"[Aerial ignition] has to be under the right conditions, and it's not really a science—to me it's almost an art…"
For the wildland fire component, my responsibility is Parkway, which is 1.2 million acres, and it includes suppression of wildland fires, and prescribed fire, which is when we go out and take a management action under preplanned conditions and light fire for resource benefits. It includes also what we call managing wildland fire, or wildland fire use for resource benefits. That's what we have going on, on the North Rim right now. That's when we get a natural ignition, and under predetermined conditions we go through an analysis process that tells us to have this fire move across that landscape with that vegetative cover is a good thing, it'll benefit the resource that's out there, be it wildlife, vegetation, a number of different things, because we're a fire-dependent ecosystem. Fire is as much a part of the surroundings of this vegetative cover as rain is. And by excluding fire we've changed things, and now we're trying to correct that. Prescribed fire and wildland fire use are simply a couple of tools to help us do that.
...We use a method called aerial ignition, focus ground fire. Yeah, we do that a lot. The primary tool is the helicopter to do that. And that allows us to put a lot of fire across the landscape in a very short period of time, and there are a number of benefits if we're able to do that. One, it has to be under the right conditions, and it's not really a science -to me it's almost an art to figure out when's the right time to do that. And if you can do that by aerial ignition, and have all those other things lined out that you need to have mitigated, you're not exposing firefighters to the risk of being on the ground and dealing with fire in that forested structure. As far as air quality and the regulations we are required to work under from the Clean Air Act, it's called the best management practice, because you put a whole lot of smoke or emissions into the airshed at one time, and then you're done. If we don't use aerial ignition, we could get conceivably, as an example, 2,000 acres done in three hours. If I did that by hand, with people on the ground, to do that would take me probably two weeks. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, just from the air quality perspective, they like that. Under the right conditions, that's a good thing to do. And of course you have to make sure that the conditions, with the forest structure that you're putting fire into are right, that you're going to get the right fire effects from moving fire across that landscape. You don't want to burn it too hot, you don't want to burn it too cool. You want to be able to control it. If you can do all that, aerial ignition is an outstanding tool.