Controlled burn at WPAFB

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) - It isn't very often you can say fire fighters started a fire, however today more than a quarter of Huffman Field was burned, in order to help save the prairie where the Wright Brothers built their first airplane.

Tuesday at one o'clock fire fighters assembled to start the bi-annual job of burning down Huffman field. Twice a year, once usually in the spring and again in the Fall, a portion of Huffman Field is burned to keep the prairie in its natural state.

Mike Bowden from the Ohio Department of Natural Resouces, division of Forestry supervised the burn. "Prairie systems, they need fire to keep them healthy. It keeps the prairie composition in a more historically natural state."

Without regular fires, scrubs and trees begin to grow, turning the land into a forest. Since most original prairie land was converted into farms, finding a natural prairie in Ohio is now a difficult task. So fire is used to help keep them.

"In this part of the state, pre settlement times, there was lots of fire activity. whether from Native Americans, lightning, those types of things that kept the prairies as prairies" said Bowden.

This isn't just a group of people lighting fires in a field. These guys build in fire stops, burn areas around the main fire zone to keep the fire contained and constantly check complex weather models to make sure the smoke rises and doesn't blow over roads or realistate.