Flames Slow and Protection Efforts Advance, Officials Say, While Urging Caution

Better weather helped slow the spread of the Table Rock Fire and allowed crews to bolster defenses, but “we’re not out of the woods yet,” a fire chief warned.

PISGAH FOREST – Favorable weather Friday and Saturday allowed significant strengthening of fire lines near evacuated homes in Transylvania County, fire officials said Saturday.

Both Transylvania County Fire Marshall Scott Justus and Connesstee Fire Chief Chase Owen described at a midday briefing the extensive work to bulldoze fire breaks, conduct back burns and remove flammable debris from around vulnerable houses.

Though they cautioned that the weather and fire conditions could change for the worse, they also sounded increasingly confident in the precautions they had taken and the resources available to stop the fire’s spread in Transylvania.

“We had a very productive day yesterday,” Owen said. “The wind was up a little bit, it actually allowed us to get in and do some more prep work because the wind was in our favor.”

There was further improvement Saturday, he added: “The weather today is probably the best that we’ve had. The humidity is supposed to be a lot higher today which will slow fire development.”

Additional help in the fire control efforts may come with rains forecast for Sunday.

The “Blue Team,” a US Forest Service emergency response group, had been cleared for operation in South Carolina earlier this week, and was able to expand its actions into North Carolina on Friday at the request of County Manager Jamie Laughter.

“We had to justify through the state of North Carolina and then to the feds that we needed that support,” she said.

Its arrival also allowed the county more direct access to information, she said:

“Some of the information coming out of South Carolina has been better because they had access to those resources that we did not have access to until Friday.”

Among the additional resources devoted to the fire: helicopters and small airplanes that have been steadily working to dump water on the northern edge of the fire line, Justus said.

Some of the water evaporated before it reached the fire because of the extreme heat and low humidity. But the action cooled the fire and moistened the ground in front of the flames, slowing their advance.

Earlier in the operation, crews cut a bulldozer line near Gum Gap, on the state line south of Happy Acres and Sherwood Forest, both of which have been evacuated. On Wednesday night crews conducted a back burn that strengthened that line, “which really stopped that progression.”

Firefighters have since continued to reinforce that line, he said, and have conducted extensive controlled burns farther west to protect homes on Dolly Masters Road and in other areas south of East Fork Road.

Firefighters had been limited in their ability to cut fire breaks in that area because so many fallen trees remain from Tropical Storm Helene, Owen said.

This debris has been a major factor throughout the fire zone, both speeding the progression of the flames and impeding the response, Justus said.

There was so much fallen vegetation, he said, “it looked like beavers had just been turned loose everywhere.”

Earlier in the week, members of the Connestee and Cedar Mountain fire departments had blown leaves and otherwise cleared flammable material from every one of the more than 700 homes in the evacuation zone, except for those made inaccessible by storm damage, Justus said.

He praised all the agencies that responded to the fires, including state and federal crews and all the county’s fire departments. But he singled out the Connestee and Cedar Mountain firefighters for the long hours they put in to clean individual properties.

“When I say they busted their rears, they really busted their rears,” he said.

The Table Rock Fire had burned about 11,000 acres by Saturday morning, surpassing the acreage consumed by nearby Pinnacle Mountain Fire in 2016, according to a story in the statewide Post and Courier newspaper. Along with the Persimmon Ridge Fire, near Ceasar’s Head, this fire has been named the Table Rock Complex Fire, and the total of about 13,000 acres burned in the event makes it the third-largest fire in South Carolina history.

In a Saturday morning briefing, Blue Team Operations Section Chief Derrick Moore said that the growth of the two fires had slowed significantly on Friday.

“Not a lot of tremendous growth yesterday, just a few hundred acres here and there,” he said.

He also described plans to initiate controlled burns over 3,000 acres west of the fire to restrain future uncontrolled spread.

Partly because of this and other controlled burns, air quality is expected to remain poor today, Laughter said.

But both Moore and the local officials reiterated that the emergency is not over.

Owen, in describing the efforts to protect Stone Lake and other evacuated communities just to the north, said “that concern is dwindling, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”

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