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Fire and Aviation
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Fire Prevention
 Fire
prevention is a combination of understanding human behavior, communicating
information, educating, utilizing vegetation management techniques,
enforcing laws and regulations and basic common sense.
It is the job of fire prevention
personnel to work with the public to mitigate human caused fires.
Although you may have heard that our present forest health and fire
problems are the fault of the Smokey Bear campaign, nothing could
be further from the truth. Smokey's message of preventing human
caused fires is vital to maintaining social and natural integrity.
The Forest Service will never promote a concept that values human
carelessness. With people moving further and further into wildlands,
imagine what sort of catastrophies we would be dealing with if we
left all fires unchecked and did away with fire prevention! Although
fire is a natural phenomenon which we need to let back into the
forest system, our forests today are not in a natural state. If
we were to allow all fires to burn without intervention, we would
see millions of acres of forest go up in smoke. When allowed to
play it's role in the forest, resources can benefit. But only under
carefully controlled circumstances. It would not be normal for human
carelessness to take the place of managed care.
Prevention will always be a useful
tool in the fire management tool box. Prescribed burning, vegetation
management, fire suppression, fire detection, fire ecology, dispatching
centers- all these tools are needed to keep the fire management
program and the forests we serve integrated and in tac
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