WAYCROSS — Autumn rain swept parts of southeast Georgia like a wet broom. The mid-November showers brushed over Waycross, Blackshear and Douglas, filling ditches that had been dry for weeks.
But out in the tangled expanses of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, little rain fell — not enough, certainly, to extinguish persistent wildfires that have burned more than 309,000 acres in the past six months.
The flames have gone underground, fueling fears that the fires will smolder through the winter and resurface next spring for another season of heat and smoke. As many as 30,000 acres may be smoldering under topsoil and downed trees, fire officials estimate. In some places, the flames have burned 6 feet deep, producing an occasional smoky plume to remind residents that an unwanted visitor has not gone away.
Firefighter Shawn Pearson studied a rain gauge attached to a post somewhere in the middle of the refuge, 250 miles south of Atlanta. Around him lay fallen hardwoods, tinder for a hungry fire.
“Three-tenths of an inch,” said Pearson, sunglasses masking his disappointment. “That’s better than I expected, but it’s not enough rain.”
Not enough rain. It’s a mantra here, repeated in homes, cafes and just about anyplace where people look at cloudless skies and grimace.
Southeast Georgia is in a drought. Forecasters say the region averages slightly more than 50 inches of rain annually; since last November, it’s had about 38. Dry conditions may be even more critical in the refuge, where fires can alter weather patterns. Firefighters say the Okefenokee needs a 6- to 8-inch “rain with a name” — a tropical storm or hurricane — to permanently extinguish the blazes.
In the past few months, thousands of people from across the country have come to fight flames burning across the 403,000-acre refuge.
The federal government has spent more than $50 million to keep the fires from spreading from federal land to private property ringing the preserve. Those efforts have worked: No homes or businesses have been lost in the fires, and no one has died in them.
Still, the battle has wearied visitors and residents, said Pearson. An employee of the U.S. Forest Service, he’s stationed at the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. But he’s spent more of the past three months in Georgia than in the mountainous park close on the Canadian border.
“Anytime you have a fire in your backyard that lasts six months,” said Pearson, “it’s hard on folks.”
Hard on motorists, who through much of the warm months had to navigate smoky roadways. Hard on home and business owners, who watched flames creep toward their property. And hardest of all on people with respiratory problems, who had to stay indoors when smoke rolled across the region. Throughout the spring and summer, the National Weather Service issued numerous air-quality advisories for southeast Georgia.
Now, with the blazes underground, most firefighters have pulled out of the Waycross area to return to jobs elsewhere across the nation. A smaller staff will keep an uneasy eye on the wildlife refuge through the rest of the year.
“Come February or March, if you have a lot of fire still in the ground, it’s going to come out again,” Pearson predicted. “This fire is a sleeping giant.”
‘War zone’
It’s called the Honey Prairie Fire, named after its point of origin, a grassy plain in the heart of the refuge where lightning struck on April 28, touching off flames. But it’s not the only blaze that has bedeviled firefighters since then.
The original fire’s cinders became airborne, touching off flames across the refuge; firefighters beat back blazes on the swamp’s eastern and western edges, as well as in its center. The fires got so hot, so huge, that NASA satellites easily took digital images of them.
Fires, biologists note, have swept through the Okefenokee forever. They’re good for the region, a complex commingling of forest and swamp. Fires burn brush, creating better habitats for an array of land creatures — deer, bears, bobcats, a variety of snakes. Simultaneously, the refuge’s ubiquitous inhabitants — alligators — adjust to flame as well as flood — congregating in canals when fires pass over the land, then moving back into expanded wetlands when rains return.
The refuge will recover, said Brent McCarty, a chief ranger with the Georgia Forestry Commission, but it looks bad now. Vast swaths of land are torched. Burned trees stand like charred posts. Bulldozers have left tracks deep enough to hide a body.
“Parts of the swamp,” he said, “look like a war zone.”
On a recent morning, McCarty sat in a folding chair in a Forestry Commission building south of Waycross. It’s served as the firefighting command post since the fires began and is nearly a second home for McCarty, an Americus resident who’s spent months here.
When he learned that the previous night’s showers had skipped Homerville, hard on the swamp’s western border and close to a ring of peat fires, McCarty rolled his eyes.
Perhaps, joked McCarty, a grin on his face, the ministers in Homerville weren’t praying as hard as they should. “Maybe they aren’t paying the preachers enough over there?” he asked.
If weather forecasts are to be believed, the faithful should start praying now as colder temperatures approach.
The National Weather Service in Jacksonville doesn’t foresee a wet winter for the Okefenokee, said meteorologist Andrew Shashy.
The Okefenokee area historically averages about 10 inches of rain between December through February, he said. It won’t get that this time, he predicted.
“We’re looking at a drier-than-normal period,” Shashy said.
The Weather Service’s records also highlight the vagaries of summer weather, Shashy noted. Alma, 25 miles north of Waycross, recorded nearly 7 inches of rain in July.
At the same time, he said, heat generated by huge fires close to Waycross impeded rainfall in areas where it was needed most – in dry underbrush and peat bogs, on roadsides where sweaty firefighters stood between flames and homes.
Still burning
Longtime residents recall 1954-1955, when creeks across the refuge dried and hungry flames gobbled up immense tracts in the Okefenokee. As in this fight, thousands of firefighters waged war on foot, in the air and with bulldozers. In places supply trucks couldn’t reach, they relied on mules.
And, despite their efforts, firefighters needed help from above — rain, and lots of it — to declare that war at an end.
A big rain would be a blessing, said John Strickland, who runs a booth at an open-air flea market in Folkston, a Charlton County town a few miles north of the Florida state line. He recalled the weather this summer, when heavy smoke made driving difficult and breathing a hazard.
“It was terrible,” said Strickland, 60, a retired public safety officer. He suggested imploring the Almighty for help. “We need to talk about this with the man upstairs, I reckon.”
Henry Benefield, who saw a lot of the world while serving in the U.S. Army, said he’s never seen a fire like this. He works with his brother at an auto body shop just north of Folkston.
“At times, your eyes would burn,” said Benefield, 67, repairing a Toyota SUV that had struck a deer. He pointed a hammer at U.S. 1, where a steady stream of traffic passed.
“Some days,” he said, “it looked like night out there.”
Benefield eyed a crumpled piece of metal and gave it a tentative tap with his hammer. “You know what?” he asked. “There are a lot of fires still in that swamp.”
Fires are as integral to the swamp as the creatures that live in it, said Doug Nuss. He lingered over an evening cup of coffee at the Suwanee River Cafe in Fargo.
The Clinch County town, 35 miles west of Folkston, is near the swamp’s southwestern corner. This summer, hundreds of workers assembled there to attack flames as they burned between Fargo and Waycross.
“In June, it was pretty damn bad,” said Nuss, 62, a retired heavy equipment operator. “That was the worst of it.”
Now, said Nuss, with nearly all the firefighters gone and the skies clear again, some people may assume that the Honey Prairie fires are history.
“But when that fire is down 6 or 7 feet, and you only get 2 inches of rain, what will that do?” he asked. “It only gets a little wet.”
Nuss drained his coffee and nodded toward the refuge — quiet now, but for how long?
“ It’s still smoldering,” he said, “down below.”
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