Welcome to Digging Deeper with Backyard Farmer.

I'm your host Kim Todd, and on our program today, we're going to be discussing fire.

(upbeat music) Earlier this spring we had some devastating wildfires in the state as we came out of a really dry winter.

And here to discuss what happened and how we can be a little more fire conscious around our homes we have Christina Hoyt, Matt Holte both with the Nebraska Forest Service.

Matt and Christina, welcome aboard.

We're glad you're not out there fighting something in the weather that we have and in the dryness we have right now.

So let's talk first, Matt about wildfires and what are they?

I mean, people know we've had them in Nebraska but why should they be concerned about it?

So Nebraska's typically not really thought of as a fire state, every seven to 10 years we'll have a larger fire season, like 2006, 2012 and potentially this year and really what's driving it right now is we're coming out of a drought or we're in the middle of a drought over most of the state.

And we've had a lot of activity.

And Nebraska typically has a spring fire season where everything's still dead and brown and everything that we have green up.

And then we'll have a late summer fire season which is where we're starting to get into now.

But the spring was very active when we were already close to what we normally get for acres burnt every year.

But really people in Nebraska were like, oh, it's Nebraska.

We don't have a whole lot of fires.

We have crop fires and we have ditch fires.

We don't have wildfires like Colorado or Wyoming or California, but we do they're here as we proved the spring.

So.

So what's the difference between a ditch fire and a wildfire?

Can a ditch fire be wild?

They are.

We call anything with a vegetation component a wildfire on our end, but people just don't think of the crop fires and the ditch fires as wildfires.

So it's just kind of changing the mindset is a lot of what we're doing.

So with Nebraska Forest Service then, people probably don't put that together either.

You're the forest service, what do you have to do with fighting fire?

So tell us a little bit about what you actually do.

So my program oversees the NWCG, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group training for all the volunteer fire departments in the state.

We do have some assistance from the state fire marshals office and some from Nebraska emergency management.

But as far as the NWCG classes, that's what we do.

And then we also have single engineer tanker program that we manage the operational side of it.

NEMA manages the financial side of it but we've got air tanker bases all over the state and we fly that plane on fires, drop retardant and just another resource for the fire departments.

Then we also work with the fire marshals office as members of the wildfire incident response assistance team.

And we are very active in the all hazard incident management team.

We've got some division supervisors on there.

I'm the IC of the team.

We've got a lot of involvement in that sort of stuff as well.

So people probably really don't realize what it takes to actually respond to something like a wildfire even just a regular old fire, even.

I mean, we hear the trucks in urban areas.

That's a whole different ballgame.

Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts.

And really like when one of those teams gets ordered our job is to kind of bring a calm to the chaos and just kind of bring it all together and we're there for relief for the fire departments and to assist them.

'Cause they're all volunteers, they have lives to go back to and everything.

So we try and come in and help manage the incident and get 'em back to normal as quickly as possible.

And so challenges when you think about challenges and I know before we started on air we talked a little bit about the difference between forest wildfire and Nebraska wildfire.

Yeah, so some of our biggest challenges, one, it's training, teaching people what they should do.

And a lot of that's experience based but doing the NWCG classes, funding everything in fire whether it's structural or wildfire or it's all very expensive.

So funding for a lot of these smaller towns is difficult.

So assisting with that and then just the vegetation type we're in, people don't think of us as a fire state, like I mentioned but like the Marshall fire in Boulder over New Year's Eve that's more than capable of happening here.

Like they had that running through town burnt up a Tesla dealership and shut down the whole city of Boulder.

That kind of stuff happens here as we proved the spring with the road 702 and 739 fires, it will burn through a town.

We do need to do that.

We need to educate on hazardous fuels reduction.

We need to get the training out there and just let people know about our program.

So they utilize 'em quicker and always time.

So the wildfires that start here, is it lightning?

Is it cigarettes?

I mean, is there any sort of, this is?

It depends.

I mean, there's a lot of human cause, there's like 4th of July, there's a lot of fireworks, fires a lot of campers drag chains, harvest season.

We always get fires from the equipment just hitting a rock and sparking corn husk.

But then there are lightning fires.

There's quite a few of those.

