Officials say one of the best ways to fight wildfires is with “pre-emptive fire…”
(Spring Creek Fire Update vxr :35)
That’s intentionally burning an area to remove fuel, ahead of where a wildfire’s going. And now drones are being used to do that, in western Colorado. The big Spring Creek Fire has been burning for a week and a half, in Garfield County, south of I-70, near the town of Parachute. It’s not growing much, but the terrain there is so rough, it’s been hard for firefighters to build containment lines. So now they’re using those drones to drop plastic balls filled with a chemical to start new fires, so they can burn brush away from the big blaze’s path in a controlled way. That fire’s scorched more than 29 hundred acres since the 24th of last month, about 4 ½ square miles. There are lines holding containment, around about a third of the Spring Creek Fire.