A big mistake people make when burning is too much water and not enough shovel. The shovel sedates the flame, the water finishes the job and cools the coals.
I've burned hundreds of piles, and I've never once had one get away from me. Not once.
I try to avoid it now, though. When something really dangerous has to be burned, I can be persuaded, but aside from that, I'm not going to do it. The biggest one I've ever burned was over a half acre of full grown timber all in one pile, twigs, leaves and all; in the middle of the woods, in the clearing it was cut from.
The fire department called me in to burn it. When I got there, I wasn't a happy camper, to say the least. It was hot as hell out, and the wood had been there for a few weeks. The fire department couldn't leave a truck if they weren't doing it themselves, and everyone refused to haul it off. As near as I can tell, they had lost their damn minds.
I had to do it. Someone else would have burned the whole damn forest down. I hauled more burning logs that night with my DII than I could count, keeping the pile dense and reducing it in size.
When I was done, there was a trench all the way round that damn thing where I was slowly smothering the area with dirt and clay as I closed the circle.
Not one damn drop of water was available. I made those fire buggers sign a form saying it was their ass, not mine, if something went wrong.
"Oh, we will come right back out."
"Dudes, if this fire leaps, you ain't gonna have the time."
I called in some help to manage the thing, but we got it burned. That fucking sucked. That's when I decided I wasn't going to respond to calls anymore. They were just getting stupid.
It takes a real jackass to make a pile of wood that big and then run off with the equipment that put it there. It takes a double-real jackass to call someone in to burn it because the weather conditions are making it a fire hazard...:banghead:
The conditions around that fire were horrible... And yet, somehow wonderful as well.
A little piece of hell broken off for a day. That should have been hauled off.
Cheers,
Kennith