SPECIAL REPORT: Forest fires burn 119,000 acres in 8 states
Forest fires that have burned more than 119,000 acres in eight states and have people from Asheville to Atlanta smelling smoke continue to rage throughout much of the Southeast.
More than 6,300 firefighters, some from as far as Washington state, are fighting fires that range from just of few acres to one in the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia that has consumed 27,000. That fire has burned more than a month and is 20 percent contained.
The Southern Coordination Center in Atlanta has been overseeing the response to the fires, coordinating efforts with a myriad of federal, state and local agencies. The center’s Dave Martin said he can’t be sure if the extent of the fires in the Southeast is unprecedented, but it’s been the biggest he can remember.
“It has been quite a while since we had had this number of large fires at this many locations,” he said. “The last time it was comparable was in 2001 and even then it wasn’t this busy.” -- Dave Martin, Southern Coordination Center, Atlanta
“The lower humidity and significant lack of precipitation for more than three months have made a perfect environment for fires to spread,” said center’s Adam Rondeau. “It makes them faster and stronger.”
Rondeau said there have been 50 major fires – fires that burn more than 100 acres -- in the Southeast in the past month. States affected are Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.
Martin said no lives have been lost. A number of minor injuries and minimum property damage have been reported. Several structures have been damaged including one residence, a house near Trenton, Ga.
However, the smoke, especially dense in the Tennessee Valley in cities like Knoxville and Chattanooga, has sent hundreds of people to emergency rooms and doctor’s offices with respiratory problems.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index, displayed on its AirNow.gov website, has in the past few weeks occasionally placed affected cities in the red “unhealthy” level, an indication that “everyone may begin to experience health effects.”
The Appalachian Trail is closed in parts of Georgia and North Carolina. Campfires have been banned in the 655,598-acre Cherokee National Forest that straddles the North Carolina-Tennessee line with stretches both north and south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Forest, which is also closed to burning.
The fires taken as a whole don't quite rival the mammoth fires of the west, but they are getting close. The Big Sur fire that burned south of San Francisco in late July burned 132,000 acres.
And, the drought and forest fires of the South are not nearly over; in fact, they could go on for months, say experts.
The Drought
“My concern is that I know they are stressed. They have to be. They are thirsty trees,” said Leo Collins, who owns Bluebird Christmas Tree Farm just north of Knoxville.
With Thanksgiving marking his biggest sales weekend of the year and just days away, Collins is talking about the trees he’ll be trying to sell. Collins, who was a botanist with the Tennessee Valley Authority for 36 years, said the long drought has him telling people to wait on buying.
By the numbers: Southeast forest fires fast facts, figures
“I know it’s bad advertising,” he said, “but a tree cut now might last six weeks where it would usually last eight weeks.”
Beef cattle aren’t getting their hay in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, and cattlemen are selling off some stock. The Tennessee Valley Authority has had to adjust its drawdown and power generation schedules because of the drought.
Tom Barnett of TVA's River Forecasting Center said it took a month less to reach the drawdown levels on some its reservoirs, but added that TVA has had to hold back on its hydroelectric power generation because it is flowing about half the water through them.
"We are trying to conserve for what's ahead," he said. "We're still in pretty good shape, much better for now than we were in 2007-08 (when another drought occurred)."
“The worst (of the drought) seems to be southeast Tennessee, northeast Georgia and the northern half of Alabama,” said David Hotz, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Morristown, Tenn. “That is where the drought seems to have originated, then spread.”
“There are places in northern Alabama with no rain for three months,” said Matthew Rosencrans, a meteorologist with the NWS’s Climate Prediction Center in Washington, D.C.
He explained that droughts are measured by the NWS on a scale that runs from D1 being the lightest to D5, each level an indicator of how often such a drought has occurred historically. He noted that some drought areas are at a D4 level, which would indicate an exceptional drought that only occurs once every 50 to 100 years.
Chattanooga has been at the center of the drought with a rainfall shortage of around 20 inches year-to-date. There the Flippers Bend fire on Signal Mountain has raged for a month and burned more than 1,000 acres. Approximately 20 homes were evacuated at the height of it. The fire is 95 percent contained.
Rosencrans said the drought is expected to continue.
“The forecast for December, January and February show the odds of below-normal precipitation are high for the Southeast,” he said, noting that states like Indiana and Ohio are likely to get plenty of rain but rainfall possibilities decrease rapidly heading south from there.
He explained that the area is in a La Nina, a weather pattern that usually follows the better known El Nino, and brings with it drier conditions. He said the Climate Prediction Center uses various “tools” to analyze weather conditions long-range around the world and “those tools point to dry conditions throughout the Southeast.
