Matt Arno is back, with his four-man crew, a pump truck, Pulaskis, rakes, and drip torches. Part of his strategy was to fell the trees so that their limbs, the slash, lay like a blanket on the forest floor. Industrial loggers use bulldozers to scrape slash into enormous piles before burning, but we think burning it as a blanket can create the effect of a natural forest fire. The theory is that you haven't restored until it's black. Arno is hypercautious, sensitive to the immense costs of letting a fire get away.
Every firefighter knows it can happen in a heartbeat.
Arno and his crew first laid down flame along a narrow line near the leeward edge of the area to be burned, patiently building a strip of black as boundary. Then another strip parallel to that, maybe six feet wide, then another and on and on slowly building the black buffer by backburning. The fire heading toward my house dies in a buffer. We continue burning for a day, until we put the fires out, and begin again a second day. It's morning on the hillside, sharp blue skies.