Georgia blaze shows how climate change has led to more wildfires in East

WASHINGTON: Often considered more a problem for Western North America, wildfires are becoming more intense, frequent and damaging in the East, such as this week's blaze that destroyed more than 50 homes in Georgia, fire scientists said.

Researchers blame a number of factors, including climate change, causing fuel to dry out and be more flammable, a record drought, tens of millions of tons of dead trees from Hurricane Helene and just the large area where dense forests and high numbers of people try to coexist.

So far this year, 2,802 square miles (7,258 square kilometres) of the United States have burned in wildfires - much of it in Nebraska, an unusual area for massive wildfires - that's 88 per cent more than the 10-year average for this time of year, according to the National Interagency Fire Centre. That's happening as significant chunks of the country set records for the warmest winter and March and April drought.

"The warmer we get, the more fire we see. Longer fire seasons, more lightning possibly, and drier fuels," said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada. "I think we're going to see more fire in the East. We're seeing more intense fires."

Fires are increasing in the East

The number of large fires, the likelihood of them happening, and the amount of land burned have increased in most of the Southeast United States from 1984 to 2020, according to a 2023 study by University of Florida fire ecologists Victoria Donovan and Carissa Wonkka.

"The fires in the East, historically and today, are a lot smaller than in the Western United States, so they might not always grab as much attention as those out West. But we're starting to see now this shift in dynamics in the East, we're starting to quantify it," Donovan said Thursday. "Even though the changes that we're seeing in the East are much smaller than we're quantifying out West, we think it's extremely important to start to get ahead of this problem now."

Three months ago, Donovan, Wonkka and other fire scientists created a new network for fire researchers to study Eastern fires because some of the issues that experts have learned out West may not apply in the East, Wonkka said.

Even though the West has bigger and more noticeable fast-spreading fires, the East has more people in the way of flames in something scientists call the wildland-urban interface or WUI.

"We found that 45 per cent of all large wildfires in the East burn some portion of the wildland-urban interface and 55 per cent of the area burned, so that a lot of these large wildfires are associated with WUI fires," Donovan said.

Add to that the forests in the East are denser and less likely to be thinned out than those in the West, Donovan said.

Hurricane Helene created a ticking time bomb'

A week ago, federal and state officials looked at the drought, the weather and the millions of dead trees from Hurricane Helene in 2024 and issued an advisory to watch out for fires, said Nick Nauslar, a National Weather Service fire science and operations officer at the National Interagency Fire Centre in Boise, Idaho.

"They are thinking, you know, they could see more fires, more resistance to control with the fires that they get," Nauslar said. "It has been warmer and drier than normal across many of the areas where Helene caused damage. So there's the potential there. You have an excess of fuel available because now (the trees are) dead and at the mercy of the weather and climate. And then if you get dry and windy conditions, if you get an ignition, it's more likely to ignite and spread."

In Georgia alone, 13,954 square miles (36,142 square kilometres) of forest land was hit by Hurricane Helene, downing more than 26 million tons of pine and 30 million tons of hardwood, according to a November 2024 University of Georgia and Georgia Forestry Commission timber damage assessment.

"Many of us have worried about fuel buildup post-Helene. It's a ticking time bomb," University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd said.

Dry air makes it worse

But it's not just downed trees - it's also dry air, increasing the likelihood of fires. It's not just a lack of rain, but the air itself is less humid, which causes problems, Nauslar and Flannigan said.

"As we warm ... the atmosphere's ability to suck moisture out of dead fuel, not live fuel, but dead fuel, increases almost exponentially as temperature increases," Flannigan said. "The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start, which means more fuel is dried and available to burn, which leads to higher intensity fires that are difficult to impossible to extinguish.

"That's what we're seeing now, starting to make inroads into the East," Flannigan said. Human-caused climate change is clearly playing a role, he said.