh 9:00 a.m., but about to start ignitions on the upper unit.

[00:04:58]And my first impressions are there's a lot of green shrubbery.

[00:05:04]Underneath that is some really dry pine needles. Uh down about 3 in of duff.

[00:05:10]Really not much moisture at all in the duff. It's really dry. Uh super still right now. No wind at all as forecast.

[00:05:18]Um, so it'll be interesting to see once we get these piles. Burning what the smoke does. If the smoke shades us out, often times smoke um shading out your burn is a real factor in how intense your burn is until the smoke goes away and then you've got a bunch of fire and u more sunlight and things change rapidly. So forecast to have the inversion break in about two hours. So, it'll be interesting to that's what I'll be watching this morning is just kind of how burning conditions change once the inversion here breaks and the smoke lifts out.

[00:05:57]I was just walking up the road and guy asked me if we're planning the burn today. I said yes. He said, "Well, good luck with that." And so, I thanked him.

[00:06:07]I thanked him for wishing us luck. We always look at uh the overstory trees cuz ponderosa pine has really heavy needle litter which is really a great fuel, great continuous fuel for moving fire.

[00:06:23]And then the ponderosa like to drape in the brush and create what we call needlecast which is kind of a unique fuel type to the Sierra Nevada.

[00:06:33]that manzanita and ponderosa pine needle mix is kind of a a regional spiciness that Sierra Nevada gets that a lot of other places don't get. Ponderosa grows in places that want to burnt often. And my friend Wolfie Rugal says that ponderrosa pine is kind of the timekeeper. It determines the time between fires depending on how much needle cast it throws down. Um, you know, some areas with pine you can burn every year just because a single year of needle drop is enough to creates enough continuous surface fuel to to to really uh support the spread of fire.

[00:07:18]So now we're uphill the unit. There's a little house up here on the null.

[00:07:29]This area here looks like it's >> all personnel on this burn and head to the top of unit one.

[00:07:34]>> All right. Sounds like we're about to get started here.

[00:07:39]Yeah, this area has been thin in the past. It's grown back in with thick cedar.

[00:07:45]There's not a lot of incline between the top of our burn unit and this neighbor's place. There's some kind of crazy gollies in here. So, if we were to have a spot over the line here, uh it would be challenging to fight it just in the topography. But they've got um hose and a fire engine here kind of um to pump this second hose if we need it.

[00:08:06]There's a hose already plumbed here, but we can augment it with the truck here.

[00:08:11]>> 2° F. Relative humidity is 72.

[00:08:16]Wind is 2.3 mph. And our probability of ignition is 20%.

[00:08:33]You only get one.

[00:08:52]You want me to tell her this way?

[00:08:59]What are you seeing? How's this look to you?

[00:09:03]>> Good at this moment.

[00:09:04]>> We'll see how we're feeling at 11:30.

[00:09:06]>> Yeah.

[00:09:07]>> How about How about we pause for a minute?

[00:09:10]>> Yeah. It's going to get a little hot on that line pretty quick.

[00:09:12]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:09:13]>> Yeah. That first progression was a little faster than I would have as far as lighting all this on fire at once.

[00:09:18]>> Yeah.

[00:09:19]>> Just to try and keep us cool.

[00:09:21]>> Yeah.

[00:09:22]>> Well, it's going to burn. They'll burn down quick, but yeah, >> they will.

[00:09:25]>> Uh, that humidity seems suspic. I don't think it's 72.

[00:09:30]>> I don't think so either. There's no way.

[00:09:32]>> Okay, you want me? I'll take I'll grab one.

[00:09:40]>> Yeah, I burned down quick. That's a good thing.

[00:09:41]>> Yep.

[00:09:42]>> Yeah, it would be nice to get this upper line cold as quickly as possible.

[00:09:46]>> Yeah.

[00:09:50]Got it right there.

[00:10:14]All right. So, it's been burning for about 15 minutes.

[00:10:18]It's going really well. the piles are really dry. We've got a lot of energy in them and they they're burning up pretty quick and so that's kind of what they want. It's uh it's early enough yet that our humidities are still pretty high like uh 65%.

[00:10:33]Temperatures are like um around 80.

[00:10:36]>> So it's kind of it's excellent conditions right now. The fire is backing out from these piles.

