A perfect storm or the new norm?

A lightning strike in the Cohutta Wilderness of north Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest started the fire on Rough Ridge.

It was Oct. 16.

No one knew what kind of harbinger that was.

A week later, the Dick’s Creek Fire was burning. Two days after that, the Boteler Fire started.

By early November, the Tellico Fire, the massive Party Rock Fire and the Ferebee Memorial fires were all burning in North Carolina.

Arsonists started a fire along the Chimney Tops Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Nov. 13. Park firefighters responded and the fire extinguished within three days.

But on the evening of Nov. 23 another arson-started fire was discovered near the Chimney Tops Trail.

This became the Chimney Tops 2 Fire and park officials decided, because of the steep terrain, it would be too dangerous for firefighters to directly attack the fire. They went to work building containment lines around the fire.

The fire was slowly backing down the mountain and park firefighters figured it would reach containment lines around Nov. 28.

Mother Nature had a different plan.

A weather front was headed in and, while fire managers were hoping for rain, the leading edge of the front was predicted to bring low humidity plus variable gusty winds.

As the front got closer, predictions became direr.

A weather service alert warned of winds strong enough to down trees and power lines and called for gusts of near 60 mph. The fire started spotting as winds blew embers across the landscape.

Soon the fire had spotted over two ridges and engaged Twin Creeks visitor center facilities.

The winds kept increasing.

Some gusts measured more than 80 mph. Not only did the Chimney Tops 2 Fire rage into Gatlinburg, the high winds downed power lines sparking more fires, soon homes and hotels were burning.

Fourteen people died.

Half a billion dollars in property burned though downtown Gatlinburg, and the main tourism areas, were spared.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam said it was largest wildfire in Tennessee, in the last 100 years.

Fire managers, today, wonder if this was the perfect storm or the new norm.

They are studying last fall’s fire season to try to prevent this kind of tragedy from occurring again.

Why 2016?

Jess Riddle, forest ecologist with Georgia ForestWatch, said the answer has a lot to do with a combination of natural events.

“These recent fires had decades of fuel build-up, extreme drought, low humidity, and windy days—pretty much everything a fire could want,” he says.

Records from Asheville’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI), formerly the National Climatic Data Center, note this fall was one of the driest and warmest on record for Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, North Georgia and other areas across the Southeast.

Most of Western North Carolina was under extreme or exceptional drought from the middle of October to the end of November. Exceptional drought is the highest level. Extreme is the second highest level.

The Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory in Otto, North Carolina, reflects the same trends.

September and October were the driest two months on record since 1934 when record keeping began.

Temperatures for all months, except January, were above average. July and September set heat records.

Josh Kelly, forest biologist at MountainTrue, said the confluence of the warm and very dry weather was unusual.

“It was the first time in my life that anything like this has happened,” he says. “Some indices of fire danger reached new records for Western North Carolina during this period.”

One of those, the Energy Release Component, measures amount of fuels in the forest. It reached a record high.

The forest was basically a tinderbox. Any, and every, flame had record high fuels waiting to be consumed.

These fuels accumulated in the forests of the Southern Appalachians due to the past seven or eight decades of fire suppression, some experts say.

Fire has always been a part of the ecosystem that helps shape the forests.

Some forest communities – fire-adapted communities – actually rely on fire.

Pines like table mountain pine, pitch pine and others are highly adapted to fire and the exclusion of fire in those habitats allows shrubs and other hardwoods to move in.

Fire is also very beneficial in oak forests, especially drier oak forests.

The exclusion of normal fire regimes has allowed less fire-tolerant species like maple, poplar and others to encroach.

So it’s easy to see how, as Jess Riddle says, 2016, had, “pretty much everything a fire could want.”

It had fuel load build up from decades of fire suppression and those fuels were extremely dry. It had extreme-to-exceptional drought conditions. It had wind, high temperatures and low humidity.

All it needed was ignition.

Unnatural sparks

Only two of the hundreds of wildfires across the region were naturally ignited. The Rough Ridge Fire in the Cohutta Wilderness on Oct. 16 and the Boteler Fire in the Nantahala National Forest near Hayesville, North Carolina, on Oct. 25 were thought to have started from lightning strikes.

