Yes accidents do happen, but sometimes decisions have to be made.
I'm doing a job now that requires a lot of brush burning. I have firewalls built around all my brush piles but I do not burn on windy days.
We had some piles burning for several days and were smoldering, we had a norther blow in and a spark flew about 100 yards and started a dead tree on fire, we put it out with no problem but if left it could have been a lot worse.
I still have a lot to burn but had to stop because of dry windy conditions.
I check the forecast for several days ahead before I start burning again.
I don't know what the weather conditions we or were predicted that day but there are some common misconception with controlled burns.
One is, you can burn with no wind. You have to have wind to do a burn.
Two, your typical winter burn ban doesn't apply to controlled burns. If it's a real bad drought, yes, they will shut them down. A lot of counties in act a burn ban after the first freeze no matter the conditions.
It's always easy to arm chair quarterback it and saying was not a good idea after the fact.
Yes, embers can travel a long ways. We had embers from burns on the islands across the ICW make it to the mainland and start lighting pastures.
My story about the worse burn I was ever on that got out of control was completely out of our control. We had watched the weather all week and even for a couple hours that morning. Most of the time conditions get good until 10 or 11 am to actually start. Any ways, we started lighting the back burn. We always do a little bit and watch it just to be sure. That's your last chance to kill it if you don't like what is going on with the fire.
They take off on a strip that's probably a mile or so. We wanted a couple hundred feet of good black for the back burn.
All the sudden the winds shift and starts rolling part of the back burn in to a head fire. Not a big deal but we continue with a back burn to make sure we are ahead of it.
The killer was the humidity dropped big time and the wind started shifting. It started throwing embers several hundred feet and they were lighting. We started trying to put fires put that were outside the burn area but the embers were hitting our shirts and and burning holes.
None of that was predicted in the weather forecast.
We had to get fire department out to fight the fires around us while we attempted to controll the main burn, still.
These guys always say... if you haven't had a fire get away from you it's because you haven't burned enough.
We have people do dumb stuff here also though. Couple years ago people had fire get outside the burn area. The fire department put it out and no one monitored it after. The next day it relite and turned in to a large fire. That was 100% preventable and a huge no-no. When our fire got out we had a watch for 48hrs straight and we put fire guards around that area also.