A handful of trucks lined the curb of a residential neighborhood on a cool, gray Saturday morning in Naperville. Just as many guys were hanging out for their lunch break. They were wearing soot-covered work clothes.
There would be fire in the neighborhood within the hour.
A resident came outside to check out the scene. She was afraid; her kids play outside, and she thought the crew was dealing with toxic materials in her neighborhood.
Evan Barker reassured her nothing toxic was about to happen. In fact, it was a repetition of a process that had been taking place in this region for thousands of years.
Barker led the prescribed burn around the stormwater retention pond. He’s a quality control manager at Pizzo Habitat Restoration, an ecological restoration company that’s been around since 1988. Barker walked around the pond, surveying the area one last time before the burn process officially began.
“This is going to go pretty quick,” he said. “We've done the work.”
The area honestly didn’t look like much. A 10- to 20-foot band of dried stalks and some woody plants stuck up around a tiny manmade pond. The area was planted with native prairie plants. Barker said they require fire to thrive.
“Part of the proper management of our native plant ecosystems in this area is fire,” he said. “It's just as important as rain in the spring and snow in the winter.”
Tallgrass prairie expert Jamie Ellis agrees. He’s with the Illinois Natural History Survey, a research institute that keeps much of the biological records of the state of Illinois.
“It is our native grassland that developed here in the middle of North America,” he said. “The prairie helps build the deep, black soils that support a very productive agricultural economy.”
He also described fire an ecological tool.
“That fire is going to burn off this standing vegetation,” he said. “So, it's going to recycle some of those nutrients, and the nitrogen, the phosphorus.”
Back at the retention pond, once Barker completed his last-minute check, the burn crew turned on a generator and assumed their positions at one end of the pond. Garett Schneider wielded what looked like a thick square of black mat attached to a broomstick.
“We call it flapper,” he said. “This is just to extinguish fire by removing oxygen to it.”
It’s one tool among many.
“We use water packs to protect things,” he said. “And then we use this just to smother fire out. This is like the last tool of the line.”
Once they lit a small test fire, it was time to ignite the area for real.
What followed was far from what the neighbor feared. The crew coaxed a slow lick of flames around the retention pond. It crept along, turning dried plant matter into black ash. Burn boss apprentice Lucas Slavicek said a light wind is an essential component of the process, but they sometimes have to ignite new lines of fire, too.
“You're letting the wind do the work,” he said. “And you're letting the wind control where the fire is going. But it helps to speed it up, versus having to go back and relight anywhere.”
In about an hour, the whole ordeal was about done, and the last patch burned up in a final burst.
Barker said it was a textbook perfect procedure.
“You kind of have to see it to get a sense of it,” he said. “It's a lot more boring than people imagine. They see flames and they see they see smoke, and they get real worried, but it's pretty subdued.”
It’s hard to overstate how ecologically significant burns like this one are. Barker is an ecologist and teaches plant identification classes at DePaul University. He still struggled to find the words to describe the complexity of this ecosystem and why it matters.
“I'm not capable of describing why these areas are valuable,” he said. “I can tell you that they are. It matters a lot to me. I feel like I'm actually saving some of these plant species. I'm actually making sure that they have a place.”
Prairie burns will take place across the state this spring. By the summer, many of these areas will be bursting with native flowers and grasses.
