![]() By the end of the day, they had set fire to a hundred and twenty acres of forest. Then they returned to the line with their drip torches. It took the team more than an hour to fully contain the slop-over. ![]() If flames are allowed to break ranks and surge forward, they can whirl around and start running with the wind, burning more intensely and smokily than the prescription allows. ![]() While the crew used chainsaws and hoes to create a new firebreak, it fell to me to insure that no part of the line got ahead of the rest. But the crew were temporarily occupied by what they called “a slop-over event”: a rogue ember had leaped across a trail that acted as a firebreak at one edge of the burn, sparking a half-acre blaze so hot that standing within a few feet of it made my chest hurt. Their task was to carry out a prescribed burn-a carefully controlled, low-intensity fire that clears duff and deadwood, reducing the risk of a catastrophic wildfire. That was the job of the United States Forest Service crew whose work I was there to observe. I wasn’t really supposed to be setting the forest on fire. I started to anticipate how terrain would affect the pace of fire: open stretches of pine needles caught instantly, but I learned to place my dabs in tight clusters near saplings and denser shrubbery. As the afternoon wore on, I began setting my ignitions farther away from the line, in order to consume the forest faster. It was mesmerizing and thrilling, and I couldn’t wait to do it again. But my new flames had the wind at their back and quickly jumped across the gap separating them from the original front, transforming the line’s ragged edge into a wall of flame. The main fire was advancing into the wind, so it moved slowly and stayed close to the ground. A swift, panicky battering with my gloved hands smothered the flames before any damage was done. The dots and dashes ignited small fires, which joined up so rapidly that at one point I set fire to my boots. Then I walked back, dotting the tip of the torch’s neck to the forest floor a few feet in front of the flames, as if I were tapping out a message in Morse code. I took a deep breath, and ducked my way through the scrub to the far end of the line. The lit cannister of fuel I was holding, known as a drip torch, had a long, looped neck that emitted a jaunty quiff of flame.
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