Less than two months after the Great Lakes Fire seared 32,000 near the central North Carolina coast, the Pulp Road Wildfire on June 15, 2023, began when a prescribed fire in a longleaf pine forest the previous day slipped from the grasp of the burn team.
The blaze in the Green Swamp Preserve burned nearly 16,000 acres of peatland, also known as pocosin wetlands. The Nature Conservancy manages this preserve, about 20 miles southwest of Wilmington in Brunswick and Columbus counties.
The burn team from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission conducted a 400-acre planned fire on Monday, June 13, 2023, on the Green Swamp Game Land in Brunswick County.
Two days later, WRC sought support from the North Carolina Forest Service after discovering flare ups beyond the boundaries of the planned fire on heavily forested and overgrown terrain within the swamp.
Although rare, there’s always a risk of a planned fire escaping.
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“It’s the nature of working with prescribed fire,” said Deb Maurer, The Nature Conservancy’s southeast Coastal Plain program director. With many variables to consider, “not every factor is predictable,” she said.
This article is the second in the three-part Carolina Public Press investigative series Coastal Kindling. The first article examined the problem of highly flammable coastal woodlands and wetlands. This article explores the underlying factors contributing to the problem. The final article looks at potential solutions.
Prescribed burns face challenges
On the state’s Coastal Plain, prescribed fire and restoring wetlands are among two key strategies for creating ecologically resilient landscapes and safeguarding communities from increasingly frequent and intense wildfires driven by climate change.
However, swelling populations in areas where development meets natural spaces is making that task increasingly challenging. The Nature Conservancy owns more than 70,000 acres in Southeastern North Carolina and has to reckon with the changing landscape.
“We design plans and strategies before a burn, but development makes it harder,” Maurer said.
Among the targets of prescribed burns are pocosin wetlands and longleaf pine savannas. The two critical, and threatened ecosystems in the Green Swamp Preserve, the Croatan National Forest and other natural landscapes on the coast rely on fire to remain healthy and resilient.
Low-intensity fires every two to fire years sustain the longleaf pine landscapes. Pocosins typically experience less frequent, but more intense fires, roughly every 5 to 20 years.
Conservation organizations, private landowners, and public agencies, such as The Nature Conservancy, the US Forest Service, state land managers, commercial timber companies and the U.S. military, use a range of management techniques, including fire, pesticides, or timber harvests, to reestablish healthy sections of longleaf pine habitat, pocosin wetlands and commercial forests.
Nancy Thompson, a spokesperson for Seattle-based timber products company Weyerhaeuser said its “active timber management strategy encompasses a variety of best practices designed to maintain forest health and resilience.”
“We establish and maintain firebreaks and access roads, which serve as critical barriers to slow or halt the spread of fire and provide essential routes for fire fighting equipment and personnel,” she said.
Weyerhaeuser manages 800,000 acres in North Carolina and works in collaboration with other land managers, including the U.S. Forest Service.
Croatan National Forest district ranger Ron Hudson told CPP that “all of our prescribed burning lines up with public protection and wildland restoration. Saving people and restoring forests are one and the same.”
That aim is in sharp contrast to past choices in which forest managers prioritized timber production over habitat restoration by draining thousands of acres of pocosins and replacing longleaf pine with rows of more economically productive loblolly pine, which foresters protected from fire.
Wildfire and controlled burns in pines and pocosins
Longleaf pine forests and pocosins require regular fire to thrive. In addition to wildfires caused by lightning strikes, Native Americans and colonists set fires to improve their health.
However, in the first half of the 20th century, the US Forest Service and other forest managers feared outbreaks of destructive wildfires and snuffed out fires as quickly as possible. But researchers in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated the benefits of letting wildfires burn or using prescribed fire, which helped reverse decades of fire suppression policies.
According to Hudson, the US Forest Service targets managed burns in a single location of the Croatan National Forest every two to five years to match the natural cycle of wildfire in longleaf pine forest. The annual goal is to burn roughly 15,000 to 20,000 acres of longleaf pine.
Pocosins and other peatlands, on the other hand, are more difficult to manage with prescribed fire since thick vegetation and wet soil is difficult to penetrate and large tracts of pocosins often have few natural or man-made fire breaks, such as roads.
The exact definition of a pocosin is still a bit mushy since “peatland areas are a mosaic of different ecological communities,” said the Nature Conservancy’s Eric Soderholm, who leads the organization’s restoration of thousands of acres of North Carolina pocosin. Not only are they ecologically significant, he added, they are “near and dear to coastal North Carolinians”.
William Wallace Tooker, once recognized as a specialist in coastal Algonquian place names, explored the lexicography of pocosins in American Anthropologist in 1898 concluding that “the meaning of (pocosin has) been based on the supposition” that it was an indigenous word for a swamp or marsh.
