Last week, Pine Island team members attended a class with some of the Fire Service’s finest! This week, a couple of them followed up with a little hands-on experience.

“Shawn [Judy] called me Saturday and said that if the weather looked good, they were going to burn Sunday,” says Matt Giberson. He and Louis Cantafio met up with the team around 10 the next morning, to start prep. “We set everything up to see which direction the wind was blowing, then we brought out maps, discussed the best approach, then did some wrangling over humidity and some other details. Tommy [Gerber] is the guy everyone kind of looks to as the final say for a lot of this, and he advised us to wait a bit.” Then Matt went for a ride around the 60 acre targeted area, where the team explained in detail what they were doing, what the trucks would be doing, who was positioned where, and the reasoning behind their decisions.

“I got to light the baseline of the fire!” says Matt. “One guy went one direction, I went another, and the guys told me when to stop and check how things were going and when to start walking again. I had to go all the way out to a certain point to form the baseline. It was interesting; the wind was blowing against my baseline and bringing the fire really slowly into the 60 acre block. While that was going on, Tommy was putting strips in to make acreage smaller and smaller.” Some of the results were especially surprising. “That piece hasn’t been burnt in sixty years, they told me. It was a lot more intense than I thought it would be, especially when I heard the roar. They told me it would happen, but you really have to see it to understand! I could hear the fire go, I saw the flames go up. It was really cool!”

Louis Cantafio was also helpful, explaining how to safely transport the equipment. Matt also learned all the problems to look for, such as how to spot fires outside of the targeted block. “Embers can fall out where you don’t want them. This is really where constant communication helps; talking about wind direction, how the fire is burning, all that.” He also learned how fast things can move! “I started walking the left flank while it was burning really slowly…then I started making the turn and Shawn told me to start running in order to bring the flank in and meet the fire as it was coming towards me.” If this is confusing to you, don’t worry: Matt drew a picture in the sand afterward to make absolutely sure he understood what he was doing.

He loved every minute of it, too. “Burning stuff on a Sunday is a good time!” he says. (Sammy Moore concurs: “Matt was having a lot of fun out there,” he says.) “It was amazing to me how quickly it burnt, and how bad the situation can get if you’re not prepared. But now I understand. I learned a lot sitting in class last week, but this kind of thing really is hands-on.”

*Photos courtesy of Matt Giberson.