GREENFIELD — It was a bright, sunny day at Beckenholdt Park, the type of day that would usually be perfect for meeting friends at the dog park or taking a walk around the trail. But earlier this week, the clear, warm weather meant it was the perfect day for a fire.
The Greenfield Parks Department and Turner Forestry carried out a prescribed burn at the park, which will help its prairie landscape flourish this spring.
Parks foreman Josh Gentry, who helped supervise the event on Monday, March 22, said that naturally occurring wildfires are part of what helps maintain the landscape of prairies. Fires kill off the saplings of hardwood trees and other plants, like raspberry and blueberry plants, while prairie grasses and wildflowers grow back soon after the burn.
“Fire is a natural part of the rejuvenation of prairie lands,” Gentry said. “…We do our burn in an effort to keep the prairie a prairie.”
Turner Forestry owner Stewart Turner said the company will conduct five or six similar prescribed burns in Indiana this year. Conditions need to be right for a burn to be conducted.
“The first thing we’re looking at is the weather,” Turner said. “We look for those excellent weather days where it’s mostly clear, lower humidities, the wind’s out in the right direction today, and we can do some burning.”
Turner and his team start off with a few small test fires to check that conditions are good, then move on burning sections of the park, setting fires with a blowtorch. Once a number of smaller fires have been burning for a while without getting out of control, the workers allow them to meet in the middle to create the largest, and hottest, point of the blaze.
Some seeds, Gentry said, are even activated by the fire and will not grow unless the surrounding environment burns at a specific temperature. In 2020, he said, Beckenholdt Park saw its first Compass plants — impressive wildflowers that can grow to be 8 feet tall — not because new seeds had been planted, but because their seeds were activated by maintenance burning in the right area.
Typically, Gentry said, an area like Beckenholdt can go three to five years without the need for a prescribed burn. However, the park’s prairie landscape has been invaded by a number of red maple saplings, which necessitated burns three years ago. Hopefully, he said, this year’s burn will take care of the last of them.
Visitors to Beckenholdt Park can expect to see new growth beginning within the next week.
Working with fire means taking an extremely careful approach. The park was entirely closed to visitors during the prescribed burn, and parks employees mowed 12-foot “fire breaks” into the grass to signify areas where fire should not reach. Turner and his team carried a number of implements for fighting fires, including “fire flappers” designed to stamp out small flames and embers. Turner carried a water gun attached to a long hose that he used to put out flames reaching outside the fire’s intended boundaries.
Mike Sherman, a seasonal forestry worker who lives in Greenfield, carried with him a backpack full of supplies that could be used in the event of the fire getting out of control. In one pocket, he carried a fireproof tent that could — up to a certain temperature — be used to protect himself from a blaze.
For Greenfield-Central High School student Logan Cicenas, it was the first fire he helped start. Logan, 18, is a cadet with the Greenfield Fire Territory who got the opportunity to learn more about the fire field by participating in a prescribed burn. Under Sherman’s supervision, Logan used a blowtorch to help start sections of the fire for the first time.
“I’m excited to have the chance to do it, to get my feet wet,” Logan said.
For many of those involved with prescribed burns, the line of work is a lifelong one. Turner worked for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources for many years before starting his own business. Prescribed burns seem small, however, compared to another job he frequently does: He serves as a member of a team composed of people from around the U.S. who are assigned to “Type 1” fires — extensive wildfires, mostly in the southwest, that are difficult to control.
In 2020, Turner helped with efforts to control the massive August Complex fire in northern California, which grew to a million acres.
“We’ve had some pretty exciting moments, I guess I would say, when the wind shifts and blows the fire in the wrong direction, that type of thing,” Turner said. “”Usually, a lot of it is just people. Last year, on the August Complex, we had drug growers in the forest, so we had to avoid them. Sometimes, that’s the scariest thing we have to deal with.”
Sherman said fighting major wildfires is less a matter of putting them out and more a matter of redirecting them away from locations where they could cause the most harm. He helped fight the Cameron Peak fire in 2020, which raged from August to December before being fully contained.
“I’ve been in situations where we’ve controlled the fire and turned it and saved whole little towns,” Sherman said. “Emotionally, it’s a roller coaster. I was in a town in Colorado that was evacuated completely, and to see people lose everything, a whole neighborhood — if you’re never been out west, it’s hard to imagine.”
The work involves other tragedies, too.
“We managed the pile at Ground Zero, we picked up the space shuttle in Texas when it crashed years ago,” Turner said. “…When the Twin Towers were destroyed, that was a challenging assignment. We were there for a long time, in downtown New York — out of our element, but managing all that and helping the (New York City Fire Department) get back on their feet. Fires are big, they can be a challenge, but we’re used to the fires. That’s an everyday occurrence for us.”