Training to rekindle healthy prairie fires

Grant allows conservation manager to teach, equip local fire departments

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VOLGA – There was a time when fires would regularly roar across the prairie grasses, clearing the land and providing the foundations for a healthy ecosystem. 

But with the development of land, whether for cities and towns or for agriculture, fires are an increasingly foreign thing for South Dakota grasslands as landowners are increasingly unfamiliar with the process.

Thanks to a $19,000 Environmental Reserve Fund grant from 3M, Joe Blastick, the Prairie Coteau region conservation manager for The Nature Conservancy, hopes to rekindle the area’s fire culture and educate and prepare small local fire departments for their role.

“The science community says that (every) four to seven years is when your grasslands historically should have been burned, but there are prairies and grasslands around here that haven’t been burned for 30, 50 years,” Blastick said.

In the past, those burns either happened naturally through such things as lightning strikes or were done purposely by Native Americans. But with farms scattered across the countryside and more landowners fearful of or unsure how to pursue regularly scheduled prescribed fires, fires are foreign to the area.

That’s not the case for other regions, Blastick said. 

“As we’ve learned over time, in this part of the country, people still acknowledge the need for fire, but they just can’t do it themselves. As you go farther south into Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, lots of landowners come together and buy their own equipment and they get these big cooperative burn groups.”

In this region, however, there are more landowners, each owning less land compared to their southern neighbors, making that kind of cooperation and coordination much more difficult.

Local fire departments instead take on that role, and educating them and using the grant dollars to help them purchase personal protective equipment suited for those kinds of fires has been Blastick’s focus.

Last fall, he went to the Aurora Fire Department to give his presentation and training session, and last week he did the same for the Volga Fire Department.

The training session focused on burn plans, which are basically checklists to keep when setting up and going through with a prescribed burn. Things that they’d list and keep in mind would include equipment, the weather, neighbors and adjoining properties and smoke management.

“It ties back to the safety and the objectives. We’re not necessarily lighting a match and letting it go. Landowners have objectives and if you’re working for a landowner by providing a service, you want to meet their objectives for that habitat,” Blastick said. 

Depending on what the landowner wants accomplished with the burn, it can mean adjusting the time of the year they start the fire. 

“Killing invasive trees, you want to burn at a different time than when you’re trying to remove cool season grasses.”

The education provided has been welcomed.

“It just feeds everybody’s knowledge. We try to get as much as possible. When we get guys like Joe to come along and do something like this, it’s just huge for us,” Volga Fire Department Chief Matt Anderson said.

The Volga Fire Department did five prescribed fires last year, ranging in size from one acre to nearly 25 acres. Typically, they do anywhere from three to six of these controlled burns in a year.

Managing those fires is a much different thing from the structural fires they mostly handle on the job, and it’s best done with equipment designed for that environment.

Even though the 28 members of the Volga Fire Department all have suits and equipment suitable for structural fires, the same can’t be said of wildland certified gear, the proper equipment for prescribed fires.

Blastick compared the difference between the gear to wearing a shirt versus a winter coat in the summer.

Because there’s more walking around and activity associated with prescribed fires, that can raise body temperatures to a dangerous level, easily overheating a firefighter.

The goal is to have wildland certified gear bought and delivered by April.

Landowners interested in scheduling a prescribed burn should contact their local fire department.

It’s a simple process, Anderson said.

After they’re contacted by a landowner, they’ll set up a meeting with them and visit the site where they’d start the fire.

“They’ll give us their outline of what they want done, where their land properties are at and then we’ll go through a whole plan with them,” Anderson said. “We’ll then go and do all our permits, get all the necessary paperwork done, we’ll get maps set out and basically wait for that ideal day.”

Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.

Courtesy photos: With fewer landowners doing prescribed burns themselves, the role is filled increasingly by local fire departments. According to the Volga Fire Department, its volunteers typically do three to six prescribed burns per year. Joe Blastick has trained the Volga and Aurora fire departments in planning prescribed burns. Pictured below, the Volga Fire Department uses a model as part of its training last week.