RSS
|
Mobile
|
Daily Emails
|
We Twitter
| Make us your home page
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. -- South Carolina's forest fire chief said Friday that local firefighters thought they'd extinguished a yard blaze last weekend that rekindled days later, destroying some 70 homes and charring 31 square miles near Myrtle Beach. Officials said homes were still being threatened by the flames.
Forestry Commission Forest Protection Chief Darryl Jones said he did not know which local agency responded to the yard fire last weekend. He said firefighters doused the blaze with water and thought it was out and that the person who is being fined for burning the debris is to blame.
He said it's common for brush fires to appear to be out but then smolder underground and rekindle.
"The fire department didn't start the fire." Jones said. "Someone lit it and somebody let it escape, and that's where this all started."
The fire has scorched more than 19,000 acres since Wednesday, becoming South Carolina's worst wildfire in at least three decades. Some sections of the coastal plain have boggy bottoms where peat, if it catches fire, can burn for days or weeks.
The wildfire threatened to intensify after a lull overnight, when calm winds and firebreaks helped contain the blaze that demolished homes and roared through woods just miles from the most-populated stretch of the state's tourist beaches.
Accelerating winds were expected to feed hot spots and push the flames farther north, away from the undamaged tourist strip, forestry and county officials said.
County officials Friday morning put early damage estimates at nearly $8.3 million. No injuries have been reported.
Holly Welch, a spokeswoman for the state Forestry Commission, said the blaze was about 50 percent contained early Friday but noted that the picture could darken with the slightest change in the weather. Winds blowing inland from the Atlantic coast have been feeding the fire and pushing it north.
"Where we think we have things secured, that could all go out the window," she said.
The fire started several miles inland Wednesday and has cut a path four miles wide through tinder-dry scrubland but skipped its way through housing developments, destroying some homes while leaving their neighbors untouched.
That's not unusual because the embers can fly long distances before landing to create blazes of their own, said Mike Bocco, the state Forestry Commission official overseeing the fight.
"A lot of times, the big, raging fire that burns through a forest is not what actually burns the homes down," he said. "The wind is picking up those embers, blowing them several hundred yards into the lawns, into the pine straw mulch, around the homes, landing in that straw, igniting and burning the house down."
The fire got within 1 1/2 miles of Route 17, the main coastal road that links beachfront towns and is lined with fast-food restaurants, beachwear stores and trinket shops. By Thursday evening, the flames were about three miles west of the highway, a distance Bocco said he hoped to maintain with intensive prevention work already completed to the north.
Officials said a resident of Conway, a city about 10 miles from where the bulk of the houses had been damaged, was being fined about $760 for starting the weekend yard blaze. The person has not been identified because authorities say the citations have not been formally filed.
In the subdivision where the yard fire was set last weekend, residents asked why one person would be blamed after firefighters responded to the blaze.
"The fire department said everything was OK. Now they're charging him for it," said Burni Uber, 58, who didn't know the name of the person who started the yard fire. "The story I heard is, it's really not his fault. It's sounds like the fire department's. They're the professionals. They said everything's all right."
