Issue 7

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

You’re driving before dawn on a winter day. It’s bad enough to be up so early in the cold, trying to wake up. You smelled smoke when you started out; you know they’ve been burning in the national forest to reduce fuels. You start to notice some shreds of fog: before you know it, you’re inside a thick dirty cloud and can’t see a foot in front of you. The drivers of the cars ahead and behind you are equally blind, all of you driving on in a panicked faith that no one will stop too soon.

This may seem dramatic, but it happens fairly often in the South during the winter fire season, usually for only a few minutes, but sometimes for much longer. In southern Mississippi in 2000, fog and smoke from a small wildfire combined to form a “superfog” on Interstate 10 in the hours just before dawn. Visibility went down to almost zero; the inevitable pileup resulted in 5 fatalities and 24 injuries. Though the smoke in this case came from a wildfire, it could just as easily come from a fire set to improve forest health.

In the South, natural resource managers do most of their prescribed burning in the first 3 months of the year, a time when the needs of human populations and forest ecologies can come into visible—and sometimes deadly—conflict. To reduce the impact of prescribed burns on nearby human populations, SRS scientists have entered the realm of night smoke, haze—and superfog. (...continued...)