- Video shows Kern County firefighters trimming and cutting down dead trees, piling up fuel and burning those piles.
- Summarize who, what, when, where.
The Kern County Fire Department is conducting pile-burning in Alta Sierra.
“These piles are created by our firefighters in the process of reducing hazardous vegetation throughout communities,” Captain Andrew Freeborn, Public Information Officer for the Kern County Fire Department said.
Freeborn told me that wildland hand crews, who are highly trained and experienced firefighters, perform the pile burns.
“These are these crews that you will see on a fire that have heavy backpacks, chainsaws, they are hiking up the mountain and they are at the front lines helping us extinguish that fire.”
Wielding chainsaws with ease, the firefighters “work” the area by piling up dry vegetation and dead trees to burn.
You can see the difference between an area worked by the fire crews and those that have not been.
“They have contributed to treating 175 acres with their efforts, and a lot of that acreage is what has now produced those piles, that in these months of good weather, we are able to go in and burn.”
With the French Fire in 2021 still fresh for many residents, those in Wofford Heights and Alta Sierra are keenly aware of the devastating effects a wildfire can have.
Driving up the 155, the environment is still clearly shaped by that fire.
A firefighter working the burn told me they are focused on working areas near housing in order to reduce the risk of somebody losing a house.
“It's going to be a very busy season during these colder months as they look to get ahead as much as they can in between fire activity.”
This activity, paired with the prescribed burns, which, in 2023, the Kern County Fire Department performed on approximately 150 acres of land, are examples of ways that the department works year round to stop the spread of wildfires, even if there isn’t an active one.
For Kern County Fire, the less people are aware of their work, the better they are doing.
“In the year 20203 we had approximately one thousand different wildfires that occurred here in Kern County. Many of those, probably 90-85 percent of those fires, the community doesn’t know about.”
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