“There will be precipitation in the South,” he said. “Keep in mind that normal is about 11.9 inches, so it is not like we are going to have nothing. It will just be less than normal.”
Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, a professor in the Geography Department at the University of Tennessee, has made a career of studying both droughts and wildfires. He said conditions from a historic standpoint are not that bad.
“It is a severe drought, but we have had much more catastrophic droughts in the past,” he said. “This drought has only lasted about five months. Go back to 2007-08 and that lasted two years; that was a much worse drought than this one. Droughts like to beget droughts; once you are in one it is very hard to get out of one.”
He said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measures droughts on a scale that goes from 0 to -6 as most severe. He said the October value was -3.83. He compared that to a drought in 1986 that measured at -5.5 and was one of the worst the area has had.
Rosencrans said rain in the southeast at this time of year usually will come when a front comes down from the northwest to the Gulf of Mexico. The front will grab some moisture and head back up to the southeast to drop some rain, but there is no indication all of that will happen soon.
Coastal residents along the Gulf of Mexico likely breathed a sigh of relief when Hurricane Matthew left them alone and turned up the East Coast in early October; but, meteorologists said, the hurricane likely would have brought 5 to 6 inches of rain to the Southern Appalachia region had Matthew gone to the gulf, and it would have helped ease much of what the area is experiencing now.
Arson
“I almost hate to say that we are experiencing dry conditions,” said Nathan Waters, assistant forester with the Tennessee Division of Forestry. “That’s all an arsonist needs to hear.”
He made the remarks recently from a parking lot at the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area near La Follette, Tenn., where a dozen or more small arson fires had been sending up smoke over an eight-mile stretch off Stinking Creek Road.
The fires dotted the WMA like a string of Christmas lights, each about a half mile apart. “What else could they be but arson?” Waters said.
Seven arson suspects have been arrested in Tennessee in the past 20 days.
Jere Jeter, the state forester for Tennessee, said arson usually accounts for about 40 percent of the state’s fires, but this year that estimate is at 70 percent. Statistics on the state Division of Forestry website, burnsafetn.gov, show there have been 1,238 forest fires in Tennessee this year to date burning 36,865 acres, well above the annual average of 25,000. The fire number is much larger than the Southern Coordination Center’s total for the entire southeast mainly because the center counts only what it considers major fires.
“There are many reasons why we are seeing an increase in forest fires,” said UT’s Grissino-Mayer. “We have more arsonists. We have more people, burning more trash. More things are burning.”
He also indicated part of the problem is that occasionally forests need to burn.
“Our forests have gone far, far too long without fires,” he said. “Our forest here in the southeast are supposed to burn at times to clean them up. It’s natural. When we put a fire out, the fuel (trees and underbrush) builds up more and more, making the condition riper for bigger fires.”
Respiratory Problems
The University of Tennessee Medical Center’s Lifestar medical rescue helicopter headquarters in Knoxville scratched dozens of flights this past week because of concerns the copters couldn’t get patients to treatment facilities without exposing them and the pilots to dangerous respiratory conditions.
“We can deal with the decreased visibility by flying on instruments,” said Phyllis Walker, program director for Lifestar. “We can fly through clouds because they are usually harmless, but this is smoke. We have to ask how long we will be flying through it. Will it affect the patient? Will it affect the pilot?”
Hospitals have reported major upticks in the number of people coming to emergency rooms with respiratory problems. In a news release early this past week, Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said more than 200 people were treated for respiratory problems.
“I have never seen it this bad before in my 11 years here.” -- Dr. James Shamiyeh, pulmonary critical care doctor and medical director of the Heart Lung Vascular Institute at UT Medical Center.
“We are most concerned with people with asthma and COPB (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease); they are the ones to be more concerned about. A patient who is otherwise at a steady state, doing all right, the air quality can tip them over and they can have a flareup. And we are absolutely seeing that," said Shamiyeh.
He was urging patients to stay inside, press the button for recycled air in their vehicles before driving, and consider wearing a N-95 masks when outdoors.
The Tennessee Department of Health sent out a release Thursday warning residents of an increased risk for a range of health effects, particularly those with respiratory problems.
Dr. Julie Schildt, a specialist in emergency and critical care at the UT College of Veterinary Medicine, said the smoke is likely also affecting animals.
“It is reasonable to assume that dogs and cats are also at risk of toxic effects of smoke, especially if exposed for long periods of time,” she said.
The National Weather Service said the wind determines what urban area gets what smoke. Nashville residents are likely smelling fire from the Cumberland Plateau east of Cookeville. There were few days this past week when the wind played tennis with the smoke, sending the haze from Knoxville to Asheville, N.C., one day, then turning to blow from the southeast and sending it back the next.
