Here at KFUG and Redwood Voice Paul Critz and yours truly, Oliver Corcovelos, interviewed Forester Lathrop Leonard to talk about the one acre fire over on Howland Hill and give an update about the fire, what it’s affecting, and how it all started.
Lathrop Leonard
We discovered a week ago Sunday but suspected was going on for almost two weeks prior to that, there was a lightning storm you may recall that came through and started another fire in the park that we put out fairly quickly. But this one nobody noticed because it was just kind of smoldering up in the tree tops for a number of days before it managed to make its way to the ground and start spreading and putting up enough smoke for people to realize it was out there.
Paul Critz
And initially, when you discovered that a week ago this last Sunday, what was the extent of it then? How many trees?
Lathrop Leonard
So it was about an acre on the ground and about five trees were burning up in the canopies. And so what happened is one of these trees probably got on fire from the lightning. And once it started burning actively up there embers and pieces of the tree, I mean, sometimes just little embers and other times big branches, like 100 pound branches would fall to the ground on fire. And then that all lit the ground on fire and it spread on the ground and even from tree to tree. And so we ended up with about five trees on fire when we discovered it and started actively suppressing that fire.
Paul Critz
Oh, my gosh. So you did something that I had never heard being done before, and that was installed sprinkler systems. Is that correct?
Lathrop Leonard
That’s right. We had some regular sprinklers like you would see in your yard on the ground so that if something fell out of the tree, it fell on the wet material so that it wouldn’t start another top fire. But then we also needed to get water where the fire was. And so we had a series of ropes and things that were pulling these sprinklers and the typical brass garden hose that people may be using in their yard. We’re hauling a bunch of those up there attached to hoses to help put this thing out.
Paul Critz
Wow. Now, is that like, ad hoc? Is this something that is commonly done or is just a fix that you guys made up?
Lathrop Leonard
Well, you know, I don’t know if anybody who’s been doing this outside of California state parks, but it’s something that we’ve been kind of developing and improving over the years over the last, I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve years or so in parks. Mostly, we seem to have more of these down in humble Redwoods State Park area, but certainly we’ve been putting them out up here and within Redwood, national and state parks, as this one, of course, is in Jedi Smith Redwoods, all those that happens everywhere, and we just have to kind of adjust and each fire up there is a little bit different so that the techniques kind of change a little bit and evolve over time as we figure out what works best in each situation, the last resort, if we can’t put it out from the ground is we’ll send a tree climber into a neighboring tree, and then they can squirt water from there. But obviously, tree climbing. That’s something Arbors and other folks do. We have some folks that are specially trained in climbing trees, but anytime you’re getting off the ground like that, it’s kind of a heads up from a safety standpoint. So we’d rather risk hoses and people’s lives.
Lathrop Leonard Forester For California State Parks and the go to guy to talk to about the fire on Holland Hill. All of us at KFUG and Redwood Voice thank you and all the firefighters working on this to keep our community safe and appreciate the lengths you go to to protect our redwoods.