The rest were all human-caused.

Some were escaped debris burns, escaped campfires and cigarettes tossed from car windows or other accidental ignitions. But a large number, probably the majority, were arson.

Forest economist Jeffrey Prestemon is project leader at the Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

His research includes understanding, predicting, and forecasting arson and intentional wildfires.

In a Forest Service report “Wildfire Ignitions: A review of the Science and Recommendations for Empirical Modeling” Prestemon, and others, found 39 percent of fires across most of the Southern Appalachians between 2000 and 2008 were arson.

Prestemon told Smoky Mountain Living that high wildfire indices, like drought and fuel load, are also predictive of arson.

In other words, arsonists know when conditions are good for setting fires.

And one of the highest predictors of arson is simply the fact that arson has recently occurred.

This is because serial arsonists are common.

“If they have success setting one fire, they’re likely to try again, plus you have copy cat arsonists,” Prestemon says.

Prestemon says access is also a big factor.

He noted that population, coupled with road density, means more fires.

He also noted that arson is more common near forest/urban interfaces where there are large numbers of human lives and property at risk.

Effects of the 2016 wildfires

A large number of wildfires burned across a variety of forest habitats in the Southern Appalachians for more than a month.

These fires burned with different intensities and different severities depending on topography, weather conditions, fuel load and other factors.

There were different intensities and severities even within the same fire perimeter, so effects of the fires varied. Forest Service, Park Service and other organizations will be monitoring the burns and some effects may not be known for years.

One of the major hotspots was where the Camp Branch Fire burned up Wayah Bald in Macon County, North Carolina. It burned the roof off the Wayah Bald Fire Tower.

Gary Kauffman, fire management specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, says the Camp Branch Fire at Wayah Bald, was the highest intensity fire site that he visited.

He says the fire raced up the mountain, through a high elevation red oak forest with flame lengths greater than 100 feet.

“Many of the red oaks and chestnut oaks had fire scars up their entire stems. I suspect many will die,” he says.

He also noted that while the tops of the rhododendron were burned, much of the root mass was still in tact and, depending on the oak mortality, that the bald could perhaps transform to a heath bald.

But many of the fires, probably most, didn’t burn with that kind of intensity or severity.

“Many areas had low to moderate intensity fire that will likely not result in widespread tree mortality,” says Adam Warwick, stewardship manager at The Nature Conservancy.

He believes most of the fires were “generally beneficial from an ecological perspective.”

Rob Klein, fire ecologist with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, says fires in the Park burned about 11,000 acres and 16 percent of that was high-severity.

Klein says a small portion of the high-severity burns could see complete stand replacement.

Most of that happened on steep, dry, slopes populated with pine and oak.

Klein noted that table mountain pine, one of the species in that habitat, is quite adapted to fire.

Some table mountain pines produce serotinous cones – cones that require heat, generally from fire, to open and disperse seed.

Klein cautioned that it will take years for these forests to reestablish themselves but noted that kind of regeneration is a natural part of forest ecology – or, at least, used to be before widespread fire suppression.

Many of the 2016 wildfires burned across fire-adapted communities. But many of these fires were unusual in the fact they burned into more moist areas.

There were instances like the Tellico Fire and the Rock Mountain Fire, where the fire burned all the way to the edge of streams in cove forests.

Kauffman said half of the burns he surveyed were in areas with less fire-adapted vegetation, but noted the fires within these areas were low in intensity and severity.

Initially there should be little negative impact on wildlife.

Klein says most medium to large mammals and birds simply move out of the fire’s path. Most reptiles and amphibians were already dormant beneath the soil. Of special concern, however, is the noonday globe snail, Petera clarkia Nantahala.

This federally threatened snail is endemic to the Nantahala gorge in Western North Carolina and much of its known habitat was within the perimeter of the Tellico Fire. Effects of the fire on the noonday globe will not be known until this spring when biologists survey the area.

Any large areas of tree mortality could mean less mast available next fall. The flip side of that is high-intensity and stand-replacing fires could be beneficial to wildlife that depends on herbaceous vegetation and early successional habitat.