Like the spring fire season we had when it was 702 fire we had fire from Kansas all the way up to South Dakota and fire from Wyoming three quarters of the way across the state.

We had a whole bunch of very large fires.

And luckily we got the snowstorm and the rain and everything else when we were down to just one when we had a larger incident management team come in but the thing that's difficult in Nebraska, not I shouldn't say difficult, but that's different is a lot of our fires are very fast moving because we are in a, we call 'em flashy fuels but we're in a light fuel type that burns very fast, dries out very fast.

Even if you get rain within an hour or two it could be ready to burn again.

Which brings us Christina to the kind of landscape that we have in Nebraska and the kind of landscape especially in urban areas or peri-urban or suburban or small town people, many people are wanting to return to more of Nebraska Prairie native or not quite as clipped and managed and irrigated.

So from a design standpoint since you do do this, what do we recommend, or what would you suggest for people who want both that different style of landscape?

And obviously they don't want one of Matt's wildfires to burn down their town or their home.

Right .

Well, I say that, I mean, the first thing I think about is for people to be knowledgeable about where they're living in the sense of like are you within a town that's pretty big or are you in one of these maybe newer developments that's kind of out around a lot of grass fuel types or woods areas that could burn or are you in an acreage where potentially you're very vulnerable to wildfire.

And as we've kind of been learning about this in our team, it's not, we're like how do we do the Nebraska natives and help our fire folks figure out how to do more fire wide landscaping?

So the biggest thing we think about is, how do you create defensible space?

So space that can make sure that fire stays low to the ground and is not climbing up into trees or your structures or other things and allows people like Matt to be able to get in to your property if they needed to be able to fight more of a structural fire that would be caused by the wildfire.

So there's things that we can do.

It doesn't mean that you have to get rid of all of your native plants, that you can't have native plants that you can't have shrubs but thinking about where you're putting them and zoning them in your landscape.

So if you think about kind of like your house right now, if you kind of mentally walk around the perimeter of it like what's sitting there that maybe shouldn't be, is it like the wood for your fireplace that should be moved?

You have like stacks of timbers or other things.

So that first, the walls of your house out five feet really should be fairly clear and have low plant material in it, plant material that's not maybe super prone to burning.

So maybe that's where you put some of your favorite perennials or some other things you could even run grass in that space or have it be rock or something like that.

And then as you're going out in your zone, in your yard those types of plants that you have can actually be a lot taller or different.

So you're talking, zone five foot to 30 foot you might be able to grow some of those native plants that we talk about but maybe you're growing them kind of in a mass.

And you're making sure there might be some low grass whether it be your turf grass or Buffalo grass or something like that, that's acting as a fire break.

Maybe you do have some of those deciduous trees in there some deciduous shrubs, but again really thinking about what are you growing?

Are you maintaining it?

Are you clearing out the dead, things like that.

So you don't have lots of fuel for a potential fire.

And then as you go out 100 feet from the house, that's kind of the key one where all of a sudden we say, okay you can start putting a lot of evergreens in around those areas.

So important to think about especially if you're in an acreage type situation where there might be a lot of open ground surrounding you where a fire could get going, so.

So for our viewers too, what we had on screen was the PDF from Nebraska Forest Service, right?

And then the little plan that really shows the zoning that you were talking about.

And so let's talk a little bit more about acreage and the potential, Lincoln and Omaha, most urban areas in the Carney, grand island even smaller ones, as people want to not be in the middle, but they don't wanna be on the farm.

Those acreages are, there are more and more of them.

And if they are in a place where they back up to a wildlife management area that is big blue or little blue or whatever, or they back up to a valley any other sorts of significant precautions if that would catch on fire if it goes zipping down through that area and maybe they've done everything right, they have turf, lower plants there, anything else you could think about either one of you that would help?

I'm turning to the fire person.

If they've done some of those fire wise practices, that transition from like the WMA into their yard, it should work to slow the fire down and give firefighters an opportunity to catch it.

Other things they could do is, I mean, we have programs where they could put in a fuel break around their property and just take that out, and-- What's a fuel break, define that.

A fuel break is we're taking any vegetative material out that'll burn.

And so essentially, it just creates a break from the firefighters could work from it should stop the fire.

It's the same as when we're on like a large fire in Colorado or something we're putting in handline or a fire line.

