Prescribed burns in Mineral County begin

MINERAL COUNTY – As the 2014 fire danger season winds down in Mineral County, Forest Service personnel are transitioning into a different role in forest management and this one actually has them setting fires, albeit controlled ones.

With cooler temperatures and periods of precipitation in the past few weeks, the conditions for prescribed burns were right so crews were sent out to predetermined locations to reduce the amount of dead debris left over from logging operations in previous years.

The work is designed to consume material that could prove hazardous if left on the forest floor for next year’s fire season. FS Fuel Management Officer Lorie Cotter said the tract of land burned last week was logged several years ago and has been on their priority list for management.

“There is a lot of slash that is created from these logging operations from felled trees and other things,” Cotter said. “So we go in and do slash or brush disposal to clean up the site.”

Cotter said crews typically perform prescribed burns in the spring and again in the fall if conditions are right but it also depends on where the site is located and the terrain. The location burned last week was approximately 10 miles west of Superior, just off Interstate 90. She did say the window for prescribed burns is typically shorter in the fall due to weather conditions.

“There are a lot more constraints in the fall,” Cotter said. “It’s usually a lot hotter and drier and we also worry about smoke. The air quality is monitored before we are allowed to burn. In the fall, it’s hard to get approval to burn because of the air conditions.”

Because conditions were determined to be optimal for burning, the operation was conducted over a period of three days. Cotter said the FS has been lucky so far this year, getting approval to burn sites they have had their eyes set on for years.

“In past years, we’ve really struggled to get windows because of the weather,” Cotter said. “It’s been great for us. Some of these units, to clean up the logging slash, we really need a fall burn to meet the prescriptions and do what we need them to do. We have to wait for the unit to dry out and some of them don’t get that way in the spring.”

Controlled burning serves a wide variety of functions for forest management besides just disposing of logging slash. One recent operation was designed to use fire to help reestablish an endangered species in the Lolo Forest. Cotter said the prescribed burning is actually helping scientists study the endangered whitebark pine which is threatened by a disease known as blister rust and the notorious mountain pine beetle.

“There’s been a lot of research into how to help regenerate the stands,” Cotter said. “The tree has really been struggling in this area. It’s very susceptible to blister rust and the beetles have been hard on them as well.”

Cotter said, because the tree grows very slow, it is often susceptible to faster growing trees out-competing it for space. The prescribed burn, as part of the study to determine what can be done to revive the species, involved burning several tracts in different ways which will tell scientists in the future what conditions are best for the whitebark pine.

“There was a fairly continuous stand of about 100 acres so they divided it into four parts,” Cotter said. “There was a control part where we did nothing. There was a part where we slashed all the trees around the whitebark pine to get rid of their competition. There was another part where we slashed and burned it and then the last part was just a prescribed burn.”

The study will take place over the next 20 years according to Cotter. She said the researchers will continue to study the sites to determine which treatment is working the best.

According to information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in 2007 it was estimated mountain pine beetles destroyed half a million acres of whitebark pine in the western part of the country.

Cotter said the prescribed burn west of Superior last week did briefly spot over the crew’s fire lines. The fire grew to approximately 6 acres in size but was contained by fire crews and at no time posed any threat to the public.