FOLKSTON — Last Sunday, with smoke creeping under doorways and seeping through windows, the faithful at Folkston United Methodist Church knelt at the altar and prayed — for the hundreds of firefighters laboring in dirt and heat, for fresh air, and for rain. Please, God, a lot of rain.
But those prayers, so far, haven’t produced the sort of downpour that could kill the fires of 2011. The Okefenokee is still burning.
“This is bad, really bad,” said Patricia Williams, walking to her job at McDonald’s last week as vehicles with their headlights on drove through a persistent morning haze. “This smoke is a headache.”
An ache that’s getting stronger by the day. Despite the efforts of more than a thousand firefighters — more are on the way — wildfires in and near the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge have burned more than 320,000 acres in the past two months. Most of the destruction is blamed on three major fires, but smaller blazes also have flared up in the flat, dry forests of southeast Georgia.
The skies are so hazy with smoke that officials have banned flights over segments of the federal wildlife refuge, a 402,000-acre swampland 250 miles south of Atlanta. Signs warn motorists to drive carefully along smoky roadways.
“I don’t believe we’ll be able to control or corral this fire until we get a substantial rain,” said Eric Mosley, a spokesman for the Georgia Forestry Commission.
Fire anticipated
In their struggle against the fires, federal, state and local officials regularly assess ground lost, ground gained.
Naturalists point out that fires are good for the ecology. Wildfires burn away ground cover, allowing trees to mature. That helps to create better habitats for wildlife. Blazes are as basic to the natural order as rain and sun.
“It’s only when the fires approach private property that they can become a problem,” said Mark Wise, a senior forester with the forestry commission.
Officials predicted just such a problem earlier this year when they noticed that water levels in the swamps were lower than those recorded in 2007. Fires that year burned nearly 600,000 acres in the region.
In late winter, state and local fire specialists visited every home near the refuge and told residents to clear their yards of anything that would burn. Wildfires, they warned, were imminent.
The first and largest fire erupted in late April when lightning ignited woodland at Honey Prairie near Fargo in the refuge’s southwest corner. Since then, it has consumed about 280,000 acres and is heading north and northwest.
On May 14, another lightning strike started a fire at Race Pond, midway between Waycross and Folkston on the refuge’s eastern boundary. Occasionally crossing U.S. 1, that fire has burned nearly 25,000 acres.
Sparks from a motor grader’s blade are blamed for the blaze that started June 15, 10 miles west of Waycross. Firefighters are calling that fire Sweat Farm Again because it started near Sweat Farm Road, site of another major blaze in 2007. It has consumed nearly 20,000 acres and forced more than 100 people to evacuate their homes.
In addition to those large fires are dozens of smaller flare-ups.
Fighting the blazes in the refuge, which is closed until further notice, has required help from all corners.
State forestry officials and firefighters from across Georgia are in southeastern Georgia. Firefighters from Montana, driving trucks from Texas, are burning some tracts to keep fires from jumping over roads. A fire specialist from Tennessee is overseeing the work of Georgia prison inmates using bulldozers to cut fire roads through forests. Firefighters from Maine are working 10- and 12-hour days “mopping up” small blazes left in the wake of larger fires. Federal officials are monitoring heat and smoke plumes that can extend 9 miles into the sky.
Everyone is laboring under harsh conditions, said Forrest Sumner, who retired as a state district ranger last year but agreed to help out with this year’s blazes.
“You can get tired just standing in the heat,” said Sumner, of Thomasville. “Everything out here will either sting you, bite you or itch you.”
‘I pray’
Thursday dawned just as murky as the day before, the sun an orange smudge in a gray sky. Guy Gowan got in his truck, flipped on the headlights and drove to the Okefenokee Restaurant. He lingered over coffee and wondered out loud when the fires of 2011 will end.
“Good Lord, we’ve had how many in the last 10 years?” asked Gowan, 56, a lifetime Charlton County resident. “We’re used to them, but we don’t like them.”
Eleanor Chesser is familiar with fires, too. For 25 years she’s lived close to the edge of the swamp’s eastern boundary.
Every morning, said Chesser, she looks out her back door. If she can see the barn, 100 yards away, she relaxes; no smoke means winds are pushing fire away from her home. If the barn is obscured?
“I pray,” said Chesser, 70.
‘Hard’ fire
Libby Lindsey and Aaron Currier held water hoses and walked slowly along a dirt road in the Okefenokee. Employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they were “mopping up” scorched woodland that crews burned the day before to stop fires from getting too close to U.S. 1.
Maine residents, they wore fireproof clothing, hard hats and leather boots. The temperature hovered at 100 degrees.
Lindsey, 23, had never been to Georgia until she got the call to head south.
“It’s nice here,” she said, then paused. “Well, it’s really hot right now.”
“I’m happy to be here,” said Currier, 19, a college student studying natural resource management. “It’d be nice to see things in a little bit better shape than they’re in right now, though.”
A few miles away, Jared Judd stopped his truck at a “pumpkin,” an orange inflatable pool that holds hundreds of gallons of water. He shoved a nozzle inside the water, turned a valve and watched as the truck sucked 250 gallons from the temporary water tank.
A resident of Helena, Mont., Judd is a contractor for the National Park Service and fights fires at parks across the country. He came to Georgia a few weeks ago from Texas.
“You need a lot more people to keep an eye on this,” he said. “This fire is harder than most.”
Even if the rains come, National Parks Service spokesman Joe Mazzeo said, memories of the fire will linger — as will the smoke.
“You can’t escape the smoke,” said Mazzeo.
People here watch the sky, looking hopeful when they hear thunder.
Their hopes rose late last week. Thunder rumbled; raindrops the size of nickels began falling along stretches of U.S. 1. Elsewhere, showers pummeled smoldering areas where firefighters battled fatigue and flame.
Mosley, of the forestry commission, called the downpour “delightful.” In the next breath, he sounded a warning to fire-weary Georgians.
“The fire is a long way from being out,” he said.
And so the prayers continue.
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