After a 24-hour shift, Evanston firefighter Zach Carascano hangs up his helmet and grabs a rake, torch or whatever else the North Shore Channel bank may demand that day.
Over the last three years, this has been his routine — balancing his work fighting fires as a member of Evanston Fire Department Station 3 with clearing invasive plant species like buckthorn and honeysuckle from a roughly one-and-a-half-acre plot on the banks of the North Shore Channel, adjacent to the station.
When he first arrived, the land was almost entirely overrun.
“There were two plants growing here. It was buckthorn and honeysuckle, and that was it. And it was a mudslide under there,” he said…