Flammable Grass Invades Alabama

Alabama has 60,000 acres of an invasive and intensely flammable weed: cogon grass. From the Washington Post this week:

“Don’t buy it, don’t dig it up, don’t plant it and just let somebody know if you see it,” said Laurie Reid, forest health specialist for the South Carolina Forestry Commission.

Nationwide, over 1 million acres are infested, “and experts say the Southeast’s drought makes the highly flammable intruder more threatening than ever.”

“I don’t think there’s anything more flammable in our environment’s landscape. I don’t know anything that burns as hot in our ecosystem as cogon grass,” said Jim Miller, a regional invasive plant scientist with the federal Agriculture Department.

A native of southeastern Asia, cogon grass was once used as packing material that arrived in Mobile, Ala., on ships in 1912. It chokes all competing vegetation _ it kills off pine seedlings in forests and overtakes grazing land where most animals won’t give it a second look because of its saw-toothed leaves.

You have to be impressed by a grass that will take over kudzu.

“It’s actually got to epidemic proportions,” said Ed Brown, a spokesman for the Mississippi Forestry Commission. “I call it a super weed. I have seen it grow on some of the driest sites that wouldn’t hardly grow anything and I’ve seen it growing down the edge of water. I’ve actually seen it taking over a patch of kudzu.”

[...]

Alabama has formed a cogon grass task force. Officials there hope to determine where in the state cogon grass can be wiped out _ and where it can only be contained.

“We are trying to figure out where we can kind of draw a line in south Alabama and say, ‘On this side of the line there’s not a lot we can do. But on the other side of the line we are going to do everything we can do eradicate it,’” said Forestry Management Division Director John Pirtle.

The second picture is a picture of a cogon grass fire near Auburn.