The U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced prescribed burns in the Redding, Calif., area.
The BLM plans pile-burning projects Jan. 9-20, according to a Jan. 6 news release. The plan is to burn "only when weather and fuel conditions allow for safe and successful burning and smoke dispersion."
“These projects are designed to remove vegetation piles from earlier projects to reduce fuels that could feed wildfires,” BLM Redding Field Office Manager Jennifer Mata said in the release. “Reducing fuel loading creates a more fire resilient landscape and reduces the probability of a wildfire spreading into the tree canopy where it could spread rapidly. This will also help us maintain and improve the scenic quality of these public lands.”
The crews plan to keep the vegetation pile burning to five to 10 acres daily until completed, the release reported. The project area is approximately 100 acres, including the Swasey recreation area, Middle Creek trail, CHina Gulch Road and Pioneer Baby Grove.
The Redding field office manages roughly 250,000 acres of public land across five northern California counties, from Tehama County in the south to Siskiyou County in the north. This area includes portions of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains and the Sacramento River Valley.
While uncontrolled fires are incredibly dangerous and damage-causing, agencies like the BLM use prescribed burning as a tool, according to the BLM website. The BLM conducts controlled burning operations to "help reduce wildfire risk to communities, municipal watersheds and other values, as well as restore natural ecologic processes and functions and to achieve integrated land-management objectives."
