Few states suffered more from forest fires in the late 1800s than did Michigan. Catastrophic fires in 1871 and 1881 burned millions of acres and killed hundreds of people. In the great Thumb fire of 1881, numerous towns in the Saginaw Valley and the Thumb region were wiped off the map.

Fires in 1893 and 1894 raged across the Upper Peninsula and, in 1896, fire destroyed the town of Ontonagon in just a few hours leaving more than 2,000 people homeless.

To prevent such tragedies from happening again, in 1903, the Michigan Legislature enacted the state's first comprehensive forest fire law, Public Act 429, which empowered the state to suppress fires on non-state-owned lands and established a system that incorporated local levels of government for assistance.

The equipment used to fight
fires in the early days was very limited. Firefighters used shovels and water pails and traveled by horseback. The evolution of firefighting equipment happened largely by trail and error, and went from shovels and axes to backpack sprayers.

Because not much was known about wildfire behavior in those years, the Department of Conservation (today's Department of Natural Resources) established the Forest Fire Experiment Station at Roscommon in 1929.

Under the direction of the station's first chief, Gilbert Stewart, the staff began to study the way fire behaved, the effects of fire and how weather affected fire. They also began to explore the development of suppression tactics and equipment.

"In 1929, I don't know if they really had a clear vision of what they were getting into," said Kirk Bradley, who heads the FFES today.

In conjunction with the U.S. Forest Service, the first studies were conducted related to the science behind a wildfire.

"They studied the factors involved with a wildfire, including the three basic items needed for any fire (heat, oxygen and fuel), and once they understood fire behavior better, they could study ways to control it," Bradley said.

Basic firefighting training teaches that removal of one of these basic needs of fire will stop it. In the out-of-doors it would be nearly impossible to remove the oxygen from the atmosphere around a fire, and the amount of energy generated even by a small wildfire is enough to require an enormous amount of water or other coolant to remove the heat.

"That leaves the most common tactic still in use today," said Bradley. "You can remove or separate the unburned fuel from the fire by creating a barrier or fire break of some type."

A fire break is a line along which either the burnable vegetation or debris has been removed or protected from burning in some manner. The width of the fire break needed to stop a wildfire is relative to the intensity of the fire.

"But how a fire break is constructed on a wildfire depends on many factors," Bradley said. "You need to consider the topography, vegetation or fuel types, soil conditions and even the remoteness of the area."

According to Bradley, techniques for constructing fire breaks vary from crews using hand tools, to aircraft dropping water or chemicals, to heavy equipment with specialized implements.

In the 1930s, after studying the topography and soil conditions in most of the fire prone areas of Michigan, station personnel first modified the horse-drawn farm plows that had been used to cut fire breaks by replacing fragile wooden parts with steel.

"The old wooden plows couldn't handle the harsher, untilled soils in the woods, so blacksmiths at the FFES constructed the first Michigan fire line plow," Bradley said. "Of course with the reinforcement came increased weight and they became difficult for the horses and the person walking behind the plow to handle."

By the 1940s, with the development of crawler tractors, the horses were replaced and the station designers had created a double bottom sulky plow that could be pulled by the tractor.

The Michigan fire line plow design has since evolved to be an integral part of modern crawler tractors and is now considered one of the best fire plows in the world.

"A comparison to manpower requirements can demonstrate the effectiveness of the Michigan fire line plow," said DNR Fire Supervisor Scott Heather.

According to the USFS, a 20-person crew with hand tools can produce a fire break one to three feet wide at rate of 0.1 to 0.3 miles per hour.

But in similar conditions, Heather said today's Michigan plow can produce a fire break six to eight feet wide in one pass at a speed of 1.5 to 3 miles per hour.

"This is approximately 10 times faster and three times wider than with hand tools," said Heather. "When you consider that a running crown fire has a typical spread rate of about two miles per hour, this extra capability can be the difference between a smaller fire and a very large one."

The speed and effectiveness of a crawler tractor equipped with a Michigan fire line plow has made it the primary wildfire suppression tool for a majority of the wildfires in Michigan.

Well-known throughout the eastern U.S., the innovations and improvements made to the Michigan plow have been closely studied by many other states.

"Michigan has shared its plow design with other states and some agencies have incorporated parts of the design into their suppression systems to help meet the needs of their region," Heather said.

Although the use of the Michigan fire line plow and other specialized equipment being developed by the FFES has helped Michigan's wildland firefighters become more effective in suppressing wildfires, the best wildfire is still the one that never started.

Remember, as Smokey says, "Only you can prevent wildfires."