 What Fred wanted me to do was to go through a few of the events in our history that has helped us to put together our plans that we have today for fighting fire both in the swamp and in the uplands. And in the beginning of this, I think back to one of the fires we had several years ago was called the Honey Buck Fire and this was an escaped prescribed fire like a number of others of ours but anyhow it was in its wind down stage and we had a volunteer fire department crew on Joneses Island for whatever we needed them for and the IC asked me to have them to drive down to the other end of the island to check on something that was supposed to be burning out or some rather mundane chore but anyhow I asked them to do it and they all jumped into the truck and they were real enthusiastic and they started the engine and turned on the siren and turned on the lights and raced a half mile down to where they were going and then slammed on the brakes and got out and did what they were supposed to do well there's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about an assignment but there is something about fighting fire that gets our adrenaline raging even though we know better we want to jump into it with both feet no matter what because wildfire is bad, it's our enemy and it must be destroyed. Well fire can be our enemy but it can also be our friend and our environment's friend. With experience fire managers have learned how to have patience with fire how to work with it instead of fighting it and how to make it less of an enemy and more of a friend. We also learned that each habitat has its own particular set of problems for instance managing fire within the Okefenokee swamp is different from almost any other habitat that we have in this country including the the cultivated bogs up in in Michigan and around the lake states and in the northeast. Well these lessons are all not new in fact history shows that that we often learn them over and over again the problem is that wet and dry periods and the resulting difficult fire years tend to occur in cycles in this area these cycles tend to occur every 10 to 30 years during the period between cycles entire management staffs can change priorities change current management plans are replaced and and the files that tell our history are in the archives that's why we're here today to we we have to document the lessons that we have learned in the past in a form that will survive through maybe long periods when fire suppression isn't an emergency and when everything just becomes kind of mundane so we can remain ready to cope with the year when it once again becomes a major priority and and and I think like the title was on there how to deal with something unexpected well I'm going to go over some of our history and go over some of our fires in the past and these may not be the most spectacular fires that we've had but they're going to be those that were kind of stepping stones in our development of our management techniques that we've learned over over the years if we can go to the first first slide here we'll notice that the like you might expect we these are you can see the years when we have a high precip high amount of precipitation and years when we when it's when it's low and and obviously our fires occur during the years when we when we have little rain and right to begin with let's have the next slide right to begin with these are fires that occurred during the beginning times before the refuge was established between 1855 and 1927 now back during this period the fire management managers kind of had this little rule when the swamp water level was high they do they make the best use of the swamp they could and do everything they could to try to run the fire into the swamp so they had one less line to worry about and there the fire would go out on that side when water levels in the swamp were low if they had a fire on the upland they'd do everything in their power to keep the fire out of the swamp because they knew that once that got in there we were in for a long period of trouble well next slide please the the the next dry period was in the early 30s and and we had a major fire in 1932 that's the the pink area there that you can see and and according to John Hopkins it covered most of the swamp and as you can see there it didn't exactly cover most of the swamp but probably as he looked at it it did it covered a lot of it but the spring of 1932 was very dry and there was a fishing party somewhere in the vicinity of mix and tammock and there was a youth within the party that decided his hands were cold and he started a little fire in the grass to try to warm his hands and the fire got away and they left it well the wind blew hard in one direction and spread the fire one way then it shifted and spread the fire another way and it covered much of the swamp and according to John Hopkins John Hopkins by the way was the was the project leader for the Hebert Cypress Company during the timber operations when they they logged the Cypress out of most of the swamp then when the government acquired the land in 1937 he became our first refuge manager when he retired in 1945 he wrote a book and and and I have excerpts here from I think it's just four pages in his books things that he learned from this 1932 fire he mentioned that it was the the prairie areas were very dry in the swamp and one of the observations that he noted was that the fire would burn over an area it could dry out more and then it would burn back over the area again and so repeat burning occurred as the muck dried out and he made the statement at that time he said no equipment known at that time would have been of any value to control or suppress the fire in the swamp the timber owners around the swamp made no attempt to suppress the fire in the swamp but fought fire out in the uplands where suppression was possible he also noted that where prescribed burning had been practiced on the uplands it it helped their suppression efforts and where the fire did burn over those areas the damage was minimized and he also noted that this area has been subjected to fire since time out of mind a fair stand of good pine was found here by the european settlers when they came and his conclusion was the pine woods has adapted to fire and most damage in the upland was limited to turpentine areas he also found after the fire they examined he and his staff examined the burned area very carefully he found very little dead wildlife and observed that native wildlife had a natural ability to survive or recover or adapt