But ecologists distinguish pocosins from other peatlands and wetlands since they’re typically elevated above surrounding landscapes, fed by rainfall and have poor drainage. The result is a soggy environment nearly impenetrable by humans, which has developed over thousands of years as layers of decomposed plant matter, or peat, accumulate.
Once a dominant ecosystem along the southeastern coast from Virginia to Georgia, pocosins have rapidly disappeared, swept over by row-crop agriculture and development. Despite those losses, North Carolina has more pocosin acreage than any other state.
Research ecologist Melinda Martinez of the Eastern Ecological Science Center of the U.S Geological Survey said peat accumulates because the organic matter in pocosins is constantly flooded. The ecosystem is like a giant, wet sponge in a kitchen sink that absorbs and retains moisture.
However, during periods of low rainfall or drought, the surface of pocosins dry out, exposing soil.
“(Peat) is very organic and rich,” she said. “But when there’s a drop in water level, because there’s so much carbon, it’s very flammable.”
Since reducing the amount of burnable material through prescribed fire is challenging, when wildfires spread into pocosins, containing them is often more difficult, particularly in wetlands that have been altered in decades past.
Draining wetlands made wildfire worse
Following the 200,000 acre Lake Phelps Fire in 1955 on the state’s northeastern Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, land managers approached fire prevention by draining the pocosins there and planting new vegetation.
Drained peatlands also proliferated prior to the enforcement of the US Clean Water Act following the expansion of the law in 1972.
“We saw a boom period in the 1970s and early 1980s as landowners attempted to bring wetlands into productive farmland” ahead of enforcement, Soderholm said. “There are areas that were never fully converted (to farmland), so they’re just sitting there drained.”
If restored and re-flooded, “they have the capacity to provide some tremendous benefits and insurance against future catastrophic wildfire events and reduce flood risks in lowland areas adjacent to peatlands,” he said.
Soderholm told CPP that in the Southeast about 3.7 million acres of forested peatlands existed historically from Virginia to Northern Florida. By the 1980s roughly 2.5 million acres were affected by drainage, of which, he estimates, only about 500,000 acres have been restored.
As a legacy of drained wetlands throughout coastal North Carolina pocosins, an array of rectangular sections of land bordered by canals and ditches continue to affect the hydrology.
Croatan National Forest fire management officer David Nelson said the Great Lakes Fire that ignited on April 19, 2023, lingered longer in areas that were unnaturally drained. To extinguish them, firefighters used irrigation pumps to move tens of millions of gallons of water from Great Lake and Catfish Lake into depleted pocosins.
By May 24, 2023, an estimated 1.25 billion gallons of water had been moved to saturate pocosin areas, according to the US Forest Service.
The pocosins of the Green Swamp Preserve, however, weren’t “ditched and drained,” Maurer said.
Acquired by The Nature Conservancy in 1977, the land was owned by a commercial timber company. Maurer speculated that the Green Swamp was relatively more costly and challenging to drain than other adjacent land, so was spared.
In June 2023, when the planned fire escaped into the Green Swamp’s peatlands, the NC Forest Service decided to burn out the entire preserve to contain the wildfire. The state forest service is responsible for identifying the strategy to manage wildfires.
According to a story line created by The Nature Conservancy, containment was urgent. A forecasted windshift would have pushed the fire towards homes.
“It burned extremely hot, but we had breaks around it. It was almost like a managed wildfire,” Maruer said. Milder weather and wet conditions also aided firefighters.
However, responding to massive, unplanned fire events are costly and have far-greater potential consequences than a controlled burn, especially wildfires near structures and people.
The National Interagency Fire Center estimated a cost of more than $700,000 to extinguish the Pulp Road Fire. The Great Lakes Fire in the Croatan National Forest was estimated to cost $12 million.
Climate change and weather extremes
According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist Scott Kennedy, a dry hurricane season in 2022 didn’t refill the water table in the pocosins in the Croatan National Forest.
As a result, the pocosins were relatively dry and more flammable. Despite heavy rain from Hurricane Ian in September 2022, Eastern North Carolina ended the year abnormally dry.
“Tropical moisture is an important source of annual precipitation,” said Kennedy, who was embedded with the incident management team to forecast weather conditions during the Great Lakes Fire. “While it’s nice to have a quiet tropical season, the lack of that moisture can lead to drought.”
During a period of high temperatures and low precipitation, known as a flash drought, pocosins are more vulnerable to fire. The combination of heat and dry conditions “shortens the time it takes for peats to reach the low moisture stage when they can readily burn even though the water table is just below the surface,” said forest ecologist Rob Scheller of NC State University.
Scheller expects that, on average, drought will be more frequent in the future. However, the variability of future weather conditions and patterns is widely debated.
