Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
By BRUCE HAMILTON
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Firefighters battled the latest in a spate of forest fires Tuesday afternoon as about 180 acres of timberland blazed in a stiff breeze across a rural area west of Hickory.
St. Tammany Fire Protection District 7 personnel were called out about 2 p.m. to the area south of Louisiana 36 and east of Horseshoe Island Road. By the time they arrived, about 50 acres were burning, firefighters said.
Chief Bruce Weathers said he didn’t know what started the blaze.
“It could have been anything,” he said.
The fire was contained within about two hours, but crews stayed busy corralling its eastern edge. No homes were threatened, Weathers said.
By late afternoon, a steady breeze out of the north sent a tremendous plume of dense brown smoke more than 10 miles across an otherwise cloudless sky, stretching over Slidell to Lake Pontchartrain.
About 15 firefighters from fire protection districts 7, 11 and 3 were assisted by personnel from the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The Forestry Department contributed five bulldozers as well as a helicopter and two pumper trucks, according to forester Epney Brasher.
“The wind today didn’t help,” she said, noting the weather helped spread the blaze across the property, owned by the Weyerhaeuser forest products company.
The blaze appeared to have been checked along Horseshoe Island Road, where flames were still visible at the ends of broken boughs among the smoking, blackened trunks.
In the past two months, a burn ban in St. Tammany Parish has been imposed, lifted and then imposed again two weeks ago after a rash of timber fires, possibly caused by out-of-control debris fires.