FTLComm - Allenville - May 4, 2000

It is human nature to make mistakes, that's why we have fire departments. With seeding going at full tilt on every farm the rush to get this year's crop in the ground continues to see farmers torching fields so that they can reduce the trash cover. The picture below shows a field at the Allenville school district site about five miles East of Sylvania where Wednesday afternoon the gentle breeze moved the fire across the field and into bucked log piles around a cut from this winter.

The loggers had left some of the poplar still standing but have removed the stand of spruce from this bush resulting in four nice piles of bucked spruce, ready for market. This picture on the right is just to the right of the image above and shows one of the piles that was not affected by the burning of the trash cover on the field.

Tisdale's fire department went out to this blaze but the water in the fire engine was not adequate to knock down the intense heat from the neatly piled logs. The water tanker was called out to the fire and the pumper then had more then the five minutes water in its internal tank. Though the fire was very hot some of the logs in the affected pile will still be salvaged. It is pretty easy sitting in the FTLComm van to criticize a

situation like this one and wonder why the farmer did not make a quick pass with his cultivator around the piled logs before setting the fire. However, such things are easy to see after the fact. Apparently the consequences of letting the fire burn toward the logs just didn't come up. With twelve to fifteen fire fighters on the job this was a costly event. Especially since the material on this field could and should have been just worked into the soil to add fibre and reduce erosion. The picture below is a peak into the logged area which appears to have been penetrated by the fire but because it is churned up from the logging the fire did not do any further damage.