Predicting a drought or periods of heavy precipitation is difficult, Martinez said. However, more extreme weather as a result of climate change and sea level rise, in particular, “could push (ecological) systems” to their breaking point.
An example of climate change pushing landscapes to the brink are ghost forests, which are the remains of once-thriving woodlands that have become a prominent feature of many coastal areas of North Carolina.
“There’s a lot of fresh water forest wetlands converting to either marshes or open water, because of a combination of salt water intrusion and increasing flooding,” Martinez said.
“If the system is pushed to an extreme by a fire, potentially, it could go from a forest to a marsh quicker than we’re expecting.”
The combination of storms, erratic weather, land use patterns, droughts and sea-level rise brought on by climate change may cause ghost forests to spread at an accelerated rate.
Pocosins could also be transformed by sea-level rise and extreme weather. Raging wildfires burn deep underground and devour the peaty soil, changing the elevation of the pocosin, altering its hydrology and potentially transforming them. Saltwater intrusion in pocosins near shorelines, for example, could accelerate their demise.
The burning woodlands next door
Unlike the borders of the Croatan National Forest, the landscape surrounding the Green Swamp Preserve is relatively rural. However, smoke from the blaze affected Wilmington and coastal communities along the US 17 highway corridor. According to The Nature Conservancy, intense smoke sparked thunderstorms.
“Smoke that impacted communities is something that the Great Lakes Fire and the Pulp Road Wildfire absolutely share together,” Maurer said. “That’s always a major concern.”
Wildfire smoke contains a mix of gasses and fine particles that can cause respiratory problems, aggravate heart and lung conditions, and reduce air quality over large areas, sometimes hundreds of miles from its source. Smoke can create hazardous conditions for drivers and emergency responders. The release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants also contributes to climate change.
Smoke from prescribed burning is also an undesirable spillover effect of managing forests. Regulations limit the amount of acres and the volume of smoke permitted from a prescribed burn, however, neighbors may have negative views of the spillover impact of smoke, harvesting timber or treating invasive plants with pesticides, even if the goal is forest restoration or wildfire prevention.
“There’s a misalignment between the values of folks moving from population centers, like Raleigh, and into the WUI (wildland urban interface),” Scheller of NC State said.
“Generally, people don’t like to see prescribed fire. They don’t like smoke and think that it’s hazardous, even if the hazard is minuscule.”
A 2023 study of residents from the San Francisco Bay Area recreating in national forests found that they were less likely to support managed fire than rural residents who live in close proximity to public forests.
The Nature Conservancy has invested in outreach and education about sharing the benefits of fire through public events and speaking engagements to explain the benefits of a safe, well-planned controlled fire, Maurer said.
Among the benefits of the Pulp Road Wildfire is reducing future fire-risk since the Green Swamp hadn’t burned in decades.
“Ecologically, it was a very good fire for the Green Swamp. It needed to burn,” she said. The wildfire, for example, significantly reduced fuel loads and has created an opportunity to design a fire management system in portions of the pocosin.
Yet extreme weather due to climate change may complicate the ability for land managers to put, what Maurer calls, “good fire on the ground.”
Controlled burns are carefully planned to ensure they’re safe and effective, which requires specific forest and weather conditions to halt the fire from spreading uncontrollably or emitting unhealthy amounts of smoke.
In general, escaped controlled burns are rare. According to the US Forest Service, 99.84% of prescribed fires on national forests do not move outside of the planned area.
“If we have a change in climate that pushes us towards extreme conditions with higher temperatures and drier conditions then the more limited windows we’ll have to burn,” Maurer said.
“Layer on the intersection with communities and the human environment and it’s a tightening space when we can burn. I’m not a pessimist about this, but it’s challenging work and I don’t think it’s going to get much easier.”
A new development in Carteret County is among the places where new residents could be moving. A recently framed home in the development is yards from the Croatan National Forest’s southern boundary, edged by towering pines. It’s an ideal location, not far from the beach and bordered by public lands.
While restoring ecosystems is central to managing wildfires, collaborations and preparing homes, such as these, are also crucial for future wildfire resilience.
The job of protecting the public belongs, in part, to fire mitigation specialist Hannah Thompson-Welch of the North Carolina Forest Service. The state agency has the responsibility of protecting state and privately owned forest land from wildfires.
“We rarely have a wildfire in North Carolina that doesn’t threaten a home.”
Hannah Thomason-Welch, N.C. Forest Service
A primary aspect of her job is convincing people to prepare their homes for wildfire. When the next pocosin fire flares may be difficult to predict; but one thing is certain from Thompson-Welch’s point of view: people should be better prepared for the threat of wildfire.
“I never want to see a catastrophic fire. But we are ranked number one in the nation of acres in the wildland urban interface,” Thompson-Welch said. “We rarely have a wildfire in North Carolina that doesn’t threaten a home.”
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