DATE: Thursday, May 8, 1997                 TAG: 9705080365

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MEREDITH COHN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE                        LENGTH:   82 lines

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE: PRESCRIBED BURNS HELP PRESERVE DISMAL SWAMP

Smokey Bear was wrong. Forest fires are not always bad.

Wildlife managers say they are biologically necessary, and a team of them on Wednesday set the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge ablaze.

Aided by warm, dry air and light wind, the fire was ignited in the morning when refuge biologist Ralph Keel, with a borrowed helicopter hovering a couple of hundred feet above, shot pingpong balls filled with potassium permanganate and antifreeze into the woods.

They dropped one by one until more than 3,500 purplish-white balls had fallen on several hundred acres in the northwest section of the preserve. The two chemicals reacted within minutes of their release, sending white puffs through the loblolly pines into the nearly cloudless sky.

``I see smoke,'' declared a grinning Lloyd Culp, the refuge manager, who perched on Hudnell Ditch Road along the eastern edge of the fire's target.

``I think I see flames,'' Culp said, his enthusiasm growing.

The cheer belied the seriousness of the mission, but it served as a release of tension built up during the hours of preparation and waiting for the perfect conditions for a prescribed burn.

Forest managers agree fire is crucial to clear away debris - including leaves, pine needles and small twigs - that fuels much larger, destructive wildfires often started by lightning. Further, in the Dismal Swamp's case, it was meant to kill off encroaching maples and gums to make room for pines and cedars, which are native to the area and are preferred by much of the area's wildlife.

Wednesday's prescribed fire, set in two areas in the refuge and burning across nearly 1,000 acres, returns the long-excluded management tool the woods.

Re-introducing fire in the swamp, and in forests across the nation, however, isn't always popular. With homes, roads and businesses creeping closer to parks and refuges, fire often proves too great a threat to property.

But not using controlled fires has been disastrous on occasion.

In the Rocky Mountains, 100 years of fire suppression was blamed for massive infernos that destroyed millions of acres of forests, including a portion of Yellowstone National Park in 1994.

State laws, including Virginia's, and the federal Clean Air Act's curbs on pollution also prevented some prescribed burns.

Fire has been most often used in the Deep South, with its sandy soils and more humid climate.

In the refuge, fire was suppressed beginning after World War II and was not re-introduced until the 1980s. The last major prescribed burn using aerial drops was in 1988, although managers burn small areas of about 100 to 200 acres a year on foot.

There have been some lightning-induced fires that burned deep in the refuge's peat soil for weeks, filling neighborhoods in nearby Suffolk and Chesapeake with smoke. Wildfires - without the benefit of planning for staff and weather and computer models - are still extinguished when possible.

About a dozen fire specialists from the Dismal Swamp, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, the National Park Service, and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and Merchants Mill Pond State Park in North Carolina participated in the burn.

Crews, led by refuge forester Dave Brownlie, the burn boss, surrounded the designated areas with water tank trucks and other equipment in case flames escaped their boundaries - marked by ditches and old logging roads.

``We take a very deliberate approach. That's the difference between a prescribed fire and a wildfire,'' Brownlie said. ``Our goal is to reduce the hazardous fuel levels on the forest floor and then to start working for biological means. We're replacing the natural role of lightning fires.''

During the day, there were constant temperature, wind and humidity checks on the radios as a helicopter circled above. Animals and birds quietly escaped the area as the smell of fire permeated the air.

The wet ground and fire-hardy pines kept the fire mostly at ground level, leading Mike Brady from the Blackwater refuge to use a flamethrower to shoot fire more than 10 feet across a ditch to boost the blaze.

During the full day's worth of burning, most of the fire was expected to burn itself out.

The green is likely to return to the charred woods in a couple of weeks, but the results of the burn won't be measured for about a year, when new sprouts are surveyed. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MORT FRYMAN/The Virginian-Pilot

Fire specialist Mike Brady sets a flanking fire to help keep

controlled burn fires within their boundaries in the Dismal Swamp on

Wednesday.

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