to wildfire and his conclusions as he was that fires in our piney woods thought at first to be damaging have instead been beneficial and he said i am not alone in that thought well then we entered let's have the next slide please then we entered a new period if you notice between 1950 and 1955 we have another low precipitation period and we have fires that way up at the top of the off the chart there these these were the 1954-55 fires now in between we went through a wet period and things had changed somewhat during this time for one thing prescribed burning that had taken place around the swamp rather informally these these were the years that we began our fire suppression actions when we first begin to get the idea that fire was bad and we had private landowners that would burn every spring to develop forage for the cattle and they were discouraged from doing this there was still quite a lot of prescribed burning going on but a lot of it had been curtailed and now as time as we enter 1954 we're just beginning to go into a rather extended dry cycle and and i have several notes from refuge manager Roy Moore's fire reports and and and up to this point they were using this old axon well you know if the fire burns into the swamp that's good it'll go out there in july 1951 Mitchells Island caught fire there was no suppression action taken the fire burned out at the edge of the island and there was very little damage to the timber okay in august 1952 compartment 15 burned the upland was suppressed the fire was allowed to burn into the swamp where it went out january in the march 1953 two fires in upland compartments 13 and 15 burned the fire was suppressed and the upland the fire went out at the edge of the swamp july 1954 same thing billy's island burned a comment by refuge manager more that the wildlife habitat which had deteriorated since they quit burning on the island had had benefited due to the wildfire then august 15 1954 blackjack island burned he said all of it but the fire went out at the edge of the swamp right here we're at the point where we're turning the page between the time when they they should have worried about the fire in the swamp now the next entry next report was september 10 1954 less than a month afterwards the report noted that the blackjack island fire did not go out as had been thought but the fire continued to burn smolder into the swamp until it burned on to mim's island mim's island burned over november 31 1954 fire on fiddler's island and again the refuge manager noted that the damage was limited because they'd had wildfire here a few years before and he didn't mention whether the fire had just burned across the swamp to let's have the next slide please he didn't mention whether the fire had burned across the swamp to fiddler's island if i can make this thing work here okay billy's island is here blackjack island is here and here's where the fire started on blackjack island it smoldered through the swamp until it got on to mim's island right here then then we had the fire on fiddler's island and i don't know whether the fire burned across two fiddler's island or whether we had a new strike on fiddler's island and it went into the swamp from there but but this gray area the the major fire had completely encompassed the whole area then um in november 20 on november 27 1954 the classic fire began the the mule tail fire and let's um let's go back to the the previous slide there the this is the classic fire where reports tell us that a turpentine or some place in the southeast side of the swamp uh got cold and he built a little fire in a pot and put it in the front of the wagon and according to the legend the the mule was pulling the wagon dangled his tail in the burning pot which upset him and he went uh tearing it through the wood spreading fire as he went well the the fire um there were high winds and the fire burned up almost the whole east side of the swamp and uh one of the points that refuge manager roymor uh noted was that uh they had done regular prescribed burning at camp canalia camp canals where all the buildings are right in here and uh because the fuels were low the fire burned right through the area but they were able to save the buildings and control the fire as it went through there well as a result of these fires uh 90 000 acres of private land burned with destruction of much of the upland timber uh some of oki finoki's uplands survive because of prescribed fires or wildfires uh areas destroyed included chesser island where the refuge manager had been ordered not to burn there anymore um and uh on riddlies and bugaboo islands where most of the trees had turpentine faces and then after also after these fires uh many turpentine face trees throughout the refuge uplands were uh that had been partially burned by the fire or where had been salvaged and removed and this of course uh reduced the amount of longleaf pine that we had in much of our longleaf pine communities within the swamp um a fire review was conducted after the fire and this is these are some of the recommendations this fire review uh was conducted by the fire suppression personnel and the landowners that surrounded the swamp and there were several recommendations that came out of this fire review one was that a sill should be built across the swanee river and certain other places in the swamp to keep the water levels high in the swamp so that a fire like this could never happen again second that a perimeter road uh road should be built around the perimeter of the swamp to facilitate access uh near the edge of the swamp by the fire management crews third there should be a break constructed right at the line between the swamp land and the upland uh to to help to uh burn off from or to get uh suppression crews next to the edge of the swamp well no action was ever taken on the on the break around the edge of the swamp the perimeter road was constructed in the early 1960s and uh and we have it today the swanee river sill was constructed about the same time and that over time has proven uh to be not effective in and maintaining the water levels of the swamp it only maintained a few thousand acres and actually from the habitat standpoint the resulting stabilized water levels were detrimental to the habitat well continuing our fire sequence let's look at the next slide here uh in 1981 we uh got caught a fire on uh lightning started a fire on black jack island this is where the whole thing started in 1954 and we'd had here again we'd had years of uh of not real uh emergency type fire weather