What it burns
The flames follow dry grass, litter and low shrubs and are usually only a few feet high. Surface fires can still burn a house, since they reach fences, decks, woodpiles and siding, and they throw embers. They are easier to fight than a crown fire, and crews can attack them directly in many cases.
What decides whether a surface fire stays low is whether it finds anything that lets it climb.
Why it matters in Northern Nevada
Cheatgrass and sagebrush flats burn quickly in a dry, windy summer, and many of the local fires recorded by the National Interagency Fire Center started or spread as surface fires in grass and brush. Dead needles under a pine and long grass under an old orchard are fuel too. Trimming the lower limbs of a tree (see ladder fuels and limbing up) stops a fire that stays on the ground from climbing the tree.
Keep the area right against the house clean. Zone 0 is 0 to 5 feet in the Living With Fire guide.
What an arborist does about it
The work that keeps a fire on the ground is brush clearing, mowing, mastication and limbing up, plus removing dead plant material and hauling slash. Battle Born does these with its own equipment. The arborist marks the limbs and plants to go before work starts. See brush mowing and defensible space and fire mitigation.
The simplest part of the job is often the most useful: rake and remove needles and leaf litter from the first 5 feet, keep grass short, and keep woodpiles away from the house. The Living With Fire guide lays out the details by zone.
Sources
- University of Nevada, Reno Extension: Living With Fire (SP-23-07) (read October 17, 2026)
- National Interagency Fire Center, fire perimeter history (read October 17, 2026)