Fanned by strong winds, stoked by low humidity and fueled by dry organic soil, the Great Lakes Fire in the Croatan National Forest in 2023 burned towards hundreds of homes along the forest’s boundary. The enormous fire scorched 32,000 acres of forest land and threatened nearby communities. Luckily, a shift in wind direction and rain allowed firefighters to contain the blaze in which no lives or structures were lost.
But the near-miss prompted a collaborative effort of land managers, policy makers, and emergency responders to think more carefully about the risk and response to the growing number of homes in places where forest and housing meet, known as the wildland urban interface, or WUI.
North Carolina leads the nation in WUI acres and its coasts feature forest and wetland ecosystems that are subject to wildfires alongside growing residential developments. Lowering fire risk is going to be an ongoing challenge in the region.
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This article is part 3 of the three-part Carolina Public Press series Coastal Kindling. The first article looked at the problem of highly flammable coastal landscapes in North Carolina. The second article explored factors that contribute to this problem. This article identifies potential solutions to mitigate the hazard.
Fire risk mitigation
A change in the weather meant firefighters got lucky during the Great Lakes Fire. Those planning for future fires can’t always count on good fortune.
During the Great Lakes Fire, Craven County emergency services director Stanley Kite coordinated the response of more than a dozen fire departments in case the fire jumped to neighboring structures.
While roughly 200 wildland firefighters from around the nation battled the wildfire within the boundaries of the Croatan National Forest, local fire departments focused on protecting people and structures in the surrounding housing developments.
“We moved some tanker trucks up, but fighting forest fires is a whole different ball game,” Kite said, since conventional fire engines are designed to extinguish structural blazes, not wildfire.
In coastal North Carolina, Kite and other public safety professionals face a crucial challenge: protecting the growing number of people living in areas where forest and suburbia collide, and minimizing the risk of future wildfires in forests stressed by past management decisions and a changing climate.
His duties, however, are increasingly difficult in fast-growing regions of the coast.
Kite prefers a larger buffer between wildlands and homes, and the application of more common-sense codes, such as requirements for more fire resistant types of landscaping and roofing.
“You’re talking about a big divide between what developers envision and what officials like myself would rather see,” he said. In North Carolina, county fire marshals have limited oversight of building codes.
Another hurdle is a shortage of volunteer firefighters. Rural and suburban volunteer departments are struggling to retain and recruit personnel for a range of reasons, among them the availability of free-time and stringent training and skill requirements.
As suburban expansion encroaches on wildlands, well-staffed and sufficiently-trained fire departments, like those in Craven County, will be required to snuff out more fires, said NC State professor of forest ecology Rob Scheller.
“Approximately 80% of fire ignitions are human caused,” he said. “So if you have more people in the interface close to the forest we should expect more fires.”
North Carolina is fourth in the United States in the number of houses in the WUI and first in the number of acres. More people and homes are likely coming.
“We’re experiencing unprecedented growth,” said Craven County planning and inspections director Chad Strawn. Much of the growth is in the US 70 corridor between New Bern and Havelock.
For good reason perhaps.
New Bern, a charming and historic waterfront city is vibrant, the climate is mild, and it’s relatively more affordable than other North Carolina cities, such as Raleigh or Asheville. The median listing home price in New Bern is $352,000, according to Realtor.com, which is 46% lower than Raleigh and 69% below average listings in Asheville.
Retirees and remote workers are among the newcomers who prefer to live near the water without the high cost of real estate and insurance policies required to live in coast front communities, Strawn said. In addition, more than 18,000 active duty service members, reserves, and contractors work at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, he said.
Unattended campfires, escaped debris fires, a half-burned cigarette, or sparks from an aging vehicle’s faulty catalytic converter will possibly be the cause of future wildfires.
However, climate change may also contribute to the frequency and intensity of wildfires. More persistent droughts, higher temperatures and drier vegetation, could combine to create ideal conditions for more wildfires that spread faster and with more ferocity.
The overall acreage burned by wildfires across the state has continued to trend downward thanks to proactive management practices, more extensive prescribed burning, and some recently wet and drought-free years.
In 2023, the NC Forest Service responded to 5,101 fires that burned 18,748 acres.
Many of those fires are prevented or contained by firefighting teams supervised by Kite or David Nelson, the Croatan National Forest’s chief fire officer. Nelson’s fire crews actively suppress fire-starts in the national forest but also beyond the Croatan’s boundary to extinguish them before they spread.
Spring is typically the most active season for wildfires in the Croatan National Forest, Nelson said. The threat typically eases with summer rains starting in May and June.
This year, however, June and early July were dry and Nelson’s team was still “staffed up,” Nelson told CPP on July 11 at the Croatan National Forest district office in New Bern. “The lines are blurring when the fire season starts and stops.”