The largest immediate negative impact associated with the 2016 fires was smoke pollution.

Many towns and urban areas as far away as Charlotte, and Atlanta, and Chattanooga and Knoxville experienced code orange and code red air quality alerts.

Other ongoing concerns include erosion and flooding primarily in those areas where the duff layer was burned away, leaving bare soil exposed.

Moderate to heavy rains could not only cause erosion but because there is no duff to absorb and slowdown runoff, flooding could occur.

Perfect storm or new norm

This is an issue that will likely be answered in hindsight a few years down the road.

There was certainly a confluence of events that came together in the Southern Appalachians in the fall of 2016, which precipitated this unprecedented fire season: Decades of fuel buildup, drought, warm temperatures, low humidity, wind and then ignition.

Many scientists, ecologists and forest managers believe climate change may have played a part and may continue to do so though no scientist would point to this fire season and say, “climate change caused this.”

There is no way to know for sure at this point.

But Steve McNulty, director of the USDA Southeast Regional Climate Hub, believes climate variability likely played a large part and that climate change plays a part in climate variability.

Climate change refers to gradual, long-term change – the heating of the Earth and the Earth’s atmosphere over the past century or so and climate variability refers to changes in weather patterns from month to month or year to year.

More greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, like CO2, trap more heat in the atmosphere creating more energy and that translates into more extreme weather patterns.

McNulty noted that rain events producing more than 2 inches of rain over a 24-hour period have increased by 20 percent since 1950.

But with a warmer atmosphere drying and evaporation occur faster, which can lead to more drought.

There are also more subtle climate variability changes that can impact wildfire. McNulty noted growing seasons that last two to three weeks longer. They produce more biomass, which can increase fuel load.

And adding more people into the mix also increases the chances of wildfire.

More people equal more campers, more hikers, more hunters and that means more campfires and more opportunities for accidental ignitions.

More property owners equal more lot clearing and more debris burning, which also adds to the chances for accidental ignition. And sadly, more people and more access lead to more arson.

This fire season could have been a perfect storm, the experts say. But it appears the conditions that created that storm are becoming the new norm.

Lessons for the future

Josh Kelly, of MountainTrue, and Adam Warwick, of TNC, both credit the Grandfather Restoration Project, which uses prescribed fire to restore forests on the Grandfather Ranger District, with greatly reducing the risk of the Paddy’s Creek Fire and the Buck Creek Gap Fire.

In a fire season briefing last fall, Warwick noted these two fires, in areas that had been previously treated through prescribed burns, were caught small and resulted in little to no damage.

“It's a little counter-intuitive, but forests that burn more frequently burn with less severity,” says Kelly. “This is because frequent fires do two things. First, they consume some of the fuels that would be more dangerous during drought conditions. Second, they change the vegetation over time. In our area, that means trees that are wider spaced and a transition from dangerous shrubby fuels, like mountain laurel, to herbaceous and grassy fuels that don't burn so severely.”

But prescribed burns are not a landscape-wide panacea.

There are areas of the forest where, due to topography and human habitation, prescribed burns aren’t prudent. And much care must be taken to manage smoke during a prescribed burn.

Environmentalists, ecologists and fire managers across the country are reaching out to stakeholders to prepare for, and mitigate, the effects of increasing wildfire on the landscape.

Programs like the National Cohesive Strategy and Fire Adapted Communities offer agencies, organizations and stakeholders ways to address issues like managing fuel loads, protecting homes and communities, managing human-caused ignitions and effectively and efficiently responding to wildfire.

Kelly noted two main takeaways from the 2016 wildfires.

“First, the Southern Appalachians are not immune from large wildfires,” he says. “Second, it's critical that people take fire into consideration when planning development. Everything from the vegetation of the site, to the steepness of the slopes, to the building materials used, to the difficulty or ease of fire fighter access during an emergency.”

Rob Klein of the Park Service says it’s important for people to understand that fire is a natural process.

“Fire has been on the landscape for thousands of years and forests will recover naturally,” he says. “They may not be the same as they were the day before the fire but they will recover to become the forests of tomorrow.”