Wednesday, May 30, 2007
News Wildfire primer
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Wed, May 30, 2007 at 7:39 PM
The news out of Waycross a day or so ago was that the so-called Georgia Bay wildfire -- the source of the morning haze and lovely campfire odor in Atlanta over the holiday weekend -- was completely contained. What a relief that's over, right? Well, not quite. First off, the news was slightly inaccurate. The fire was only 85 percent contained, as the Georgia Forestry Commission subsequently corrected. But, more importantly, contained is not the same as controlled.
Last Thursday, I visited the amusingly named Joint Information Center -- a communications command post staffed by employees of various state agencies from Georgia and Florida -- in downtown Waycross, where I received a crash course in Wildfire 101.
For starters, I discovered that no one down there is talking about actually putting the fires out. That's because a very large portion of the fire is inside the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, which straddles the state line. Because fire is a natural part of a forest's life cycle, the standard policy is to let wilderness areas burn. Also, it would be very difficult to get firefighting equipment into such a soggy, remote wilderness area. Therefore, the focus has been on keeping the fire contained inside the Okefenokee and battling it only when it intrudes onto private land. I was told several times by different experts that the only thing that could put the fires out is a significant rainfall. When that might happen is anyone's guess.
And even then, the fire won't go completely out, I was told. Because the soil inside the Okefenokee has a high organic content, similar to compost, the fire can continue to smolder and spread below ground, causing new outbreaks when it hits unburned areas.
The night I was there, the fire had broken through the containment perimeter on the western edge of the refuge and, spurred by strong winds out of the east, had spread quickly into thousands of acres of pine plantations -- the main cash crop in that corner of Georgia. By the next morning, the fire had tripled in size.
So far, the fires -- three separate wildfires that have converged into one -- have burned more than a half-million acres of public and private land. But even that figure can be deceptive because a wildfire can burn through the same stretch of forest more than once. I drove through several places where the fire had stayed close to the ground, burning fallen pine needles and singeing the bottoms of the tree trunks, but leaving the branches untouched. Newly dried needles covered the charred ground, providing fuel for another potential fire in the same place were the wind to change direction.
So, while the fire is now much smaller than it was a few weeks ago, it isn't over yet and may not be for a while. To follow the fire's progress, check out these maps.
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