[00:10:41]>> And what we want is we want these piles to burn down and then have the fire back out to the control line. And then that way um we'll have secure black up to the control line which means that these piles as we move on and to the interior of the unit these piles won't be able to creep out across our fire line. So it's kind of it's going according to their plan right now. Burn the piles out um early in the day when the conditions are mild. Right now our probability of ignition meaning likelihood of a spot of like an ember flies out of the pile is only 30% which is really low. So that's why we're burning piles early in the day because if we burnt this unit later today once it's, you know, 90° and our probability of ignition is 80, much more likely that we would have a spot that could go over our line and start a spot fire that we'd have to suppress. So right now it's the plan. Burn out all these piles, back the fire out to the the control line, and then move on down the hill into less complex firing and holding. or see right here is the fire is killing these little baby cedars, which is what we want. We want this fire to be hot enough to kill baby trees because this has been thinned and um shade tolerant trees like cedar love to grow like thicket in these forests and they create some of the wildest fire hazard. So, we want this fire to kind of back through here with enough lingering kind of heat to kill these baby trees.

[00:12:08]Otherwise, what we get is we get a thicket like this.

[00:12:15]And the cedar thicket are like one of the worst hazards we have. So, definitely one of the objectives today, kill these little cedar.

[00:12:22]So, the smoke's lifting out of here pretty well. I was wasn't sure like if um if we were going to be stuck on our smoke inversion. The thing is these piles are really dry and so there's not a lot of uh smoke being generated. It's generating more smoke where the fire is backing into the greenery here. U and so as the fire becomes more established on the kind of downwind end, which is where they started lighting, it's generating a little more smoke that's kind of going to help suppress fire behavior along this line, which is kind of what we need right now.

[00:12:55]They're lit backs here along the line.

[00:12:57]Um and the fire is just kind of backing some places. It's just going out right now. The backing fire, interestingly.

[00:13:11]All right, just before 10. Um, still just watching these piles kind of turn to a broadcast burn backing down to our line here.

[00:13:22]Like I said before, they've fired off the line here. So now that there's some radiant heat from those piles where the fire was just kind of backing now it's it's burning more actively um towards our line.

[00:13:35]It's nice. There's a bunch of heat in the interior of this unit and that heat is creating kind of an indraft.

[00:13:42]So it that helps our fire along the edge here burn towards the center. If you didn't have that indraft going interior of the unit, then you might be have a little more of heat pushing this way.

[00:13:54]But that's one thing that we do with our firing is we adjust where we put heat on the ground and when because that will help create um kind of a local area of low pressure that draws air into itself edge of the hand line there.

[00:14:14]>> Great. How's the blackout looking on that southern edge?

[00:14:18]Still quite a bit of heat, but we are uh we're getting it cooler now.

[00:14:22]Would you like some more fire in there to complete the edge?

[00:14:29]>> We have the other torch down here and I have mine for any supplements. We're fine there. Thank you.

[00:14:33]>> Oh, it's really cooking here. I'm hiding behind a tree.

[00:14:35]>> Great.

[00:14:36]>> Just so I can not burn my face off.

[00:14:41]>> I'm progressing lighting some tile more in the interior center of the unit.

[00:14:48]>> Not exactly center, but center of the southern line.

[00:14:52]Yeah, copy that. You saw that pretty strong ridge line with the piles on the top of it.

[00:14:57]>> Pretty wild.

[00:14:58]>> Progressing down towards right now.

[00:15:01]>> Yeah. So, we're trying to keep it out of here.

[00:15:05]>> I don't think I'm quite there yet. Um I might be might be right in that that >> Usually you like to start your fire at the top of the hill so you can't lose your fire up the hill if you lose it.

[00:15:15]>> Yeah, I'm on it right now. The neighbor >> I guess wasn't on board. So, we're on a property line here. And so, this this line's looking pretty good. Um, but you know, when you're thinking about doing a prescribed burn, it's always good to think about like if you don't own all the way to the top of the hill, fire wants to run to the top of the hill if it gets away from you. So, it's always good to try to get your neighbors on board. Sometimes it's not possible like here. Um, but when it is, it's nice to start at the top or start, you know, at the house and work your way out just so your fire can't get there uh without your permission.

[00:15:52]We call that a mids slope line. You know, you don't if you can avoid it, you don't want a mid-slope line just cuz your holders often have to eat more smoke.

[00:16:00]>> That's >> uh for us luckily today, what, like I said, was interior heat going. Um, we're kind of pulling the smoke off the line and that's making life much more pleasurable for us who are holding.

[00:16:13]Those of us who are holding right now are just basically controlling the line.

[00:16:21]>> Right.

[00:16:22]>> So, I'm kind of in the middle of this upper unit now.

[00:16:24]>> And as I said before, you can see like this landscape is really >> funky. It's a little hard to see in the image here, but >> how many do you have?

[00:16:34]I'm on this little ridge here that's just mine tailings. They kind of just mine through all these areas and just piled up rows between.

[00:16:43]So these little gullies that run kind of like straight up towards the top of our unit.

