By JEFFREY COLLINS and BRITTANY PETERSON Associated Press
When Nicole Taylor and her family moved to their new home in the South Carolina mountains six months ago, the gorgeous view of Table Rock Mountain was the clincher.
She ended up with a porch-side seat to one of at least a half dozen wildfires in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas, fed by dry conditions and millions of trees that were knocked down by Hurricane Helene in 2024 and began decaying into tinderbox fuel.
Taylor watched this past weekend as smoke started to rise from the ridges across Highway 11 in Pickens County. The smoke got worse Monday, and it was pouring off the mountain Tuesday when she got a text saying she was under a mandatory evacuation.
So far no one has been hurt in the fires, which have burned more than 20 square miles (52 square kilometers) in mostly rugged, remote forests and the popular state park that includes Table Rock Mountain. Only a few dozen structures have been damaged.
But the firefighting is slow work. Sources of water to extinguish the flames are scarce, so crews depend on building fire breaks to try to stop them in their tracks, using bulldozers, excavators and even shovels and saws to strip the land of fuel.
It then becomes a waiting game, making sure embers don’t jump the break and hoping for the winds to die down or — the best relief of all — a long, soaking rain.
The long wait
Hurricane Helene slammed through Pickens County the Friday after Taylor moved into her dream home last September. The hurricane-force winds traveled hundreds of miles inland, smashing entire forests and destroying the electrical grid.
There was more than a week of what she called “prairie life.”
“We we’re like, OK, if we can make it through that, we can make it through anything. Unfortunately fire is one thing we can’t fight.”
This week Taylor decamped to wait the fire out in a hotel room in Greenville with her fiance, two children and their dogs. So far the fire has remained across the highway, but it is still too close for them to be able to go home.
“It’s been an actual whirlwind,” Taylor said of the last several days.
Rain and then fire
Six months ago Eric Young packed up his cats and left his home in Transylvania County, North Carolina, after floods and winds from Helene knocked out power, water and cell service. On Wednesday the fires in nearby South Carolina forced them all out again.
A retired environmental educator who moved there from Long Island a few years ago, he had his car, driveway and crawl space flooded in September.
Now he is at a friend’s home near Charlotte, trying to keep a sense of humor about the absurdity of floodwaters followed so soon by flames.
“I thought it was nirvana here — never get anything but severe thunderstorms, the weather is temperate, very nice,” he said. “I didn’t know I’d be gut-punched twice in six months.”
Fighting the blaze
Forestry officials were worried after all those trees came down during Helene. It’s not just the fuel they create, they also hinder firefighters’ movement.
“It is nearly impossible to get through this stuff. We’ve got about five bulldozers, an excavator and saw crews to open this up and clean this,” Toby Cox, the firefighter in charge of the Table Rock fire, said about a fire break in a video briefing Thursday morning.
Extinguishing wildfires in the Carolinas takes time. A fire near Myrtle Beach that threatened dozens of homes and burned 2.5 square miles (6.5 square kilometers) in early March has been out of the news for nearly four weeks, but it is still just 80% contained and sends smoke billowing over neighborhoods when the wind shifts.
Conditions that favor fire outbreaks
Wildfires are unusual in the Carolinas, but not unheard of. The Great Fire of 1898 burned some 4,700 square miles (12,175 square kilometers) in the two states, an area roughly the size of Connecticut, said David Easterling, the director of the Technical Support Unit at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Spring is typically when blazes happen, according to Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist.
This season the Blue Ridge Mountains are dry, having received only about two-thirds of the normal amount of rainfall in the last six months since Hurricane Helene. March has been full of sunny, dry, windy days.
Meanwhile the risk to people and property has increased over the years thanks to a boom in popularity of the mountains as a place to live.
“North Carolina has a lot of homes in the wildland urban interface, or more people living with a higher fire risk,” Dello said.
Any trees downed by Helene that do not burn this year will still be around for future fire seasons.
“All that storm debris will be there for years to come, increasing the fire danger considerably,” Easterling said.
The latest fire updates
The two large fires in South Carolina continued to burn Thursday. The Table Rock fire has consumed 7.1 square miles (18.4 square kilometers), and the one on Persimmon Ridge in Greenville County has burned 2.4 square miles (6.2 square kilometers).
The fires are about 8 miles (13 kilometers) apart, and emergency officials have asked almost everyone living between them to leave as a precaution. The evacuation zone extended into nearby Transylvania County, North Carolina.
In North Carolina at least eight fires were burning in the mountains. The largest — the Black Cove Fire and the Deep Woods Fire in Polk County — were 17% and 30% contained, respectively, after firefighters made more progress. The fires have scorched about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) combined but have barely grown for more than a day.