Abigail Margulis

amargulis@citizen-times.com

As any camper knows, it takes tinder, kindling and firewood to get a good fire going.

In the case of wildfires torching thousands of acres of forest across the Southeast, it’s been simpler – drought, drought and drought.

Western North Carolina is enduring its fifth-driest fall in 104 years and the worst since a much shorter lived drought in the spring of 1985, according to state records. The region has gone up to 80 days without significant rainfall, which is any amount greater than a quarter of an inch.

For firefighters, that has meant more – and drier – fuel on forest floors. And dry conditions have kept leaves on trees longer, giving fires longer life and flames more reason to reach higher.

"I've never seen a fire season like this before," said CW Smith, who has served in the U.S. Service Forest since 1969. "We normally expect some fires during fall, hunting season and people coming to see the leaves but nothing close to this. This is unheard of and unseen in this part of the country."

Flames have scarred about 7,000 acres around Rumbling Bald Mountain near Lake Lure as part of the Party Rock fire, which has been burning since Nov. 5.

“I’ve been in the fire service 39 years and it’s the largest wildland fire that I’ve ever worked,” Mills River Fire Chief Rick Livingston said.

Nearly 14,000 acres have burned near the Nantahala Outdoor Center, about 76 miles west from Asheville, since the end of October.

In total about 47,000 acres have gone up in flames in WNC as wildfires have quickly ignited and grown, threatening thousands of structures and causing complexities for how firefighters have been battling more than 20 wildfires.

Investigators say they believe most have been caused by people through careless behavior, but some might have been intentionally set. A lightning strike caused one.

Thursday WNC wildfire update: 50,000+ acres affected

Firefighters, forest service officials and residents say they've never witnessed fires like this in their lifetimes.

Forest Service officials and meteorologists say current conditions due to a historical drought and La Nina weather pattern are extreme for the mountain region in terms of the severity of wildfire risks, the size, intensity of flames, and the number of fires crews have been battling.

As flames have rapidly spread across the region including Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia, thousands of people have been forced from their homes and others have remained inside as smoke has made breathing difficult.

More than 2,000 firefighters have been involved in battling the flames, some of them from as far away as Alaska and Puerto Rico.

Typical season

On average in North Carolina, some 4,000 wildfires a year consume 115,000 acres on private and state land, according to the N.C. Forest Service. The peak occurred in 1941 when 728,947 acres burned.

The agency has yet to compile records for this year, and in general, calculating acres burned a year can be tough because it requires getting tallies from multiple federal, state and local agencies.

North Carolina’s most severe fire season normally occurs from late winter through late spring, said Lisa Jennings, public information officer for the U.S. Forest Service. There is also a shorter season in the fall after leaves have dropped.

Firefighters typically see an active spring season due to drier and windier days. Additionally, cold fronts passing through create more wind and limit rainfall. Relative humidity can also bottom out in the teens and single digits, contributing to rapid growth of wildfires.

The number of fires during April ticked upward in Buncombe County as crews responded to more than 100 reports of brush or debris fires that grew out of hand.

The total number of wildland fires from March 1 to April 11 represented a 92 percent increase over the same time period in 2015, according to data compiled by the Buncombe County Emergency Operations Center.

Buncombe officials also tallied a spike in wildland fires from 2006-08.

In those years a La Nina weather system created drier air, warmer temperatures and allowed less rainfall, said meteorologist Kevin Scasny, who works out of the Southern Area Coordination Center in Atlanta.

He also noted an increase in wildland fires across the Southeast in the late 1990s to 2011 due to a La Nina event.

On top of the Southeast entering a La Nina event, the region just had a three-year El Nino period, which provided a wetter season.

North Carolina had the fourth-wettest November on record in 2015, according to climate data dating back to 1985. December was also abnormally wet.

For the North Carolina mountains, 2015 was the second-wettest year on record, he added.

“Typically when you have these huge wetting periods through history then the next year can trend the other direction more significantly,” Scasny said.

For the region that has meant long periods without any rain, he added.

“When that happens soil dries out, stream flows drop off and there tends to be a lot of stress,” Scasny said. “The other problem is the warm temperatures we’ve had. We’re running four to six weeks behind.”

This has caused leaves to remain on trees and, as winds pick up blowing leaves to the ground, there is more fuel that can ignite. Due to the three-year wet period more vegetation is on trees, causing there to be more fuels for flames to burn.

"It's making this season really hard," Jennings said. "When we clear these fire lines the leaves fall back on them so it takes a lot of effort to constantly blow the leaves off."

Dried leaves that have remained on trees have also caused flames to burn up into the canopy of trees, she added.

At the Party Rock fire, firefighters have faced fires behaving unlike anything they’ve encountered, Livingston said.

"The unpredictable characteristics of this fire with extremely dry conditions and changing wind directions have made this fire similar to fire conditions in the western states, such as California," he said.

"A typical Western North Carolina wildland fire only burns the leaf litter and debris on the ground,” Livingston said. “With this fire in a lot of cases what we’ve seen is a total burn of the bushes, trees and everything in its path has been consumed by fire which is unusual in Western North Carolina."

WNC last faced a drought of this scale in 1965, according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which is a tool used by the state climate office.

It's the fifth-driest season in the past 104 years for Western North Carolina, according to Catherine Hibbard with the U.S. Forest Service.

Other large fires

In Buncombe County and nearby, firefighters most often compare the Party Rock fire, which has forced evacuations in the Lake Lure area, to the Ridgecrest fire, also referred to as the Weed Lane fire.

But that fire covered only 740 acres near Black Mountain, claimed one home and required a statewide response.

"Everything came together for the Ridgecrest fire including weather, fuels and typography," said Rob Townley with the N.C. Forest Service. "It’s the largest fire that we know of in Buncombe County dating back to the '70s."

Before then, 10,000 acres burned in summer 2007 in Linville Gorge, Jennings said.

"That’s different because that was primarily in the wilderness where these fires are in the urban and wild interface so it’s a different beast to handle," she said.

Forest Service officials say 2008-11 was also a severe fire year for North Carolina’s coastal plains of the state.

Firefighters spent weeks to months suppressing flames that collectively burned more than 125,000 acres and cost tens of millions of dollars, according to the N.C. Forest Service records.

These fires were similar to the current ones in WNC due to the drought and quick ignition that rapidly spread, Haines said.

The Pains Bay fire burned 45,000 acres in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge over the course of May and June in 2011.

After igniting from a lightning strike, flames danced around the coast until more than 6 inches of rain fell. Two other large fires included the Evans Road fire and Juniper Road fire.

The Juniper Road fire, on the Holly Shelter Game Land near the coast, grew to 31,140 acres over the course of about a month during the summer of 2011.

The Evans Road Fire, ignited by lightning on June 1, 2008, near Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina, grew quickly onto the refuge, eventually burning more than 41,500 acres, according to the N.C. Forest Service.

The fire was the state’s largest seen in 22 years and took just six months to fully suppress.

Fire outlook



The wildfires across WNC are expected to last at least through Thanksgiving, Jennings said.

"We are looking at a little chance of rain on Thanksgiving but then a better chance of rain toward the middle of December when we move out of this dry pattern," Jennings said.

But every system that has come near WNC weakens or moves too far north, said Josh Palmer, meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Greer, South Carolina, which tracks mountain weather.

"Any rainfall we would typically see is shunted north or dries up as it enters our area," he said.

At a recent press conference at the Party Rock fire, Gov. Pat McCrory said due to the current drought conditions wildfires could continue to rage through the winter.

“The predictions are we could have these challenges through March, with the predicted dry weather conditions,” McCrory said.