FORKSTON, Pa. (AP) - For 13 years, Charlie Womer climbed to the top of Mehoopany fire lookout tower in Wyoming County to watch over miles of countryside.
The tower went up in 1923. Womer was born four years later.
Fire season is changing for Womer and the tower he watched from.
Last year was his last season watching for forest fires, and the tower is scheduled to be replaced.
“I enjoyed it,” he said. “I miss going up the tower and looking around.”
Last year, at 88 years old, Womer was still climbing the steep flights of metal stairs to the top of the Mehoopany fire tower, crawling through the hatch and watching the landscape.
It’s a rare position among the hundreds of men and women who care for the state’s natural resources. About ten towers are actively staffed at a time, and in many cases, the person watching on a particular day is a DCNR employee who normally does other work but is assigned to work in the tower that day.
Womer began the job after Jack Zborovian, a DCNR fire supervisor, asked fire chiefs in the area if they knew people who might be interested in the job. Womer, the former president of the Noxen Volunteer Fire Company, applied in Scranton for the position, which pays $13-$18 per hour, with all the scenic views you want.
From his post in a small cabin 60 feet above the ground, Womer could see puffy clouds from the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear power plant, windmills in Bear Creek 25 miles away, and into Broome County, New York.
He worked during spring, when Pennsylvania sees more than 80 percent of its wildfires. Each day, he spent eight hours in the tower when fire danger was highest, from late morning until the evening. He saw farmers getting ready for planting and the remnants of winter snow making shiny white lines on the runs of Montage Mountain ski resort. He once pinpointed the location of a fire by explaining what ski run it was on.
He was there as windmills at the Mehoopany Wind Farm went up. When they were complete, he heard the steady whoosh of the windmills spinning all around him.
About half the time Womer was up in the tower, he was monitoring an active fire, or sometimes more than one. The rest of the time was spent watching for flames.
Couldn’t that get boring?
“It didn’t with me,” he said. He was interested in the wildlife around his perch - deer, turkey, bear, everything - when fires weren’t threatening.
His observations went in a journal that kept a record of the fires he spotted. As he watched over the brown and green colors of the Pennsylvania countryside, he looked for the color of smoke.
When he saw it, he watched it for a moment. If it tapered off, it may be just a brush fire. If it got larger, it was probably a forest fire.
He turned to a circular map in the middle of the tower, looked out the windows and spun a metal rod until a point on the end lined up with the smoke.
He noted the direction from the tower to the smoke, and using measurements on the rod, an idea of how far away the fire was.
He might call another fire tower to see if the watcher there saw smoke in the same area. With two watchers looking at the same plume of smoke, a line from both of them should cross at the source of the fire.
If the smoke was far away and beyond the sight of another tower, Womer might pull out a regional or state map for more information, and call in the fire.
A local fire department is usually the first to check out the scene, and if it can handle the blaze alone, it extinguishes the fire and prepares for the next one. Sometimes they need aid. In that case, the firefighters start working to fight the fire, buying time for a DCNR crew to join them.
If it gets even larger, DCNR supervisor Jack Zborovian has a plan for calling in more resources, such as airplanes, bulldozers or more help from elsewhere in the state.
Most of the wilderness fires in the state are smaller than 10 acres. In 2015, for example, firefighters extinguished about 750 fires that were smaller than 10 acres, about 60 between 10 and 99 acres, and four that were larger than 100 acres. Almost all the forest fires in Pennsylvania are caused by humans, who start fires by burning debris, sending sparks flying from power equipment, deliberately burning the forest and in other ways.
Fire watchers are still an important part of wildland firefighting, said DCNR officials.
Most forest fires are called in by people via cellphone, but some parts of the state don’t have cell coverage or many people living there or passing through. The state also uses aircraft to detect fires, but aircraft costs have gone up quite a bit in the past 15 years, Kern said. Towers fill in some of that coverage.
“I think we realized that you need multiple ways to detect fires and towers are just kind of part of the puzzle,” he said.
Towers overlook areas with few roads and people, where someone on the ground would be unlikely to notice a fire until it has grown to become extremely large, Zborovian said.
“The towerman is basically our insurance policy to make sure that we get a first look at an early stage of a fire in that location,” he said.
Womer has stopped fighting wildfires, and now he’s stopped watching them. But he’s still involved in fire work, even as he turns 90 years old in May. He now helps with traffic control in support of firefighters working at a job he loves.
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Smokey Bear was right.
Humans are a major cause of wildfires. In Pennsylvania, people cause 98 percent of wildfires.
A major cause of the fires in our state is debris burning. Fires frequently start in someone’s backyard, travel through dead grass and weeds, and into bordering woodlands. The United States Forest Service has advice for preventing wildfires:
Debris burning
. Check the conditions. Don’t burn when it’s windy or vegetation is too dry.
.Know local regulations. In some areas, a permit is required.
. Know what’s allowed. Unless prohibited by local ordinances, you can burn dry, natural vegetation grown on the property. Household trash, plastic and tires aren’t good to burn and burning them may be illegal in some places.
. Choose a proper site. The burn site should be away from powerlines, overhanging limbs, buildings, vehicles, and equipment. You need at least three times the height of the pile of vertical clearance. The site should be surrounded by gravel or dirt for at least 10 feet in all directions. Keep the surroundings watered down and have a shovel nearby during the burn.
