How to Prevent Forest Fires

Video Transcript

"When you're out in the wilderness it's really important to always try to be preventing forest fires as they can rage through forests and kill tons of trees, do damage to the wilderness areas as well as putting people in danger and homes in danger. So there's a few things that you always need to remember in terms of preventing forest fires. One is you need to if you're ever smoking in the wilderness to completely extinguish your cigarette butts and never just through them out or flick them out into areas of wilderness, especially if there's dry areas. Never be shooting fireworks or taking fireworks into the wilderness as they can catch things on fire. If you're ever parking your vehicle in the wilderness, try to avoid parking it anywhere near dry scrubs or brush as forest fires have been started that way. And then obviously when you're cooking, it's really, really important to protect the environment around where your camp stove is and be careful as you're hooking your fuel bottle to your stove just making sure not to spill any fuel around where your stove area is or your kitchen area is to get things caught on fire. In terms of campfires, they're great things to have as you're out camping, bring s'mores and tell stories around the campfire but we need to be really sure that we build a great campfire that protects the environment and is clear of all dry debris and scrub and pine needles and build a good fire ring and then also managing that fire when it's burning making sure that there's not embers going into the bushes nearby or anything being able to burn out of the fire. And then also we need to completely extinguish our fire by pouring water on it, letting it completely burn out, soaking the ground with water making sure you're crushing any ash or embers and just making sure there's no heat left in that fire before we leave the site just to protect from forest fires."