The Fight
Marty Woods looked up at the Neddy Mountain fire near Newport, Tenn., and explains how fighting fires here is different than around Reno, Nev., where he lives. A fire on the mountain burned 1,116 acres this past week.
“We actually have hills there a lot like this,” Woods said. “But they are mainly pine forests. Here the trees are more diverse.”
Martin was called in to manage the operation at Neddy Mountain. He is one of thousands of firefighters brought to the area through various agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to help battle the blazes.
Centers have been set up at various airports around the region to process the firefighters coming in.
One at McGhee Tyson Airport in Alcoa that serves the Knoxville area dealt with 100 fighters coming from the West Coast on Tuesday.
“When they hit the ground, our guys let the Coordination Center know, and they get their resource orders, which have the incidents they’ll be assigned to,” said Catherine Koele, Eastern Area Incident Management Team spokeswoman. She is at McGhee Tyson helping manage.
Koele said most of those that came in Tuesday were headed to Georgia and North Carolina.
Two helicopters pulled buckets of water from French Broad River to dump water on the Neddy Mountain fire. A C-130 Hercules tanker, propeller-driven plane and two BAE, so-called “next generation” jets dumped slurry on and around that blaze. The planes were contracted by the U.S. Forest Service and based in Chattanooga. They can dump 2,000 gallons of slurry fire retardant.
The center’s Martin said 74 aircraft are being used to fight fires, including around 20 planes and jets, which include surveillance aircraft. Most are using Chattanooga as a base, but another was being set up in the Tri-Cities area and aircraft can also be brought form Lake City, Fla.
Some of those surveillance missions are being flown by the Civil Air Patrol’s Tennessee Wing with planes taking photos of where fires with location and size.
The aircraft that disperse water and slurry focus on fires that involve a danger to people and structures, like the one on Signal Mountain.
Most of the fires are being fought with bulldozers cutting break lines, back fire torches and leaf blowers. The torches are used to light fires that collide with the on-going fires and deny them fuel. Unless there are air drops, almost no water is used.
Fighting fires in remote, mountainous regions brings unusual challenges. Sometimes just getting to the fire can take an hour-long trip – Martin said that has been a big issue with the Rough Ridge fire. The terrain sometimes does not allow bulldozers which means making lines by hand with rakes.
“Hand-line construction is a booger,” said Robert Rhinehart, with the state Division of Forest, while at the Neddy Mountain fire.
Firefighters at a 50-acre fire off the Cherohala Skyway in the Cherokee National Forest near Tellico Plains, Tenn., had to be careful not to disturb the Trail of Tears, a historic site where Cherokee Indians made their forced march to Oklahoma.
The center’s Martin said a plan is in place to deal with the potential of a long haul.
“The planning process is important,” he said. “We try and stay a few days ahead on the resources needed as much as we can. The long nature of this particular season is making that even more important.
“With the holiday season and the work force just getting fatigued, we are really having to stay ahead on what we need.”
Cost
It will be a long time before the total cost of dealing with these fires is known.
Jeter, the Tennessee state forester, said he had at one point last week estimated it at more than $6 million in his state alone, but he emphasized that he really has no idea.
“It is still too early to tell,” he said. “The cost of the fixed-wing aircraft has been about $600,000 just for that.”
“Flying two Black Hawk helicopters is $76,000 for an eight-hour shift,” he said. “Plus we have all of the overtime for our own employees. So, it gets very expensive very quickly.”
The state has secured two Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grants concerning four of the fires. How much those grants are won’t be decided until the bill is handed in – something that could take months.
Danon Lucas, of FEMA Region IV External Affairs, listed six FEMA grants to help cover the cost of battling six fires in four states: Eagles Nest Fire, Kentucky; Flipper Bend Wildfire, Tennessee; Smith Mountain Complex Fire, Tennessee; Party Rock Fire, North Carolina; Pinnacle Mountain Fire, South Carolina; Tatum-Gulf Fire, Georgia.
In an emailed response to questions from the News Sentinel, Lucas said under the grants FEMA would reimburse 75 percent of the eligible firefighting costs. This does not include damage to private property.
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The reimbursement also is only for the cost of fighting the fires listed not for the overall fighting expense within a state or the Southeast.
Lucas said the grantee has nine months to submit its documentation to FEMA.
SEE ALSO:
By the numbers: Southeast forest fires fast facts, figures
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Trail of Tears threatened in Tellico Plains, TN wildfire
Fighting Tennessee wildfires costs millions
Smoke grounds more than 25 Lifestar flights in Tennessee
What does 'code red' air quality mean for Tennesseans?
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Smoke from Tennessee wildfires may harm animals, too
Fire information is available on burnsafetn.gov.