NY Wildfire and Incident Management Academy participants learn how to fight fires

New York Wildfire and Incident Management Academy participants spent an eventful Wednesday learning about firefighting.

“The reason we're here today is to teach firefighters how to fight fires and how to use fire as a firefighting agent,” said Bill Fonda of the New York Wildlife and Incident Management Academy.

He said the second reason is “to preserve the habitat we have here for grassland birds and other species that rely on grasslands.”

Landscape ecologist Nolan Calamia works for the Sisters of Saint Joseph in Brentwood.

“Traditionally we had a lot of lawn, it's kind of an old Long Island property, but we relandscaped a lot of that lawn with native grasslands and meadows and to properly care for those meadows, I started doing controlled burns on them,” he said.

Calamia said to do it safely and properly, he and others took NYWIMA training.

Academy classes last until Friday.