‘Burns out the fuel’: First responders fight fire with fire in Iowa wildland fires
By Maddie Augustine
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COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (KETV) — It may seem counterproductive, setting fire when flames are already tearing through acres of land.
It’s actually a tactic known as back burning, and it’s used to fight wildland fires.
“It’s a lot less dangerous for firefighters, and there are no resources lost,” Chad Graeve, Pottawattamie County natural resource specialist, said. “It was real advantageous.”
Fires like the one on April 11 that sparked just north of Council Bluffs along I-80.
“The fire was spotting so far ahead of itself,” Graeve said. You had the main fire and a new hot spot, sometimes 150 feet ahead of it. We didn’t have time to work off of something and backfire. So we had to go way ahead, find a better spot to backfire off of so that it wouldn’t jump that and really create a lot of black.”
And used again, in this fire that ignited just days before near Veteran’s Memorial Highway.
“We were hoping the fire would die down kind of on its own. Didn’t happen,” Capt. Mike Godbout, Council Bluffs Fire Department, said. “We knew that this [a nearby ravine] was going to be our cutoff. If it hit that point, we were going to go over by the bridge and that’s where we were going to set our backburn.”
Smoke so thick from the flames and heavy winds, the bridge was shut down due to visibility concerns, and there was still danger on the ground.
“We ended up having a lot of trees fall around us and fall around our crews,” Godbout siad. “[It] just became more dangerous. At that point, we figured out that we probably weren’t going to get that head fire out, and with those trees falling, we decided to back out and come up with something else at that point. We we went to our perfect resource, our best resources.”
That resource is a partnership between Graeve and the wildland team from the Council Bluffs Fire Department.
“We’ve got 31 guys on our team,” Godbout said. “We started working with Chad the last five years.”
The first step is identifying a fire break, or control line, and from there, Grave said it’s like coloring a picture book. You start from the edge and work your way to the middle.
“We let the fire move to the main fire that then burns out the fuel and deprives the main fire of any more fuel,” Graeve said. “And then the fire goes out.”
A successful tactic and partnership.
“Our training becomes the real fires,” Godbout said. “But we’re getting better and we’re pretty happy with where we’re at right now.”
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