and the swamp the swamp water level had been fairly high in 1980 the 1980s was another period when it became low um the the fire started on the island and uh and the georgia forestry commission uh picked us up in the helicopter and we were going to go try to put the fire out on the island with the helicopter and the helicopter broke and so the island burned off and uh the uh and it did not do a bad job of burning it put a good job and then the fire left the island and burned about oh 900 or a thousand or so acres within the swamp and uh the the forestry commission got the helicopter fixed and uh mr dozer's uh personnel there were we're kind of adamant about wanting us to use that uh helicopter to put that fire out that was in the swamp there uh so we wouldn't have a repeat of the 1954 fire manager then was john eddie and we looked at the uh we looked at the area around the fire and we had uh some open prairie area around here with water in it and uh for one thing one thing we didn't have any fire suppression money and we really couldn't hire a helicopter to work on the fire in the swamp but uh but also we just we thought the fire would go out when it reached that point and there was a little bit of consternation there because the water kept going down as the fire kept coming closer but fortunately the the uh the fire burned up to the edge of the open prairies and it went out at that point and then later rains suppressed the fire and put it out but there was always the question after that would would the helicopters have been beneficial excuse me in suppressing the fire in the swamp and the the forest service even sent a crew of fire behavior officers we you know we'd we'd had fires in bog lands throughout the countries and we have fought them there for years and sent a crew of fire behavior officers down and we flew over the area and looked at the uh the boundary between the burned scrub shrub and the and and uh where the fire occurred and where it didn't occur and they determined that yes probably the uh the helicopters would have been beneficial so that's something we can use in the future if we have another fire like this in the swamp well then a few years after this and and we did use helicopters for putting out fires and some of the uplands uh uh they were they were useful to us and the state was always generous with the use of their helicopter uh then 1988 happened and Yellowstone the fire in Yellowstone National Park happened and as we all know the the uh the fire really was that occurred in Yellowstone was beneficial probably in most areas but uh there weren't really good plans for what to do with wildfire if it occurred how it should be managed and and this sort of thing there was a lot of unanswered questions and so our department heads in washington decided they they handed down the edict that uh that when we had a wildfire or if we had a fire that occurred uh on uh fish and wildlife service lands uh and there was no prescription that that said how when the fire should start and how it should be handled and all this sort of thing uh it would be considered a wildfire and would be aggressively suppressed so these are the orders that we were under for the next few years and of course the the uh the intended result was that we would have real good fire plans and so from that point we'd be able to uh manage the fires but we weren't at that point at this time um later this particular year in 1988 we had a fire up uh someplace up in here on uh oh rather right here I believe in mcdonald island at the edge of the swamp not a very big fire but we had used the helicopters a couple of times by then and refuge manager john shore was there then and we had ordered uh let's let's have the next slide we had ordered his humongous helicopter biggest one we'd ever seen on the refuge I think had a 450 gallon bucket and uh we flew over the fire area and the refuge manager asked the pilot he says uh can you put this fire out with this helicopter in that big bucket he says a piece of cake and so he dumped a 450 gallon load on the fire and it didn't do much he dumped another load on it didn't do much he fought it the rest of the day we had crews in there uh in the swamp along we had this little old line going into the swamp where he'd dump a bucket and they'd get in there and they'd try to mix the water and stuff around and the fire got suppressed but I don't think that we or the helicopter had much to do with it uh then the next year we had uh with the fire I was talking about right at the beginning the honey buck fire it was an escape prescribed fire and there we uh let's go to the go to the next slide we can be ready for that um there we had a fire um we were burning on on um honey island which is here and the the fire escaped and started burning toward the pocket and then boy we got all upset about this and uh and and we and the state got together and did everything we could to stop it we set uh we set a backing fire I think six miles all the way from the end from the to Stephen Foster State Park clear to the end of the refuge the the backing fire that we set escaped and got on the private land and I don't think that the backing fire and the swamp fire ever met one another so um uh so this operation wasn't we didn't burn a lot of private land just a little bit but this operation wasn't really successful either uh the next year the next year we had another fire um in the vicinity of Bugaboo Island and this fire took off and burned and and before we knew it it was almost up here to Honey Island and it was momentarily stopped there a little piece of uh open area next to Honey Island and we got all upset about this and we here we really turned out we had helicopters dump water on the fire we had our folks we literally built hand line around a lot of that fire just about kill ourselves doing it and and when the fire finally uh stopped or was suppressed by whatever sometime later we determined that probably we may have saved maybe one square foot of of land by by killing ourselves on this fire well then the real turning point was uh just later on that same year a fire started uh some place in the vicinity of the swamp here on the west side lightning caused fire and uh and and it it really took off and started burning and and we here we had a major we had several uh incident management teams on this fire and let's have the next slide okay uh the uh okay let's let's go through through these okay um go ahead to the next slide till it's changes here okay uh we had we had upwards of almost 700 people on