Wind Cave National Park personnel are planning to conduct a prescribed burn this Sunday.
The area set to be torched is substantial – but safety precautions are in place and extra firefighters have been called in to assist with keeping the flames under control.
Wind Cave National Park encompasses about 33,000 acres just north of the small Black Hills town of Hot Springs.
Assisted by 50 firefighters from as far away as Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, Wind Cave personnel will torch 2,199 acres in what’s being designated as the Cold Brook Prescribed Fire.
Wind Cave spokesperson Tom Farrell says park management tries to conduct prescribed burns every few years. One determining factor, adds Farrell, is the park’s budget.
“It involves surrounding agencies,” explains Farrell. “A lot of the work goes into prepping for the burn in terms of making sure there’s good control lines, limbing any trees where the branches are close to where the lines of the boundaries of the burn are. So, there’s quite a bit that goes into it more than just the day of the burn when you see the smoke and the flames.”
Officials decide which portion of the land needs to be burned according to Eric Allen. He’s the Fire Management Officer for the Northern Great Plains Park Group.
“You may do it to enhance an area for forage for a specific type of animal,” Allen offers. “You may do it in order to manage possibly the exotic species or to manage a specific plant species or to discourage or encourage it. And there’s a wide variety of reasons why you could apply fire to an area that would help benefit the resources in itself.”
The primary reason for this prescribed burn, says Allen, is to reduce the fuel load in the area.
“So that if we were to have a fire during the heart of fire season, it would be much easier for us to manage,”Allen explains. “It would be burnt at a lower intensity. And so, basically, I’m just beating that fire to the punch.”
Eric Allen says a two-thousand-plus acre burn is larger than the norm for other parks, but not for Wind Cave. Residents in the southern Black Hills can expect to see substantial smoke and flames in the area at some point after 8 a.m. Sunday morning.