Brownwood area residents will see a huge plume of smoke Monday as the 10th Annual Central Texas Wildfire Academy wraps up with a controlled burn.
The academy is sponsored by the Lake Dam Volunteer Fire Department in conjunction with the Texas Forest Service and firefighters across the state are taking advantage of the chance to learn how to fight these types of fires, sometimes without the aid of water.
The academy will feature wildland firefighting training for both paid and volunteer departments, as well as courses focusing on safety and fire operations in the wildland urban interface.
According to Tammy Brown with the Lake Dam VFD, the prescribed burn will be held on section 11 of the Camp Bowie National Guard facility. This prescribed burn field exercise allows students to actually work on a fire, and to learn to work together with other fire departments. Officials said that the burn has multiple benefits, helping give firefighters a safer training experience along with ecological benefits of burning off fuels that might otherwise allow a wildfire in the future to become even harder to control which could cause more damage to property and possible loss of life, whether human or wildlife.
“The more training firefighters have, the safer they perform their tasks,” said Texas Forest Service Resource Specialist Mary Leathers, an instructor at the academy. “Our role at Texas Forest Service is to train the initial attack responders to perform firefighting tasks in as safe a manner as possible so everybody goes home at the end of the day.”