[00:16:49]>> So we're kind of lighting the piles along the tops of these ridges so they back down so we don't just like get a whole bunch of fire establishing the bottom of the skull that could run horn at our line. We had rain running my torch and one backpack.

[00:17:07]The way that the gullies here are working, they're kind of creating these little pockets of intense, more intense fire behavior.

[00:17:23]All right, it's almost 11. Still really mellow backing fire going on here. The piles are going up really quick as soon as you light the pile.

[00:17:31]uh it's fully involved within, you know, 3 or 4 minutes, but we're getting this really nice packing fire. It's really consuming a lot of the surface stuff, which is our our objective here. Um we expect it's going to get hotter and drier, but right now we got good fire effects.

[00:17:48]We're getting good depth off our control line. Name of the game here for the first couple hours has just been to secure the top of the unit here before we really get too ambitious with there's a lot of big piles in the interior of this unit >> and so uh just been taking it slow and now that the do secured kind of they're moving to firing more of these interior piles.

[00:18:10]Smoke's still kind of hanging in a little. It's it's barely shading us but it is having a little bit of an effect on on our fire behavior.

[00:18:19]portions of the fire are more shaded than others. So, as the piles burn and the smoke comes in, it kind of shades the interior of the burn a bit.

[00:18:54]that.

[00:19:12]All right. So, we're about 11:45 now.

[00:19:17]Smoke's kind of hanging in about the same as it has all morning. Um, piles are burning about the same as they have. It's a little drier, getting a little bit of a breeze now. Um, one of the things we got going here, so now we're kind of in the lower unit below the house. And there's just these these big piles and the we're in more of this kind of wacky mining topography. And so, we got these big piles in the bottoms of the gullies. So the gullies create these kind of weird dynamics and there's just a lot of piles. So kind of there's a balance here between getting everything lit before the peak of the day uh versus not wanting to kill trees. So you know if we light all these piles right now they're going to all kind of play together and make a very big fire and that's going to kill bigger trees. So, uh it's just a kind of got to be patient. It's easy to feel pressured um because it is getting warmer and drier.

[00:20:21]All right, it's noon still. We're getting our smoke is lifting out, but there's still enough smoke from all the um broadcast kind of flanking fire that we're smoking the interior self out pretty well. Um these piles in the gully are really cranking and but uh we've kind of got pretty good depth now around the critical holding lines like on I'm on the east line here which is kind of where we'd be worried about west winds pushing fire out of here. We've got the piles are kind of burning down now on the bottom. They got a lot of heat in them but um things are things are going fine.

[00:21:14]and then this is the green, right? Not ideal uh having this kind of untreated thicket as your green where you don't want the fire to go, but uh had time here to kind of burn in the piles along the line.

[00:21:28]We've got a hose lay here. supposedly is coming downhill from the water source.

[00:21:32]So, we got more pressure than we would going the other way. So, right now, uh things are fine here.

[00:21:41]>> Yeah, cuz all that is really needed is security around the line and then jackpots along the ridge. Everything else can kind of fill itself in.

[00:21:52]>> There's no need to like push it harder than it's already being pushed.

[00:22:00]All right. So, we're burning here doing a broadcast burn with the piles in place. And the side that I'm standing on has not been treated, has not been thinned, hand piled.

[00:22:13]And see all these kindtory cedar and it's thicker, a lot more trees. And then this side where we're burning has been heavily thinned and then they piled a lot of that material and now we're burning the whole unit with the piles in place. So the difficult thing about having this much fuel per acre. I mean most this is kind of the default for most of our forests here in Nevada is like way too much fuel. Lots of understory fuels is you got to put all that stuff somewhere when you cut it down. Like you can chip it which is hard if you are on a steep ridge like this and you can't bring a chipper in. You can you know you have to drag it to a chipper and you can haul it away but that costs money that you have to pay to dump the chips. Or you can stack it up and burn it like we're doing here.

[00:22:57]But there's so much material, these piles are burning really hot. And there's decent likelihood that we're going to kill many of the remaining trees here just because there's so much heat from these piles and just because this funky topography from all this gold mining, everything has created these kind of steep and deep gullies.

[00:23:18]So, it's a challenge, you know, like getting we have crazy excessive fuel loads, but getting it off like out of the forest, it's not worth any money.

[00:23:29]It's a real challenge. And if you try to get rid of it in place by burning, there's a huge amount of heat that has to go somewhere and that might end up killing some of these trees that we're trying to save piles.

[00:23:42]So fuels reduction is challenging especially in topography where you can't say bring in a chipper and drag stuff to a road >> real quick and then head back to where you are.

[00:24:01]>> Hey Bruce Seth.

[00:24:06]>> Yeah, I heard that.

[00:24:08]>> All right. Wait for a second for the smoke to subside.