We're just putting a break in the fuel to where it's just not gonna burn.

So is that fire break then not even turf, is it?

It could, yeah.

You could do something like rock, a lot of those acreages they'll have like a long entrance driveway.

You could use that for your fuel break, stuff like that and.

So interesting concept in terms of design, to see, and maybe it becomes Christina from a design standpoint a dry creek bed, even if it's not really, if there's never a creek through it, but make it something other than, oh gosh what is that weird path running through there?

Yeah I definitely think it takes a lot of thought especially, you and I are both trained in design and you kind of look at fire wise landscapes at first.

You're like that goes against everything that we were trying to do.

[Kim] Exactly.

So I do think it takes some thought but I think it's, you can still have a very nice design landscape that follows design principles and still needs fire wise as you do it.

And, definitely reach out if people have questions.

We have foresters all across the state that understand fire wise landscapes and can give advice on that.

And we have great stuff on our website.

Well, and let's back up a minute to the five feet, the 30 feet, 100 feet, in truly urban areas, real like real urban Boulder, Lincoln whatever, the 100 feet is across the street in somebody else's front yard.

And that five foot zone.

And again, from a design standpoint, people, they forget how big a plant gets and they don't want to keep that area which is really not very big.

It's not very big.

-It's-- -At all.

Shorter than I am.

Exactly.

By only four inches.

Exactly, not very big.

And yet it doesn't happen very often.

You see evergreens or grasses or all sorts of things slammed right up against the house, which again heaven forbid that we would have a lot of wildfires that would ever scoot through a town again but I would assume those are the ones that are really at highest risk.

Right.

And that's kind of why I think I said earlier, if you do a little scoot around your house and kinda look at what you have, usually plants aren't very healthy in, depending on your EU and things like that.

If you're getting them right up against your house anyways.

So, there might be an opportunity to clear out a little bit of space there, but again, being aware of where you're at, clearly your risk for wildfire is much, much higher in different areas of the state than others depending on your moisture levels and the precipitation levels.

[Kim] That wind The wind, your terrain, there's a lot of factors and fire.

So, the middle of Lincoln or middle of Omaha might not really having to be thinking about this, but a community where you might be in a neighborhood at the edge of Scott's Bluff or something like that might really need to be doing some serious thought.

The other thing I would say is if you're in a neighborhood situation, even at the edge of town you might be thinking about it in terms of like what are all your neighbors doing as well to work together to actually create some fuel breaks that line up 'cause if you have one, but your neighbor might not have one it might not be as helpful.

Well, and you mentioned the difference between Omaha, Scott's Bluff, just the whole diversity of, I mean, it's rich in diversity everything in the state in terms of what happens.

And yet, probably that break line where you really start to think a little bit more about, okay, we're drier, we're higher, we're windier.

The soils are different, Carney, Grand Islands, North Plats?

Where are you starting to see in the state Matt?

We're definitely seeing things move east more than we have in the past.

Where we used to see most of the fires was the Pine Ridge and the panhandle wild cab bills.

And then kind of up towards Valentine across that north part.

But I mean, we had 6,000 acres by Verdigris and then we had all the stuff at McCook and then we had 20,000 acres by Broken Bow.

And, we're definitely seeing it move to the east.

That line seems like it's shifting a little bit.

And even being in Seward I'm having to do a lot more watering and yard stuff this year than I have since we've moved here.

But cycling back like the rings around the house that you guys were talking about where the 100 feet would be in somebody's yard.

That's the whole purpose of the fire wise community is getting the whole community to do that is because of the Paradise fires in California.

And that kind of stuff.

So it's the whole community working together to have that fire wise mentality going on to prevent that kind of stuff from happening.

Which is a great idea because we want to be a community anyway, you do a lot of work with communities all across the states.

So the last thing you want is to have your community have to come together after everything has already scorched.

-Great.

-All right.

Well, thanks, that is all the time we do have for Digging Deeper with Backyard Farmer.

Thanks, Christina and Matt for talking to us today we hope we don't have to talk to you further about fire.

We will be back next time with another in depth discussion.

Do be sure to watch Backyard Farmer live every Thursday at 7:00 PM central on Nebraska Public Media.

Thanks for Digging Deeper with Backyard Farmer.

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