Fire has another benefit to the coast redwoods. These trees are able to sprout new trunks from tissue in their root collars called burl. Burl is bud tissue which remains dormant until some kind of damage occurs to the trunk of the parent tree. When the parent tree is damaged, the burl tissue begins to grow. A tree that has lost its top due to wind can grow a new top in this way.
Redwoods also sprout from the base, much the same way as rose bushes grow suckers.
When the trunk is cut off, such as when a tree is logged or burned by fire, the tree will often develop a ring of sprouts around the stump. Burls not only occur only at the base of the tree, but can grow anywhere on the tree. In the picture below, the strange growth on the side of the tree is a burl. You may have seen redwood trees with two trunks. Redwoods are able to grow two trunks on the same tree when damage has occurred, and burl tissue starts growing.