Last fall’s Hurricane Helene brought unparalleled devastation to parts of Southwest Virginia, Northeast Tennessee and Western North Carolina.
Communities there are still cleaning up months later. The storm has long passed, but its impacts may have a long tail – potentially adding to another natural disaster this part of the world typically deals with during this time of year.
“It’s clear that Helene – the downed material from that hurricane is definitely changing the pattern and changing the risk.”
Michele Steinberg is the Wildfire Division Director at the National Fire Protection Association – a nonprofit that provides information and other resources on fire, electrical and related hazards.
She says that there is such a thing as a good fire. Ecosystems go through natural seasons when fires are more prevalent…
“Fire on the landscape does all kinds of beneficial things like returning nutrients to the soil, getting rid of dead growth and undergrowth that normally would take a very long time to rot away or be eaten by critters,” she says. “It helps clear the land and encourages certain species to grow. Animal and plant species have kind of adapted to these fire cycles that go on.”
For the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic and Southern states – the spring and fall are typically when conditions for those natural wildfire seasons are present.
“Spring typically – we have this in New England as well – where we can even get fires when there’s still snow on the ground in patches because enough things have dried out – there’s a lot of dead material on the ground. And so, if you have a nice, sunny day, you get a lot of solar heating to the ground. If you have an ignition and it’s dry and windy – you have the ingredients for a wildfire. So, you really have fuel, heat and oxygen as the basic fire triangle that exists for any kind of fire.”
Steinberg says in the natural cycle of things, trees, grasses and shrubs serve as that fuel.
“Unfortunately, when we see wildfires start to impact our communities – our homes become the fuel, our cars become the fuel. Things we have put into our built environment – if they can burn, they will in a wildfire.”
Tropical systems like Hurricane Helene can contribute to the availability of wildfire fuel when they move inland – just think of how many trees, shrubs and other greenery that get toppled and blown around as the storm passes.
“Then you’ve got a huge fuel load of all those trees down. You’re not getting the natural regeneration. You’ve got all this stuff that’s hard to move. The material is dead now or dying – it’s drying out,” Steinberg explains. “It’s a completely different scenario for the hazard itself of how much fuel is there and available to burn.”
She adds that a wildfire with more dead material to work with will lead to a more intense blaze – potentially with larger flames being able to spread further. There’s another problem additional fuel in the aftermath of hurricanes like Helene.
“[It’s] the inability for the fire service and people to get in there and cope with, extinguish and manage the fire because post any big hurricane, the first thing is to get the built environment back – get our infrastructure, our roads back. And those are the roads we are going to use every day, right? But we may not be thinking of the forest road or someplace where fire services can get in and try to maintain this in a condition where it’s not going to spread to cause more harm.”
Steinberg says emergency personnel in communities hit by Helene raised the alarm pretty early after the storm passed that there would likely be an elevated wildfire risk from the downed trees and other greenery in its wake. Western North Carolina has already seen some of its worst wildfires in more than a decade this spring – and Steinberg says there is historical precedent for this kind of phenomenon before Helene as well.
I asked her if there are some things that residents can do to help with the situation. She said folks can start by just being knowledgeable about what conditions lead to wildfires – including knowing what a “Red Flag Warning” from the National Weather Service and state agencies actually means.
“What they mean is, ‘We’ve got conditions right now. We know we have that fuel sitting there, but now it’s dry, it’s hot and it’s windy. Those are the three big ingredients that if you have fuel and an ignition, you’re likely to have a major fire start and spread quickly – and that’s what people need to be hyper aware of.”
There are also things homeowners can do.
“Within five feet of your foundation, your deck – make sure there’s nothing accumulating there – leaves, debris. Wherever things get blown by the wind like into a corner or under a deck – that’s where those embers are going to go,” Steinberg explains. “If that fuel starts to burn in the forest or anywhere nearby – those embers can be lofted by the wind, land on your property, start fires there.”
The National Fire Protection Association has plenty of resources to be prepared for wildfire season. There are also several communities across Virginia that participate in NFPA’s Firewise USA program – which allows individual neighborhoods to work together in cleaning up around homes and ensuring that shared community spaces are protected.
Virginia's spring wildfire season runs through the end of April.
CSU: An above-average hurricane season lies ahead...
A new, seasonal projection from Colorado State University shows 17 named storms for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasters with the school’s Tropical Cyclones, Radar, Atmospheric Modeling and Software Team are predicting nine of those will be hurricanes and four will be major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher.
All of those figures are higher than the 30-year average.
Levi Silvers, who helped compile the projection, says there are a couple of reasons why his team is expecting an above-average season…
“The warm sea-surface temperature in the regions where these storms form – and there’s also a few other regions in the Atlantic basin that are warmer than average right now, which traditionally have correlated with above-average seasons,” Silvers says.
‘And then also, right now we have a weak La Nina event occurring – and we either expect that to transition to a neutral El Nino event or to remain a weak La Nina event in the coming months.”
The El Nino Southern Oscillation – or ENSO – is a global weather pattern that typically results in more favorable conditions for tropical development in the Atlantic during its La Nina phase.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1st through November 30th.
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