[00:24:13]So, it's just after 1 and we're definitely getting some wind now.

[00:24:19]The good thing is that our our critical control lines on the downwind and uphill sides are all buffered in now. You know, we've completed ignitions and the piles have burned down quite a bit on those highest consequence flanks. So, now um we expected this. We expect up canyon winds in the afternoon and now they're coming on schedule, but um timing's worked out well to be past the kind of critical spots with our active fire uh in time for this to happen.

[00:24:51]So, there's a check line here, kind of a little deer trail that goes through the unit. And right now, we got fire up to that check line, but I don't know yet if the call is to hang it up here or to keep burning.

[00:25:03]We want to be done with ignitions in uh just under an hour. So, might be time to hang this one up here and work with what we got.

[00:25:41]Hey Zeke, I have a bike.

[00:25:44]>> All right.

[00:26:03]All right, coming up on 2 p.m. Still bit to burn here in the lower unit. Upper unit's done.

[00:26:10]So, they're starting to kind of take bigger bites here with their firing.

[00:26:19]We got this big kind of bowl here.

[00:26:23]Got some piles in the bottom of it. So, kind of been firing off the road here to gain depth. till they'll depped off the road. So when we get fire coming up this gully uh doesn't have anywhere to burn up on the road. So there's kind of piecing in a bite here along along the way. We're going to get out of here. Don't get burnt in So, there really is an enormous amount of heat over in the piles on the other side here.

[00:27:10]We got kind of a just up canyon flow now. Kind of your normal 2 to 3 mph up canyon flow. Um control-wise, we're good. the um the critical holding lines, as I said before, the mids slope lines are um well burned in now. And so it's kind of time to uh get it done.

[00:28:20]So with the firing complete along the road down to the corner here and the interior firing brought down to the road as well. Ignitions were complete. The entire unit was black from line to line to line to line and it was time to mop up the fire. So, a couple thoughts on how this all went.

[00:28:39]Um the timing worked out well with um having enough time to get the interior all well secured and get some good depth along these lines burned in and kind of going out by the time that we had more fire down below and fire that was going to push up this gully. Uh the timing worked out well on the weather. Um, it was good that the humidity stayed a little high cuz it gave us a little bit of extra time, but we finished really close to the target of 2 p.m. It's probably a little closer to 2:30 when we finally finished ignitions, but we were still in prescription.

[00:29:16]That all worked pretty well. I think uh, one lesson I would take away from this and one thing that's kind of been on my mind the last couple days is just that um, those piles that we burned are going to be hot for a long time. either they're going to take thousands of gallons of water to completely extinguish or they're going to they're going to burn down. They're going to they're going to be hot for, you know, weeks or months. That's not really ideal going into the summer. Um, you know, obviously the crew is going to do their due diligence and secure the edges of this fire, but lots of um lots of folks over the years have had problems with spring burns, um even burning piles that come back to life in the middle of summer and become wildfire. So, it definitely um it takes a lot of mop up to mop up piles and the piles that are in the interior of the unit um you know are less of an issue than the ones on the edge of the line, but it's going to be a lot of mop up for them to to burn the pile to to mop up the hot piles.

[00:30:14]They kind of uh sounds like ended up having to do that just because they didn't have time during the winter to get the piles burnt. And so that's, you know, that's an issue with building piles in general is that if you're going to build a pile, um, you're either committing to leave it there in the woods forever or coming back at some point and burning it. But in a lot of times, it's easier to build a pile than it is to get it burnt if you can't burn it right when you're there. If you don't manage to get your piles burnt, as we saw here, having a bunch of fuel stacked and tinder dry in your burn adds lots of BTUs to the landscape when it does burn. and burning in the winter is better, but you kind of have to work with what you've got with um people power and scheduling and other projects and everything else. So, I think that was the only thing that uh it would have been easier project to do had the piles not been there. It would have been easier to secure. Um probably would have resulted in less damage to the surviving trees to burn the piles in the winter. But, um these guys are trying to do what they can with the the resources, time, everything else that they have.

[00:31:20]So, all in all, I feel like it was a good project. Got good good black on the ground. I hope you guys enjoyed this kind of blowby-blow. I know it's not for everyone, but those of you who like geeking out on this stuff will uh well, I think probably hopefully appreciate the detail. I want to thank Tim at First Rain for inviting me to come out and for really um being willing to step up and uh do this work in a place where a lot of people aren't doing the work. Uh great to work with this crew. Pretty dialed. if you guys are in Nevada County and uh are interested in doing this kind of work, reach out to First Rain.

[00:31:54]So, um thanks for supporting Lookout.

[00:31:56]Check out our website and uh like and subscribe and all that and we'll see you on the next one.

[00:32:28]Hey,