TIGER, Ga. — Thick smoke has settled over a wide area of the southern Appalachians, where dozens of uncontrolled wildfires are burning through decades of leaf litter, and people breathe in tiny bits of the forest with every gulp of air.
The fires are burning through the night, working through desiccated deciduous forests accustomed to wet, humid summers and autumns.
“It doesn’t die down after dark,” said fire Capt. Ron Thalacker, who arrived from Carlsbad, N.M., with a fire engine that now draws water from streams and ponds to spray on hot spots in Georgia’s Rabun County.
More than 5,000 firefighters and support personnel, including many veterans of wildfires in the arid West, and 24 helicopters are battling blazes in the fire zone, which has spread from northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee into eastern Kentucky, the western Carolinas and parts of surrounding states.
More than 30 large fires remain uncontained, and overall, 128,000 acres have burned, or about nine times the size of Manhattan.
Firefighters got a lucky break when a fire reversed direction, turning away from the Trail of Tears, which marks the route where the Cherokee and other Indians were forcibly removed from their lands in the 1800s. In national forests, following procedures approved by the tribes, heavy equipment isn’t allowed within 750 feet of the trail bed unless life or property is threatened, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Terry McDonald said.
Just across the state line in North Carolina, three firefighters were battling the Party Rock fire near the town of Lake Lure after driving 23 hours from Albuquerque, N.M.
Some 850 people were fighting the Party Rock blaze, which grew to more than 5,700 acres on Tuesday and was still just 19 percent contained, she said.
Tom Stokesberry, an emergency-medical technician from Six Rivers National Forest in California, arrived in Georgia’s Rabun County on Veterans Day.
“The goal is to keep this line intact,” Stokesberry said, pointing to a narrow, winding dirt road between a burning mountainside and a pasture that, so far, has been untouched by the fire.
Burning trees falling across creeks and roads are an ever-present threat. “A tree drops across the creek and now you’ve got fire on the other side,” Thalacker explained.