Fighting fire with fire: How intentional burns keep the Everglades alive
Less than a minute after a red helicopter zoomed low over a stretch of tall sawgrass in Everglades National Park, dispensing what looked like ping-pong balls, bright orange flames erupted in the dry vegetation.
Fueled by light winds, the fire quickly moved west, creating a cloud of yellowish gray smoke above the river of grass just beyond the Ernest F. Coe visitor center. The helicopter whooshed to another spot and again hovered for a few minutes, dropping the little balls and starting another fire, then another, and more after that. For a moment, thick smoke darkened a perfectly sunny blue sky.
As apocalyptic as the scene looked, it was actually a case of friendly fire for the Everglades. Park managers this week began a new round of what are called “prescribed burns” to reduce the risk of wildfires and rejuvenate native plants that naturally depend on fire to flourish. The park aims to burn 75,000 acres over three weeks, with the help of 30 fire specialists and firefighters.
“It’s like fighting fire with fire,” said Michael Gue, the park’s prescribed fire specialist. “We are trying to reintroduce fire in these ecosystems so it can play the natural role it used to in keeping hazardous fuels under control and renewing native plants.”
For thousands of years, seasonal fires triggered by lightning kept the Everglades thriving. Fire thinned the canopies of pine rockland areas, allowing light to reach native plants on the floor; it cleared grasses to ease the flow of water through the marshes and helped rid the system of exotic plants that don’t tolerate fires. The ash also helped fertilize new growth. Over time, fire helped create the mosaic pattern of water and grass the Everglades is known for.
Most plants in the Everglades are built to burn, Gue said. During a fire, grass blades and fan-shaped leaves of saw palmetto palms quickly go up in smoke, but their roots remain intact, protected in the moist soil. New shoots sprout within a week or so.
A natural force
Fires used to move naturally through the Everglades before people began to alter the landscape in South Florida. As drainage canals and dikes were built, large patches of the Everglades lost their natural fire-and-life balance. Because of development, fire became a risk that had to be suppressed. And, ironically, areas that are close to communities that haven’t burned naturally for a long time can become a disastrous wildfire waiting to happen.
So for the past few decades, park managers have attempted to mimic the natural fires with these prescribed burns. The main goal is to reduce shrubs that over time become fuel for wildfires. The recent fires in Australia and California were a reminder of the need to proactively manage fuel loads that accumulate in forests, even as development continues to advance, Gue said.
Prescribed burns are also cost-effective: The intentional fires at Everglades National Park cost about $4.60 per acre, compared with $500 per acre if park staff were fighting a wildfire, he added.
And planned fires don’t ravage entire populations of native animals. For one, native critters are adapted to the natural fire patterns, and know when to run. Some even take advantage of the scorched soil right after a fire, like native birds that return to feed on toasted bugs and fish. Another example is the Florida panther, which likes to hunt deer feeding on new grass growth in the weeks following a burn.
Prescribed burns are set in a mosaic pattern to allow time and space for wildlife to move away from the fire. The patches of vegetation that remain untouched can act as refuge during and after a fire.
Ecological regeneration is another result of deliberate burns. As South Florida grew and development quickly advanced over the marshes and pinelands, scientists realized fires were crucial for the survival of the Everglades.
Smokey Bear was wrong
For much of the 1940s and 1950s the Smokey Bear policy of fire suppression was widely accepted, and led to the belief that even targeted fires were harmful to the environment. But in the late 1950s scientists and national park ecologists began to study the benefits of fire in certain ecosystems. Everglades National Park led the way in prescribed burns, launching a program in 1958 to reintroduce and maintain fire as part of an ecosystem that was quickly being altered by people.
In April 2016, a prescribed burn stopped a large wildfire from advancing. More than 3,800 acres burned inside the park in a fire that’s believed to have started at the Long Pine Key campground. The week before, a prescribed burn of about 980 acres just east of the larger blaze had already consumed all the potential kindling, creating a buffer zone where the wildfire eventually died.
Regular burns are so vital to the Everglades that nearly half of all prescribed burns at U.S. national parks happen here. And these fires also help prevent long-term damage to the soil. Because the Everglades have been dried out by drainage, fires that happen in very dry conditions can burn deep into the peat soil, or muck. These intense burns are almost impossible to put out without the help of rain, and leave scarred, dead soil behind.
With the Everglades’ dramatically varied terrain, with lakes, swamps and tree islands, air-dropping balls filled with fire-starting chemicals is an efficient way to reach inaccessible spots. But the good old handheld drip torch is also widely used for intentional burns.
The same day when fire specialists were setting large expanses of sawgrass alight, crews were burning vegetation around the main visitor center at the park’s Homestead entrance.
“I was walking out of the gift shop and suddenly I see these huge flames through the window,” said Beth McCaw, a visitor from Nashville. Near the parking lot, park staff set up a stand with posters and fliers about the prescribed burns to educate visitors in park management strategies.
Low but intense flames quickly moved through saw palmetto palms along a walkway between the park’s office building and the visitor center. A ring of fire could be seen from the visitor center’s porch, circling the pond in the back of the building.
“It’s definitely something you don’t expect to see at a national park visitor center, but it’s kind of cool,” McCaw said.
Follow Adriana Brasileiro on Twitter @AdriBras
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
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