Nature can heal, but slowly
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
A month after the worst
brush fire in decades, forestland at the Queen’s River Preserve is already
starting to recover.
A pink lady slipper grows in the preserve. (Tim Mooney/TNC)
Tim Mooney, communications and marketing
manager for the Rhode Island chapter of The Nature Conservancy, which owns the
land, said he has visited the site of April’s fire a half-dozen times over the
last month, and noticed plant life coming back almost right away.
“Grasses started popping up a week after
the fire, coming up the ash line,” Mooney said. “On Friday — four weeks after
the fire — pink lady’s slippers are up, blackberries are starting to re-sprout,
ferns are coming back up. There’s already more green out there now than there
was a month ago.”
The newly cleared areas of the preserve
have shown to be beneficial for a different kind of wildlife, as well. The
aftermath of the fire has given the forest a chance to reset, said Mooney,
which has created a habitat for songbirds.
The preserve, which is typically open to
the public year-round, was closed until the beginning of May to clean up fire
containment efforts.
Last month’s brush fire burned 238 acres, 45 of which belonged to The Nature Conservancy as part of the Queen’s River Preserve. The rest were state-managed lands and private property. State investigators told WPRI last month they suspected an abandoned campsite on the preserve was the cause of the blaze.
The fire came within 100 feet of nearby residential homes, but there were no reported injuries or fatalities. Some residents were asked to briefly evacuate.
It was the worst brush fire in Rhode Island
in more than eight decades. In May 1942, the state saw around 900 acres burned
across four days in 15 separate wildfires thanks to low people power because of
World War II, according to the New England Historical Society.
Mooney said The Nature Conservancy has not
committed to any forest management plan in response to the fire on the
preserve, preferring to wait and see what long-term impacts the blaze will have
on plants and wildlife.
“Large-scale wildfires have not been part
of the Rhode Island landscape in decades,” he said. “It’s not completely
foreign, but we may allow the forest to recover on its own to adapt and
change.”
The Nature Conservancy is documenting the
extent of the brush fire via aerial photography, a project expected to be
completed in the near future, but the known path of the fire shows several
unconventional fire-prevention strategies.
“As you look at the path of the fire, it
appears that young, green hayfields and a large swamp — on the preserve and off
— provided natural defenses that kept the fire from spreading and shielded
several homes and other buildings,” Mooney said.
Lawmakers are already responding to the
fire, expressing concern over the state’s forest management practices. Last
week, the House’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee heard a
resolution (H6342) introduced by Rep.
Megan Cotter, D-Exeter, to create a study commission on wildfire prevention and
forest management.
“Many of those acres were in my district,
about three minutes from my home,” Cotter told the committee. “You could see it
in our backyard.”
“Climate change and the dryness of the year
make Rhode Island like a tinderbox,” Rep. David Bennett, D-Warwick, said during
a hearing on the bill. “We don’t take care of the forest, we don’t take care of
the undergrowth, we don’t even maintain our fire roads.”
Mooney and The Nature Conservancy dispute
that forest management practices were the chief cause of the fire, instead
pointing toward dry conditions in the forest.
“I don’t think we have the science to say
that at this point,” he said. “We’re more focused on climate change playing out
in real-time here.”
It’s not the first time state wildfires
have raised the issue of climate change. ecoRI News reported in August
that 2022 was one of the driest summers on record thanks to the weather swings
from extreme rain events to extreme drought the state experienced last year.
The state Department of Environmental
Management banned outdoor fires at its campgrounds in late August, citing the
dangerous risk of wildfires that season. Rhode Island recorded more than 80
brush fires last year.
Traditionally, the “busy” season for
wildfires in Rhode Island is March to May, when winter snow finally melts and
reveals debris on the ground before trees grow their spring leaves. Early
spring sun shines through the forest, drying out the surface layer of the
forest, making it more flammable. The risk of fire decreases as the leaves grow
in, the typical humidity of the New England summer rises, and rains moisten the
ground.
But New England, unlike western states such
as California, has not been traditionally seen as a hotbed of wildfire. DEM’s
program is under-resourced and under-staffed. A Burrillville wildfire last year
had to be spotted from a Massachusetts fire tower — the ones in Rhode Island
are no longer staffed.
Cotter’s resolution was held for further
study.