Checking fuel moisture levels before a planned burn

Transcript

[Background Music]

[Text on screen] Before we undertake any planned burn, we must check the fuel moisture levels of the site

[Jade Dessent] So we go out and take our fuel moisture readings so that we have an idea of how much moisture is in our fuel so that when we burn we have an idea of the intensity that it’s going to burn at.

This basically has little teeth in there and it grinds all our leaves up into fine abstracts.

Now we’re going to select our type. So our type of fuel that we’re assessing so we go to type and that gives us our list and we’re doing brown eucalypt, so number four, perfect.

Right, now we screw this on and this compacts all the fuel down and then when I press sample, it sends electronic pulses through, and we do this tree times and then average it out to get our fuel moisture levels.

So, what we’re looking for is the number to fall within a prescription.

So, the prescription that we aim for is approximately in between 9 and 16% fuel moisture content.

[Text on screen] 9-16% Fuel Moisture Content. This is the ideal level for a planned burn to have maximum

[Jade Dessent] We aim for that because it’s the most ideal for a burn that will burn continuous but not at a high intensity so if we’re getting fuel moistures sort of below that 9%, we’ll have a very high intensity flame burn whereas if we have fuel moisture content above that 16 and way above that 16 the burn won’t actually burn as intense as we need them to remove that fuel.

[Text on screen] Below 9% means the intensity of the burn will be too high. Above 16% mean the intensity of the burn will be too low.

[Jade Dessent] So there’s other prescriptions that we look for; so not only do we do our fuel moisture content, but we also have to have parameters for our temperature, our relative humidity, our wind speed, and also sometimes our rainfall.

[Text on screen] We also assess temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, rainfall.

[Jade Dessent] So if those parameters are too high a temperature or too strong a wind or our fuel moisture content is too low, we won’t go ahead with the burn and we’ll just reschedule for times where those parameters are in check.

[Text on screen] We will only conduct a planned burn when all these conditions are right.