In between peak times for tourists in the area, Nelson and his crew conduct prescribed burns in sections of longleaf pine and wiregrass habitat. The agency’s fire-prevention strategy is to treat areas with controlled burns to create a buffer between the hot burning pocosins and communities.
That tactic proved successful when, on April 20, 2023, the initial column of flames of the Great Lakes Fire fizzled once it hit thousands of acres of forestland burned under Nelson’s supervision in 2022 and 2023.
Ecosystem restoration to limit fire
On Sept. 11, 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated $5 million to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in Croatan National Forest and its neighboring communities.
The expanded work of the U.S. Forest Service’s Wildfire Crisis Strategy is funded by the federal Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
In July, The Nature Conservancy North Carolina chapter received $67.8 million from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program to conserve and restore peatlands in the Pocosin Lakes and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, located further north along the coastline.
The funding will help conservationists add to more than a decade of ongoing peatland restoration, including a shovel-ready project on the Angola Bay Game Land in Pender County managed by the NC Wildlife Resources Council. The 7,500-acre landscape includes sections of intact and drained pocosins.
In partnership with the WRC, The Nature Conservancy will install a network of 37 water-control structures and raise the elevation of roads to retain rainfall and maintain the water table within the pocosins, which are elevated wetlands with dense vegetation. This should reduce the flammability in some pocosins and other dry peatlands, especially after human intervention to drain them in past decades.
Angola Bay Game Land is a high-priority restoration target since it connects to other conservation areas, including the Holly Shelter Game Land and forestland within Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Angola Bay’s elevation and distance from the coast also protects the pocosin from saltwater intrusion and the impact of rising sea level.
“The restoration work really aims to bring ecological function back to these systems and make them more resilient,” said Eric Soderholm of The Nature Conservancy.
The project will help pocosins retain moisture in the soil to reduce the risk of a wildfire and enhance their stormwater storage function, “preparing them and protecting them from drought conditions and extreme storms so they aren’t as vulnerable to a catastrophic event that could cause (an ecological) system to collapse,” he said.
Towards a community mitigation assistance team
The Great Lakes Fire was 100% contained by early May 2023, but it continued to smolder for months. Into the summer, fire crews continued to pump water into the sizzling pocosins to raise the water table to ensure that the layers of flammable organic soil remained saturated.
While the fire seethed in the organic peatland soil, on May 15, 2023, a convoy of vehicles left the Great Lakes Fire’s incident command center in a strip mall in New Bern. Connected by radio, Nelson narrated a tour past housing developments and into the Croatan National Forest to demonstrate the wildfire’s impact and its threat to nearby communities.
Among the passengers was Hannah Thompson-Welch of the North Carolina Forest Service. As one of the state’s two mitigation specialists, a primary duty of her job is convincing people to prepare their homes for the threat of wildfire. Thompson-Welch is responsible for 50 counties in the eastern half of the state. Another specialist oversees North Carolina’s 50 western counties.
Thompson-Welch’s enthusiasm for discussing fires is evident. While she’s well-versed in fire fuels, patterns, and terminology, often rattling off acronyms and fire lingo, she takes care to explain wildfire concepts in a way that nonexperts can easily understand, including a synopsis of the national wildland cohesive fire management strategy.
The strategy, she explained, is best described with a three-ring Venn diagram: building resilient landscapes is one circle; a second is safe and effective wildfire response, and establishing fire adapted communities, the third. The trio of goals in tandem form a strategy that builds local capacity to address wildfire risk.
Fire adapted communities, the third wheel, is the space where Thompson-Welch spends most of her time.
“It’s a lot of pressure on a mitigation person to try to influence the change that needs to happen before a big fire occurs,” she said. “We are ranked No. 1 in the nation of acres in the wildland urban interface, and that’s where a catastrophic fire could occur.”
Her objective is to demonstrate “how close people live to an area that has the potential to burn.”
In July 2023, while driving her pickup with CPP, Thompson pointed out hazards in Bluewater Rise, a community of nearly 1,000 single-family homes at the southern boundary of New Bern and at the edge of thousands of acres of pine forest and swampy vegetation of the Croatan National Forest.
Enclosed by wood fences, the backyards stretch out in orderly rows, creating uniform, segmented patches of green grass.
Some of the homes in the subdivision have flammable landscaping, such as bark mulch or pine straw, close to their foundations, making them vulnerable to fire. Wood privacy fences directly attached to homes can act as wicks, potentially leading flames back to the structure if they catch fire.
Additionally, grassy lawns and fields become a fire hazard in dry, hot periods of the summer, increasing the risk to nearby homes.
Thompson-Welch points to a new home’s fence line and suggests low-cost ways to minimize the risk of wildfire spreading.
“To separate the wick from where that fence connects to the home,” she said. “If they had one piece of metal, then it breaks the chain of the wick of the fence to the house.”
