Waterton lights prairie fire

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

All the right conditions aligned Monday for Canada's Waterton Lakes National Park to carry out a massive prescribed fire on the park's eastern prairie.

It's the first major fire in that area in more than 100 years.

"It's under way as we speak," Waterton communications officer Janice Smith said Monday afternoon.

The burn was expected to cover 1,600 hectares, or roughly 4,000 acres, in a long-planned effort to rejuvenate the prairie by curbing aspen expansion into grasslands while promoting new growth of native grasses.

It's also expected to reduce the potential for wildfires that can threaten structures outside the park, Smith said.

Since Waterton was established in 1895, there is no record of any substantial fires on the park's eastern prairie, Smith said. Over that same period, it's estimated that aspen and shrubs have encroached on about one quarter of the grasslands.

"There is no record of a fire in this particular spot for 100 years," she said. "Up until the 1980s, If there was a fire, it would have been suppressed - right away."

Fire-history studies have shown that prior to the park's establishment and aggressive fire-suppression policies, the grasslands burned about every five years, with many of the fires ignited by aboriginal tribes.

Monday's burn has been planned for about five years, Smith said, but the proper conditions didn't develop until this year. Immediate preparations for the burn have been under way for the last few weeks.

Wardens have been burning out strips of grassland on the eastern perimeter of the fire area. The blackened areas are intended to serve as breaks for a fire driven by southwest winds. Firefighters using drip torches continued those efforts Monday before the "big burn" was ignited by a helicopter rigged with a device that dispenses flammable pingpong balls.

Park officials notified neighboring landowners of the burn plans, and efforts have been made to address their concerns, Smith said.

"One of our bigger concerns is smoke, because people have health problems and it can cause some problems on the roads," she said. "You sort of want some wind, but you don't want too much wind."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com