Fire can destroy, but it can also help restore the health of a natural area.
The Indiana Dunes National Park’s naturalists and fire management team members keep those ideas in mind as they plan and carry out prescribed fires this spring in the 15,000-acre national park, when weather permits.
“The weather is always the dictator,” said Micah Bell, the park’s fire prevention and education specialist. “It has to be not too windy, not too calm, not too hot, not too cold.”
Of this spring’s planned fires, he said: “If we get them all done, that’ll be a good spring.”
The largest would be a continuation of the prescribed fire begun last fall at Howes Prairie, a 414-acre area south of Porter Beach and Dune Acres, west of Waverly Road and north of the Calumet Trail.
The park burned about 130 acres of Howes Prairie last fall, but the fire had to be stopped because the day became too hot and windy.
“We always err on the side of caution,” Bell said.
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Other fires planned for this spring include 23 acres in the Porter Beach area surrounded by Wabash Avenue, Roskin Road and the western boundary of Indiana Dunes State Park; and 142 acres on the west end of Beam Street in the town of Porter, as part of the long-term restoration of Mnoke Prairie.
Prescribed fires have been carried out already in 16 acres around the Douglas Center for Environmental Education in Gary’s Miller section, to protect the building from future wildland fires, and 66 acres west of County Line Road and south of U.S. 12.
“A lot of science” goes into planning each season’s prescribed fires, Bell said.
“Every one of our burns goes into restoring the nature of the park.”
When the first European settlers arrived in the region, they saw native inhabitants setting fires so they could plant crops on the land. Later, scientists noticed, in the growth rings of felled trees, how fires had influenced the trees.
“We’re trying to mimic Mother Nature as part of our restoration of the land,” Bell said.
Each “burn plan” for part of the park is the result of years of research into the proposed area’s plant and animal life, along with its history and geology, and must be approved by local and regional national park officials.
Rare and endangered plants get special attention.
For example, Bell said, park staff will build a little shelter of fire-retardant materials around a Pitcher’s thistle, a threatened plant that grows in sand dunes. Afterward, he has seen where that plant has not only survived but thrived.
Animals in a burn area are on their own.
“Once smoke is in the air, they smell it and their fight-or-flight instinct kicks in,” Bell said. “More than once, we’ve almost been run over by a deer running away.”
The prescribed fires themselves tend to be slow-moving, relatively low-intensity fires, unlike the massive wildfires that consume forests in the western United States.
Reducing the danger of uncontrolled wildfires is another purpose for prescribed fires. The low-intensity fires use up the fuel that, if built up, can create larger fires later.
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The park’s firefighters sometimes find themselves confronting a wildfire — nearly all of which in this area are caused by humans, Bell said.
A couple of years ago, the fire team was conducting a prescribed burn in the Tolleston Dunes area when a wildfire broke out in Miller Woods, Bell said. They could see the column of smoke from that fire as they left the prescribed burn to confront the wildfire. The Gary Fire Department and other municipal firefighters had to help the national park’s fire team get that fire under control.
Tim Zorn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.