Prescribed Fire
What is Prescribed Fire or Controlled Burning?
For more than 150 years forest fires have been supressed. As a result, forests have grown dense, and the fuel has built up, making wildfires more intense and often damaging.
Prescribed fire or controlled burning is a method of applying low-intensity fire as a tool that provides the benefits of fire while avoiding the dangers of wildfire, to improve defensible space, clean up forest debris and restore forest and soil health.
Benefits include:
- Lower fire hazard and make communities safer
- Enhance forest health and resilience
- Increase wildlife habitat
- Improved forage
- Restore and enhance native wildflowers
- Control pests (like ticks) and invasive grasses and weeds
As a community, if we educate ourselves about beneficial fire and learn how to safely apply it to our properties, we can return the land to health and help reduce the severity of wildfire in our local community and our state.
The state of California has recognized the importance of prescribed fire as a tool to combat catastrophic fires. They have ambitious goals for increasing the number of acres burned by private landowners. At the NCRCD, our goal is to assist in that effort by educating our community on prescribed fire best-practices.
To that end, the NCRCD has created a FREE comprehensive fire curriculum, The ABC's of Prescribed Burning. Classes and burns are held regularly during the winter months. Subscribe to our newsletter, check our calendar and sign up for as many classes as you can.
Our prescribed fire program includes:
Watch a video of a small neighborhood burn in the Lower Colfax Firewise Community:
Neighbors helping neighbors with prescribed burns to make their homes and forests safer. The Lower Colfax Firewise Community has formed a team of community members under the leadership of Dario Davidson to help each other do small prescribed burns in their defensible space.
