SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Consider the past six months in the mountains of southern Appalachia. Hurricane Helene brought catastrophic flooding to places like Asheville, North Carolina, but lately it's been so windy and dry that the Carolinas are currently fighting wildfires. The North Carolina Forest Service has declared one of them the highest-priority fire in the U.S. Now, wildfires are not new to this region, but the strength, frequency and size of these blazes - that is new. To talk about this more we're going to bring in somebody who has spent 25 years studying fires like these - Rob Scheller. He's a professor of landscape ecology at North Carolina State University. Welcome to the show.
ROB SCHELLER: Thank you. Happy to be here, Scott.
DETROW: What's the best way to describe what's going on right now in the Carolinas and in the broader southeast? How serious is the fire risk? How has this changed from before?
SCHELLER: The fire risk is elevated, and it is severe. We do need to be taking precautions. This is a combination, of course, of a dry spring, which is not unusual for the area, but it is a dry spring in combination with elevated fuel loads over a wide area due to Hurricane Helene. Hurricane Helene damaged over 800,000 acres of forest, and so just think about a lot of tree mortality, limbs falling and so on. And so that all lands on the forest floor, and once it gets dried out, this is fantastic fuel for a fire.
DETROW: Is it fair to say, then, that the massive population growth that you've seen throughout so much of the southeast is a big factor here? I mean, I think one example - Greenville, South Carolina. This is...
SCHELLER: Yeah.
DETROW: ...One of the communities near one of these fires - gained something like six new households every week between 2000 and 2020. This is just massive population growth in this region. How does that affect all of this?
SCHELLER: Yeah. The expansion of the wildland-urban interface is a huge factor when we think about fire risk, and it is expanding rapidly across the southeast. And so the more people, there's more opportunities for fires to negatively impact, of course, homes and lives. It's also more opportunities for people to accidentally start fires. And so that's more people living near natural vegetation, having barbecues, maybe doing some burning of yard waste and so on. So it's a two-way risk, both to people and people starting fires as well.
DETROW: What is the best way to frame it from your perspective on the question I'm sure you've gotten a lot of - has climate change made this risk worse?
SCHELLER: Climate change has made the risk worse and part of that is just rising temperatures by themselves will allow fuels to dry out faster. The other factor is what we're seeing in the southeast is precipitation has become much more variable over time. And so last year is a great example, where we had a really wet spring followed by a dry summer, and then a wet, early fall and then a really dry and later fall. And so that means that you have these flash droughts sprinkled throughout the season which, again, allow fuels to dry out and increases fire risk.
DETROW: So obviously, temperatures are going up. That's not changing anytime soon.
SCHELLER: No.
DETROW: More people are moving to the southeast. That doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
SCHELLER: Correct.
DETROW: What to you are the biggest steps that can be taken to try and mitigate these risks?
SCHELLER: Again, there's many sides to the risk story. So one thing you want to do is just reduce the risk of fire spreading, and that requires reducing the amount of fuels on the ground. That means getting out there and doing some salvage logging, maybe doing some prescribed burning. However, that's going to be difficult across over 800,000 acres of rough terrain, and so people also need to be reducing their own risk. And in that case, there's things you can do around vegetation management immediately around your house - making sure the vegetation is away from the house, making sure you don't have a woodpile near to or up against the house, trying to eliminate any wooden fences. People could also change the way they build new houses. So there's many more fireproof methods of building houses today. And lastly, people just need to be aware of the potential for fire and think about evacuation routes, what they need to grab right away. You don't want to be waiting till the last minute to figure out where the prize family photo album is or the deed to the house, etc. You should have all those things ready to go in the case of a fire because those delays cause mortality.
DETROW: Yeah. That is Professor Rob Scheller of North Carolina State University. Thank you so much.
SCHELLER: You're welcome. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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