The convoy of vehicles in May 2023 following the wildfire also stopped at Bluewater Rise and marked the beginning of a collaborative effort to build capacity around a more unified response to preventing and responding to future wildfires.
The drive through followed the US Forest Service’s request for a Community Mitigation Assistance Team, or CMAT, to work closely with the Great Lakes Fire Incident Management Teams to identify mitigation opportunities.
In 2016 a string of devastating fires affected the southeastern United States. More than 50,000 acres burned in the fall of 2016 during an extreme drought. Among them was the Chimney Tops 2 wildfire, covering 18,000 acres in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, spreading to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, killing 14 and damaging 1,400 structures.
The following year, Thompson-Welch was invited to a series of training sessions to introduce her to the CMAT concept and learn best practices.
“I’ve kind of been steeped in it ever since,” she said. “One of the most exciting things that have happened with the Great Lakes Fire is that we have engaged the planners here in this area. Now we have an audience with them. It gave them a chance to see the impact and scrub their feet in the dirt.”
A better planning approach
“It was really eye-opening seeing the efforts of firefighters and the reality of how close it was to getting into some of our residentially populated areas,” Strawn said. “The fire was still smoldering, and you could still feel the heat.”
Craven County is currently updating its land-use plan in order to predict development patterns and identify potential conservation areas to serve as buffers between wooded areas and homes.
“We’re trying to see what actually fits for our community and works for everyone,” Strawn said.
“First and foremost is keeping it in mind just how close we were to the fire and the need to take some of these proactive measures into thought when retrofitting homes or developing within the WUI.”
Building codes are under the direct authority of the state of North Carolina. Counties must abide by codes that the NC Building Code Council adopts. Within the Office of State Fire Marshal, the council has 17 members appointed by the governor.
However, Craven County can develop ordinances to establish standards for the development and subdivision of land. Forming new development regulations will require a united front with neighboring municipalities and counties, Strawn said.
“That’s part of the whole group effort that we’re working on so we can come together collectively to look at the different types of recommendations to put in our subdivision ordinance,” he said.
Recently, the CMAT was formed into a more formal structure and renamed the Croatan Fireshed Partnership; Thompson-Welch is serving as chair. Among the group’s initial goals is to assess and provide mitigation strategies to 15,768 individual parcels in Craven County. That effort will begin this winter.
The hard sell, Thompson-Welch said, is convincing people to make changes to their homes voluntarily to make them more fire resistant. When smoke is engulfing your home and fire-engines are screaming past, it’s easy to imagine a homeowner making immediate changes. Once the urgency wears off, it’s a different story.
“You have to pitch this and tell people why it’s important,” she said. “They’re concerned at the moment, but we have a very short window to do something before they forget.”
In addition to individual adaptations to homes, the Croatan Fireshed Partnership will also advocate for common-sense guidelines for future developments, such as ensuring adequate firefighter access to neighborhoods. The also want to ensure that when policymakers approve development, they account for the potential wildfire risk.
“(If) we’re going to get ahead of the climate change curve, collaborations will be everything,” Scheller said. “If you’re thinking about a landscape, and managing the whole landscape, you just cannot do it one landowner at a time. Coordinated effort and those collaborations are absolutely essential.”
“(If) we’re going to get ahead of the climate change curve, collaborations will be everything.”
Rob Scheller, N.C. State University professor of forest ecology
New technology may also support the coordinated effort of the Partnership.
Purdue University, for example, is using digital forestry tools to identify high-risk areas that could affect population centers and infrastructure. Remote sensing technologies, for example, can determine the probability of wildfire in specific locations. Satellite data and artificial intelligence can potentially identify future fire stations and fire hydrant locations.
The NC State Center for Geospatial Analytics has designed FireHydro, a computer model, to allow fire managers to map fire risk and to plan prescribed burns to predict the likely direction and extent of a wildfire.
Among the most pressing challenges on the state’s coast is the steady influx of people, drawn to its natural beauty, mild climate and outdoor lifestyle. With scenic beaches and abundant recreation nearby, new housing developments like Bluewater Rise are inevitable.
But they also contribute to the wildland-urban interface, where forests and homes meet.
The Great Lakes Fire served as a harsh reminder of the present danger.
Thompson-Welch put it bluntly: “everyone was concerned when the smoke was at their back door.” The challenge now is turning that moment of fear into lasting action, ensuring communities are prepared before the next fire strikes.
“I want to leave this place better than I found it,” she said, suggesting that there’s expanded capacity: both financially and organizationally.
In the face of climate change, population growth, and unpredictable fire seasons, the lesson from the Great Lakes Fire and other recent blazes is to build resilient landscapes, make thoughtful decisions about where we live, and strengthen partnerships to safeguard communities.
“We’re all starting to sing from the same page of music,” she said.
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