At least a half-dozen large wildfires continued to burn in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina and North Carolina on Thursday, leading to states of emergency and evacuations as firefighters deployed from other parts of the US to help bring the blazes under control.
In North Carolina, progress was being made in containing two of the largest wildfires burning in the mountains, but officials warned that fire danger remained from dry and windy conditions.
The news was worse in South Carolina, where two fires nearly doubled in size on Wednesday.
Hundreds of people have been asked to leave their homes in the two states. Wednesday’s dry weather led to several new fires in western North Carolina and prompted the state’s governor, Josh Stein, to declare a state of emergency in 34 western counties. At least nine fires were active in that part of the state, officials said.
The so-called Black Cove complex fire is currently the highest-priority wildfire in the US, according to an update from the North Carolina department of agriculture, with hundreds of firefighters working to battle the flames. States such as Oregon have already sent dozens of firefighters to assist with the efforts, deploying an additional 11 people on Wednesday.
Acres burned
US wildfires are measured in terms of acres. While the size of a wildfire doesn’t necessarily correlate to its destructive impact, acreage provides a way to understand a fire’s footprint and how quickly it has grown.
There are 2.47 acres in a hectare, and 640 acres in a square mile, but this can be hard to visualise. Here are some easy comparisons: one acre equates to roughly the size of an American football field. London’s Heathrow airport is about 3,000 acres. Manhattan covers roughly 14,600 acres, while Chicago is roughly 150,000 acres, and Los Angeles is roughly 320,000 acres.
Megafire
A megafire is defined by the National Interagency Fire Center as a wildfire that has burned more than 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares).
Containment level
A wildfire’s containment level indicates how much progress firefighters have made in controlling the fire. Containment is achieved by creating perimeters the fire can’t move across. This is done through methods such as putting fire retardants on the ground, digging trenches, or removing brush and other flammable fuels.
Containment is measured in terms of the percentage of the fire that has been surrounded by these control lines. A wildfire with a low containment level, such as 0% or 5%, is essentially burning out of control. A fire with a high level of containment, such as 90%, isn’t necessarily extinguished but rather has a large protective perimeter and a rate of growth that is under control.
Evacuation orders and warnings
Evacuation warnings and orders are issued by officials when a wildfire is causing imminent danger to people’s life and property. According to the California office of emergency services, an evacuation warning means that it's a good idea to leave an area or get ready to leave soon. An evacuation order means that you should leave the area immediately.
Red flag warning
A red flag warning is a type of forecast issued by the National Weather Service that indicates when weather conditions are likely to spark or spread wildfires. These conditions typically include dryness, low humidity, high winds and heat.
Prescribed burn
A prescribed burn, or a controlled burn, is a fire that is intentionally set under carefully managed conditions in order to improve the health of a landscape. Prescribed burns are carried out by trained experts such as members of the US Forest Service and Indigenous fire practitioners. Prescribed burns help remove flammable vegetation and reduce the risk of larger, more catastrophic blazes, among other benefits.
Prescribed burning was once a common tool among Native American tribes who used “good fire” to improve the land, but was limited for much of the last century by a US government approach based on fire suppression. In recent years, US land managers have returned to embracing the benefits of prescribed burns, and now conduct thousands across the country every year.
So far no one has been hurt in the fires, which have burned more than 20 sq miles in mostly rugged, remote forests and the popular state park that includes Table Rock Mountain. Only a few dozen structures have been damaged.
But the fires are burning in an area that was hit hard by Hurricane Helene in September. Fed by dry conditions, the millions of fallen trees from that storm have become a tinderbox, providing fuel for the wildfires and hindering firefighters’ use of logging roads and paths.
Forestry officials were worried after all those trees came down during Helene. It’s not just the fuel they create – they also hinder firefighters’ movement.
“It is nearly impossible to get through this stuff. We’ve got about five bulldozers, an excavator and saw crews to open this up and clean this,” Toby Cox, the firefighter in charge of the Table Rock fire, said about a fire break in a video briefing on Thursday morning.
Six months ago, Eric Young packed up his cats and left his home in Transylvania county, North Carolina, after floods and winds from Helene knocked out power, water and cell service. On Wednesday, the fires in nearby South Carolina forced them all out again.
A retired environmental educator who moved there from Long Island a few years ago, he lost his car and a heater when his driveway and crawl space were inundated in September.
Now he is at a friend’s home in Charlotte, trying to keep a sense of humor about the absurdity of floodwaters followed so soon by flames.
“I thought it was nirvana here – never get anything but severe thunderstorms, the weather is temperate, very nice,” he said. “I didn’t know I’d be gut-punched twice in six months.”
Wildfires are unusual in the Carolinas, but not unheard of. The Great Fire of 1898 burned about 4,700 sq miles (12,175 sq km) in the two states, an area roughly the size of Connecticut, said David Easterling, the director of the technical support unit at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Spring is typically when blazes happen, according to Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist.
This season the Blue Ridge Mountains are dry, having received only about two-thirds of the normal amount of rainfall in the last six months since Hurricane Helene. March has been full of sunny, dry, windy days.
There is rain in the forecast for the weekend, but it isn’t the kind of soaking downpour that can knock a fire out on its own, said the National Weather Service meteorologist Ashley Rehnberg in Greer, South Carolina.
“Hopefully that will at least calm things down briefly,” Rehnberg said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
