National Park Service employee Chris Mason looks over his shoulder at flames moving up Fort Hill Wednesday in the Vicksburg National Military Park.(C. Todd Sherman The Vicksburg Post)

[04/03/03] Within just a matter of hours Wednesday, National Park Service crews accomplished with fire in the Vicksburg National Military Park a task that would have taken days to do by conventional means.

But this is not the first time fire was used in the local park to clear heavily overgrown but difficult to maintain areas. Several years ago, a crew of NPS employees drawn from the local staff and from the Natchez Trace Parkway burned an area near Graveyard Road and Stockade Redan in the northeast part of the park. Later an area on the South Loop near Fort Garrott received a similar treatment.

The two areas that were burned Wednesday were the western slope of Fort Hill and another steep slope east of the Tennessee Circle on Confederate Avenue.

“We are getting rid of the fuel load,” explained Ranger Bob Irish as he watched the burn crew finish up at Fort Hill.

He said the fire accomplished in about 20 minutes what a crew with hand tools and string trimmers would need two or three days to do.

Irish said there are about four sites in the park they try to clear every year if there is a window of opportunity when the weather is right and when they can assemble a burn crew.

They work under the direction of burn boss Dan Mapstone from the Natchez Trace Parkway who is also a fire management officer with the park service.

Irish said the crew first set a test fire on the northwest corner of Fort Hill to see how the area would burn. They then burned a narrow strip at the top to halt the fire before setting the entire west slope afire from the bottom. The crew went through a similar process at the second burn site.

Irish said the south to southwest wind was helpful as it both pushed the fire along and also blew the smoke away from nearby homes.

The park includes the main battle lines for the Civil War Siege of Vicksburg in 1863. It was created as a permanent preserve by Congress in 1899 and is toured by nearly 1 million people each year.