VALDOSTA, Ga. — By the end of Fiscal Year 2007, over 9,500 fires burned more than 504,000 acres in the state of Georgia and the Forestry Commission is now focused on recovery.
The fire problems began April 12 and continued until the mop-up command was closed more than two months later.
“I realized then that we were in the beginning of a serious fire situation,” said Alan Dozier, Georgia Forestry Commission chief of forest protection.
The Sweat Farm Road Fire began in Ware County April 16 after heavy winds knocked a dead tree onto a power line. The fire was contained in a farm field by forest rangers that evening, until the fire jumped the field in a very unusual turn of events.
“We never caught up to it after that,” Dozier said.
Once inside the Okefenokee Swamp the name of the fire was changed to the Big Turnaround. Not long after, the Bugaboo Fire was turned up by a lightning strike and those two fires burned together creating the largest fire in the history of the southern United States, affecting 123 private and 11 corporate land owners and destroying 18 homes. With 441,000 acres burned in Georgia and 120,000 acres burned in Florida thus far, the fire continues to rage on in the Okefenokee Swamp, but is out of reach of forest rangers, according to Dozier.
Now, more than $8 million is needed to reforest non-industrial private land alone and funds are also needed to rehabilitate more than 352 miles of firebreaks surrounding the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
More than 3,300 people from 44 states across the country in addition to Canada and Puerto Rico worked with GFC to control the fires. Georgia’s firefighters also turned out in record numbers with 650 personnel working on the Mop-up Command task force. These workers wet stumps and smoldering debris so that fires would not re-ignite, freeing up forest rangers to tackle the flames.
Fiscal Year 2007 produced the largest annual GFC expenditure for fire control ever recorded, totaling over $62 million, according to GFC. A total of approximately $45 million of the recovery cost will be funded by a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, representing 75 percent of the total cost, according to Dozier.
As the battle continued in an effort to control the blazes that ravaged the southeastern portion of the state, GFC focused a great deal of effort on fire prevention.
“With the drought and the fires already going, any effort toward preventing new fires paid dividends,” Dozier said.
Not long after the Sweat Farm Road Fire began, a fire was deliberately set behind the GFC Command Post. In response to that incident an Arson Task Force, made up of 20 law enforcement officers and forestry investigators from neighboring states, was developed, according to Dozier.
The Task Force investigated 101 wildfires in an approximate two-month period and found 76 to be arson related. With the help of two bloodhound teams, 12 individuals were arrested in connection with arsons, of which five were juveniles. All 12 will be prosecuted in their respective counties and GFC will be following up on more than 100 leads developed by the Task Force in the coming months, according to Dozier.
With the same focus, GFC’s Fire Prevention Team held town hall meetings, made appearances at sporting events and took advantage of every available opportunity to speak with the public about fire safety.
“I’m convinced that saved a lot of grief and prevented a lot of fires from starting,” Dozier said.
Dozier added that a group of workers are continuing emergency repairs on roads and culverts damaged during the Sweat Farm Road/Big Turnaround Fires, which are almost complete.
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