Terry Stokka has lived in Black Forest for 29 years. He is president of the Friends of Black Forest, chairman of the Black Forest Land Use Committee and chairman of the Black Forest Water & Wells Committee.
Mitigation — Part II
By Terry Stokka
Last month, I talked about one of the more simple forms of mitigation, that is trimming lower dead branches off trees to prevent ground fires from becoming ladder fires as the fire climbs up the lower, dead branches of trees. Cleaning off dead limbs up to 6-8 feet can go a long way to keep a fire on the ground and prevent the fire from climbing up to the crown.
I talked about using a lopper to lop off those dead branches, and now I would like to add a tool called a pole saw that would enable you to reach higher. A pole saw is a curved saw blade about 18 inches long, with wicked teeth, that is connected to a 10-foot pole. Consider getting one.-If you are really serious, you can even buy a motorized version.
Now I want to shift gears and talk about thinning. Having a thick forest between our homes and the road might afford great privacy but it is also dangerous in case of a fire. In a fire, a fire truck will go around neighborhoods ahead of the fire and evaluate which homes can and cannot be protected. A narrow, tree-lined driveway is dangerous because a fire truck could get trapped at the house and not be able to get out if the fire is near. Also, a narrow driveway could prevent a fire truck from being able to turn around and that is also a no. Consider thinning trees along the driveway. Ask yourself, “Could a fire truck turn around in my driveway?” I will bet that you could still have privacy and make your home defensible.
A dog-hair thicket is a bunch of small trees that have grown very close together. Often they grow tall and skinny to try to reach the sun before the others and that makes them weak, so a snowstorm that dumps snow on the upper branches bends the trees over and they never stand up straight again. That thick and tangled mess of small trees becomes a great fire hazard in hot, dry weather. Just because the needles are green doesn’t mean they won’t burst into flames as the fire approaches and heats the air to high temperatures.
Your best action is to go into that cluster and thin out about two-thirds of the trees. When we moved into our house, we had two dog-hair thickets that I thinned. I cut 85 trees out of an area no larger than 50 x 50 feet and the cluster was still too thick. The remaining trees had more sun and didn’t have to share water with all the others so it was a win-win.Those little trees are easy to handle so you can take them to the slash/mulch site to get rid of them.
Start walking around your property on a regular basis and become a student of your lot. Just this week I realized that I have several areas of tall, dead grass from last year that are dangerous for fire. Watch for trees with pitch tubes on the trunk that signal beetle presence. Trees that are fading from deep green to light green suggest a beetle presence. If you see trees like that, you must cut them down, take the slash to the slash/mulch site (www.bfslash.org), cut up the trunk wood and take it to Rocky Top Resources (www.rockytopresources.com). The slash site will take logs a maximum of 8 inches in diameter and 6 feet long. Rocky Top will bring a dumpster to you for about $300 if you have a lot of logs, slash and pine needles. Urban Firewood on highway 24 and Judge Orr Road will not take beetle-infested logs.
This spring is currently very dry and hot and the summer looks to be the same so we must be serious about taking care of our lots to do all we can to prevent fires from happening or spreading. Join with me to see our wooded lots as a treasure that we need to protect and nurture as much as possible. Nobody wants their lot to end up as a bunch of black sticks. I ache when I think of the 488 homes that burned in the Black Forest fire of 2013. Those people lost both home and trees. I never want to see a fire like that again.
