Just a few minutes after he and his crew intentionally set a small patch of bone-dry grass and brush ablaze in a Grant Creek neighborhood on Wednesday morning, Robert Dillon marveled at how quickly the fire spread. “It’s burning like it’s July,” he observed. “It’s scary.”
Dillon wasn’t worried though. He and his employees at Robert Dillon Tree and Forestry Service are all highly trained professional wildland firefighters, and they were being paid by the landowner to start prescribed burns to protect the home in the event of a wildfire.
In heavily forested areas or places with tall grass, many homeowners choose to get a head start on Mother Nature by paying private foresters to burn the excess fuel before the summer’s hot, dry weather sets in and increases the chance of an unpredictable blaze.
This time of year, Dillon and his three-man crew are extremely busy. Some days they’re burning a farmer’s ditch and other days they’re thinning the lower branches of pine trees on a heavily wooded property to prevent a crown fire.
Dillon said his prices vary. “It depends on the fuel type, exactly what we’re burning,” he explained. “Like this is going to be fine fuels like grass. We don’t have any real heavy understory here, which is kind of nice. It depends on terrain, how big it is, so it varies quite a bit. The risk is a little bit higher with heavy understory. We have higher flames and longer burn periods so we have to keep crews overnight a lot of times. We camped out a few nights on our last job.”
From The Missoulian: https://missoulian.com/business/local/foresters-busy-with-prescribed-burns-to-prevent-wildfire-tragedies/article_b9681e66-8f90-5f85-82a3-6e4277fcaf1d.html