. Prepare the pile. Keep burn piles small and manageable. Instead of burning everything at once, add additional debris as the fire burns down.
. Use a proper burn barrel. If using a burn barrel, make sure it’s made entirely of metal, properly equipped with at least three screen air vents along the sides and a metal screen on the top and in good condition.
. Finish the job. Always stay with the fire until it is completely out. Drown the fire with water, turn over the ashes with a shovel and drown it again. Repeat several times.
. Follow up. Check the burn area regularly over the next several days and up to several weeks following the burn, especially if the weather is warm, dry, and windy.
Campfire safety
. Be smart when picking a campfire spot. Don’t build a campfire if campground or event rules prohibit it. Sometimes digging of pits may be prohibited due to archaeological or other concerns. Don’t build a fire if conditions are windy or vegetation is dry. Also, look for an existing fire ring or pit.
. If there’s not an existing fire ring, choose a site at least 15 feet from tent walls, shrubs, trees or other flammable objects. Beware of low-hanging branches. Pick an open, level location away from heavy fuels such as logs, brush or decaying leaves, and choose a spot that is protected from wind gusts.
. Prepare a proper pit. Clear a 10-foot diameter area around the site, and remove any grass, twigs, leaves and firewood. Dig a pit in the dirt, about a foot deep, and surround the pit with rocks.
. Don’t cut whole trees or branches, dead or alive. Live materials won’t burn and dead standing trees - called “snags” - are often homes for birds and other wildlife.
. When burning, keep the fire small and under control. Don’t burn dangerous things like aerosol cans, pressurized containers, glass or aluminum cans. Never leave the campfire unattended.
. Extinguish the fire. Allow the wood to burn completely to ash, if possible. To extinguish, pour lots of water on the fire to drown all the embers, not just the red ones. Pour until the hissing sound from hot embers stops. If you don’t have water, stir dirt or sand into the embers with a shovel to bury the fire. With the shovel, scrape any remaining sticks and logs to remove any embers. Make sure that no embers are exposed and still smoldering. Continue adding water, dirt or sand and stirring with a shovel until all material is cool. If it’s too hot to touch, it’s too hot to leave.
For more information on fire safety, visit smokeybear.com.
Sidebar2
Wildfires in Northeast Pennsylvania
State forests in Pennsylvania are divided into 20 districts. District 11, the Pinchot district, includes about 45,000 acres in Luzerne, Lackawanna, Wyoming, Susquehanna and Wayne counties.
It’s one of the busier forest districts in the state for fighting wildfires. The district has accounted for an outsize percentage of acres burned in the state the past decade, according to data at dcnr.state.pa.us.
Most of the wilderness fires in the state are relatively small. Since 2007, the average size of a wildfire has ranged from 2.1 acres in 2007 to 11.1 acres in 2008. In 2015, the average size was 5.1 acres. There are some larger fires, however. Just two forest fires in 2015 burned a combined 1,522 acres, far more than hundreds of smaller fires.
Percentage of total acreage burned by wildfires in Pennsylvania that was within in District 11:
2015: 12.4
2014: 18.7
2013: 15.3
2012: 12.2
2011: 22.6
2010: 41.2
2009: 43.5
2008: 3.4
2007: 10.6
Fire season
In Pennsylvania, spring brings fire.
Longer, warmer days with the sun shining through a bare forest leads to a lot of dry fuel ready to burn.
Another ingredient needed for wildfires is more common in the spring. Fire needs an ignition source, and in Pennsylvania, it often comes from people burning debris.
March, April and May account for 83 percent of the state’s fires. April is the busiest month, when 42 percent of the state’s wildfires burn. October and November bring another spike, and those months account for 9 percent of the state’s wildfires.
Really anytime that there is no snow and the vegetation is not green can be a high risk for fires, Kern said.
Sidebar3
The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has a list of towers throughout the state it wants to replace.
Of those towers, 16 are planned for replacement in the near future, said Mike Kern, chief of the Division of Forest Fire Protection for DCNR. The towers are too old and too costly to repair to meet current construction standards, so the department is replacing them.
In Luzerne County, a tower in Buck Township and another in Jenkins Township are scheduled for replacement. Both are decades old. The Buck Township tower was built in 1921 and the Jenkins Township tower was built in 1959. The tower Womer manned in Forkston Township, Wyoming County, is also scheduled for replacement. All three towers are staffed during the fire season, which runs from around late March through early May in Pennsylvania.
Three other towers in Luzerne County aren’t regularly staffed during the fire season and aren’t scheduled for replacement now.
The cost to construct 16 new towers is about $4 million, Kern said. After that, the department will look for more funding to replace more, and may decide that some others aren’t worth keeping.
Most replacements will be 80 or 100 feet tall, and made of mostly aluminum and galvanized steel to reduce the need for painting. Instead of a trapdoor entrance, such as the one at the current Mehoopany site, towers will have a catwalk around the outside and a regular door between the catwalk and the cabin.
“Our ultimate goal was to either have good towers that we could use or take them down and then not have to maintain the ones we don’t use,” Kern said.
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Information from: The Citizens’ Voice, https://www.citizensvoice.com
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