I have no real experience in dealing with wildfires as I grew up in and agricultural community. So instead I have decided to share my experiences with what I would call grassland fires as the ones I have experienced likely burn the way I would imagine they do in an open grassland area with little to no buffers or breaks. The photos I have shared here are of a 250 or so acre fire we had this year in a harvest Annual Ryegrass field. The blackened area you see in the photos was from the day prior, when our flail kicked up enough spark to start up a rapidly moving fire. Winds were relatively high that day and I believe they were moving from West heading East. It takes very little to start a fire like this due to the low moisture content of the fuels and the relatively high temperatures. After the larger fire broke out the operator attempted to put it out with a fire extinguisher but it was to no avail as the flames had quickly spread to well over an acre of area. This is where I have experience in dealing with fire crews coming to our field and attempting to hand dig a line around the fire. It seemed almost comical to me as it was clear they were out of luck with the number of people they had and how little water was on hand to help douse the flames.
As the fire quickly spread it began burning towards a forested area where there is a large patch of homes. At this point we got very lucky, a neighboring farmer happened to be discing up a field close by and came as soon as he could. He was able to disc a line around the fire as it burned towards the trees. As he turned over the grass and brought up the dirt it put an instant stop to the spread of the fire.
The next day, we still had 800 plus acres of harvested fields to flail in this area and we decided it would be best if I disced in the same area as our flail operator, so if another fire were to arise I could hopefully stop it. As seen in these photos, another fire kicked up that afternoon. I looked over and saw just a little bit of smoke and by the time I made it to where the fire was, it had already began blowing back towards the trees. I circled around to the front of the fire and began cutting in a 30ft disc line, unfortunately the winds were strong enough this day that embers from the fire were jumping that line and starting new fires all around it. Although these seem to be relatively low intensity fires, the heat inside the cab of the tractor was immense and I felt myself began to sweat immediately.
As soon as I felt that I had created a large enough fire line, I called for the other operator to grab our water truck which has a 5,000 gallon Pak-Tank on the back and a pump. At this point I got on the back of it and had him drive around my line, wetting the embers I could see and trying to douse the unburnt fuel enough to keep it from catching should and ember kick up. This was not my first time dealing with field fires, but this summer we seemed to have a much higher number of them occur than we have previously. This is likely due to the extremely dry conditions we were experiencing. I am using this experience as an example because I feel as if it is a good model for describing what occurs in a grassland wildfire. It also showed me that it is highly unlikely that water drops and other water methods will not be very successful in stopping the spread of such a fire. This is probably why they tend to wait for a road or similar break in a grassland fire as a point of holding when they occur.
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