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This is what we're looking for right now though, the flame height is about a foot to two foot.
I'm controlling the line to make sure we're not getting any spot fires on this side of
the line. It's my job right now, just watching this fire.
We're here at Forestry Summer Camp, and this is Fire Week, and the students are becoming
certified firefighters. This is an operational burn for instructional purposes, just teaching
the students how to do it. With 23 students here and the whole, and then we had eight
other professionals coming from the State Forest Service, the Park Service and the Nature
Conservancy. They're all represented here to help and help instruct the students. We
started with a briefing that was led by our burn boss, who is a student, and he's a senior.
And he planned the whole thing. Then he told everybody what was going to happen, the strategy
that we're following, and broke them up into three crews, and they all went in separate
directions to do their assignments. Each crew was led by a professional who gave instruction
throughout the whole thing. Now all you have to do to initiate this is
turn the head of this thing down right along this outside edge.
For the past week we've learned about fire behavior and we've learned about what to look
for whenever we're actually out on a fire. So we were out here, and we got the fire started,
and the professors and the other people assisting, they would start asking us questions to make
sure we knew what was happening based on what we had been taught, like the wind and how
the wind is going to affect the behavior of the fire and how it may heat a stand nearby.
And you'll have the radiant heat coming off and then you may get spotting. So we've been
able to apply the things that we have learned to this activity. And it's been really beneficial,
I think. I love how I learn. You're taught the things, but you can't, if you can't apply
them, how can you really let them sink into your memory and really know what to do if
you're in that situation? In the classroom they're going to go over
all the scenarios that you're going to see, but you're not really going to understand
what it means when they're talking about it in the classroom until you get out and apply
it in the field. You're not going to; you just don't get the real effect in the classroom.
And you really need to be on a fire to learn about fire. That's it.