On May 4, 2023, a crew with the company Prairie Restorations conducted prescribed burns at three city-owned sites in Duluth—one in Riverside (at the intersection of Spring Street and the Waabizheshikana Trail) and two others in Hartley Park.
The first burn was Riverside. As the six-person burn crew unrolled hoses and staged equipment around the perimeter of the site, John Kratochvil, who was onsite as an observer for Prairie Restorations, told me that the company’s local Esko office probably conducted 20-25 prescribed burns per year, and that their other offices did “close to 100, 150 each.” Prairie Restorations has two other offices in the state, in Princeton and Scandia.
Kratochvil said that the sites would not be difficult to burn. His only concern with the Riverside location was the northeast boundary, which was adjacent to a heavily brush-filled area—they didn’t want fire to “carry into the woods.” But the wind was coming from the right direction to prevent that, and Kratochvil said they would lay down a “wet line” of water along that boundary before they burned it.
Burn Boss Beowulf Boswell asked me to stay outside the line of hose, but otherwise he did not object to me roaming around while his crew worked. Throughout the day, Beowulf was accommodating and helpful. He seemed interested in making sure that I understood what was going on. He reminded me more of a teacher than a burn boss. Beowulf was his real name; his father was a history/literature major.
Igniting the grass with “drip torches” (canisters which drip a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline), the crew backed the fire downhill, into the wind. The dead grass and weeds burned quickly. Patches of greenery smoldered more slowly. The flames scarcely rose above two feet high. The breeze carried the smoke away. The operation was so calm that Beowulf invited me up onto the hillside to get a closer view of the flames.
“The deer poop makes a nice smoldering nugget,” he said, indicating a narrow plume of smoke rising from the grass.
“Are you joking me?” I asked.
“No.”
The burn took about 30 minutes to complete. The crew “mopped up” the blackened area by dousing the hot spots with water, then packed up their gear and proceeded to Hartley Park to repeat the operation.
Because Hartley had more dead vegetation, the flames were bigger and hotter. The crew was as matter-of-fact as ever. Two Bobcat vehicles equipped with water tanks patrolled the perimeter of the burn. As I snapped pictures, Beowulf called over one of the drip torch guys, who introduced himself as Brett Bjergo. By the time I had ascertained the spelling of Brett’s surname and asked him how long he had worked for the company, I became worried that I was distracting him from the wall of flame roaring up behind him, so I cut the interview short.
The burn was happening along Hartley Park’s most heavily used trail. A dozen members of the public observed the proceedings. Duluth Fire Marshal Lisa Consie was also on hand. She told me that prescribed burns currently didn’t happen very often in Duluth, simply because the fire department didn’t have an existing category of burn permit for it, but they hoped to “rewrite some of the language on our burn permit to allow more prescribed fire.”
“So it sounds like you want to allow more of it,” I said.
“I do,” said Consie. “We want to see a tool used in a good way.”
The third burn site of the day, on a hill overlooking Hartley Pond, had some nice flare-ups in patches of weeds, but nothing that fazed the crew. They were done mopping up in 20 minutes.
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Cover photo: The Prairie Restorations burn crew above Hartley Pond, May 4, 2023. Credit: John Ramos
This is very interesting, exactly how it is done; and the photos are clear.