this fire we had crews in the swamp working on the fire building hand line uh putting fire out uh putting burning embers jabbing them into the swamp to put them out um we had uh next slide we had helicopters I don't know how many helicopters of all sizes dumping water in the swamp next slide we even had retardant drops the the red stuff falling in the swamp um and water handling crews we had we had experts and putting out bog fires from Michigan and the northeast down there and we had miles and miles and miles of hose in the swamp and sprinkler systems uh everything that we could that we could come up with and uh for a while we thought we had the fire stopped at a two or three thousand acres but it went on and it burned 23,000 acres and I think we uh I think we finally put the declared the fire out several months later when the when the rains came but um overall this fire cost us over nine million dollars and uh it did there was one good thing that resulted from the fire the the break that they had uh suggested be built back in 1955 was started uh we determined that we needed an area we knew we decided we knew to begin with we couldn't put the fire out in the swamp we're going to have to attack it when it comes to the edge of the swamp but we have this transition zone where it makes it kind of hard to fight it right there and we don't want to let it build up until it gets a half mile inland so we started this break around the very edge of the swamp kind of between the the uh between the transition area where the swamp starts and the and the upland uh begins and we built a break around the probably the lower the lower one quarter of the swamp and by utilizing this break we were able to uh attack the fire as it came to the uplands and we really rather than to work in the swamp we were able to do what needed to be done where we thought the fire was going to hit that break on the uplands and we managed to come out without damaging too much private land well we also had other we we learned other lessons throughout the uh throughout the the time let's have the next slide please the reason why do we have such a problem trying to put out fire within the swamp uh first of all this is kind of a a profile of the of the vegetation in the swamp we have a mixture of things but a lot of hurrah bush greenbrier and other impenetrable vegetation that grows anywhere from three to fifteen feet high within the swamp and uh and we've got this layer of dead material that falls next to the surface of the root mat and then uh below that we've got the peat layer and the sand and uh next slide please the uh when this burns we get a tremendous fire we have smoked in Tallahassee with smokes from our fire next slide please and it's a very hot fire a very extremely hot fire and uh now we can have uh let's next slide please the the uh water level can be right up to the top of the root mat and you still have a fire like this now when we if if the water level is at the top of the root mat will burn off all the surface vegetation next slide please and uh you'll see here uh in the background was where the fire stopped that's what the vegetation looked like to begin with this in front here burned last year and you notice that it is growing up just the way it was before next slide please now if the water level is low enough so we burn into the root mat a little bit then we'll get uh a change in vegetation next slide please uh we may have grasses instead of instead of brush when it when it comes up and next slide and then the classic thing is if it burns down to the peat layer then we get the uh we get the open areas that open prairie areas and open lakes okay um a couple other lessons we learned back in 1979 uh when uh one of our technicians was plowing out uh a wildfire uh he went a couple hundred yards down from the edge of the wildfire in the pocket and uh was starting to plow out uh run a line between the road and the swamp he had maybe a couple 300 yards to go the wind direction changed and within a few seconds it burned the fire it blew the fire over him uh he was using this old 1954 tractor at the time and we didn't have any equipment no money to do anything and uh and he died a few days later and and the burn center in texas two years later at marit island we lost two more people uh they were trying to plow a line in front of a fire and they got their tractor on a stump and were burned over and as a result of this uh we got a lot of uh we got a lot more money we got funding and most of probably most important of all we got training uh so that uh folks learned how to put out wildfire well in closing the lessons we learned is one we can't safely manage fires without adequate fire suppression equipment personal protection equipment training and funding two it's impossible to suppress fires in the swamp other than a very small spotfire three it's dangerous and foolhardy to put personnel in the swamp travel is hazardous and difficult and personnel may easily become trapped four it's dangerous to put equipment in the swamp it will get stuck uh and if you could put five if you could put equipment personnel and anything you wanted to in the swamp it wouldn't do any good anyhow uh the helicopter drops in the swamp this vegetation layer is so thick that it atomizes the water when it hits it and it doesn't soak the actual burning area uh you'd have to dump buckets and buckets in a single spot just to put out a little piece of fire um seven retardant drops just make a real good show besides fertilizing the uh the vegetation that's there uh eight if it were possible to create a fire line in the swamp the chance of it holding anything or zero because there's too much burning stuff in the air nine as they did in 1932 the most effective management technique is to retreat to the upland and fight fire when it gets there uh ten managed wildfire used in conjunction with prescribed fire is beneficial in the uplands and in the swamp for both fire suppression and habitat quality uh 11 the surface fire in a stop swamp stop spreading only when it reaches an open water area and 12 the fire isn't out until the water level comes up from underneath and as a result of all of our planning we did finish the swamp's edge break around the rest of the swamp and fred will tell you more about that we developed a plan for when we would fight fire in the swamp when we wouldn't and we've also developed a series of um of uh dip sites throughout the swamp so that we can use helicopters to help us when the fire uh comes to the upland and thank you very much