Often considered more a problem for western North America, wildfires are becoming more intense, frequent and damaging in the East, such as last week’s blaze that destroyed dozens of 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 the vast area where dense forests and high numbers of people try to coexist.
So far this year, 2,802 square miles of the United States has burned in wildfires, much of it in Nebraska, an unusual area for massive wildfires. That’s 88% more than the 10-year average for this time of year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s happening as significant chunks of the country set records for the warmest winter followed by 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, their likelihood and the amount of land burned have increased in most of the southeastern 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 researchers to study fires in the East because some of the issues that experts have learned out West may not apply there, Wonkka said.
Even though the West has bigger and more noticeable fast-spreading fires, the East has more people in the way of flames — what scientists call the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.
“We found that 45% of all large wildfires in the East burn some portion of the wildland-urban interface … 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’s impact
A week ago, federal and state official 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 Center 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 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 of forest land was hit by Hurricane Helene, downing more than 26 million tons of pine and 30 million tons of hardwood, according 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 — the air itself is less humid, which causes problems, Nauslar and Flannigan said.
Human-caused climate change is clearly playing a role, 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,” he said. “The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start, [which] means more fuel dried and is 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.
Borenstein writes for the Associated Press.
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