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Fire crews taking on new strategy to fight still uncontained wildfire in Hyde County
PONZER, N.C. — More than a thousand acres of land in Hyde County are still burning today, five days after the Ferebee Road fire began.
Emergency crews have launched a new effort to knock down the fire, which has been only 12% contained since Wednesday.
A spokesperson for the NC Forest Service said 1,088 acres were burning as of Friday afternoon due to the brush fire, which was started by a lightning strike on June 19.
The land impacted is part of a private reserve called the Carolina Ranch, and emergency officials said the fire hasn’t caused injury or burned any structures.
But responders on the site of the fire said hot, dry and windy conditions have allowed the flames to push past lines of containment and continue to smolder.
“Difficulties with the fire is it is a remote location, there’s not water, water’s two or three miles away,” incident commander John Cook said. “So it’s a hard operation to get enough water to put out where the area’s on fire.”
Their latest plan: setting up pumps in two nearby lakes to dump thousands of gallons of water into the area.
Owners of the Carolina Ranch said the land where the fire began was part of an active carbon farm, and the moisture-rich soil has helped to limit the spread of the flames.
But with the forest still smoldering, emergency crews told WRAL News their main concern would be limiting the impact of smoke on nearby communities.
“When it gets bad enough, it can cause problems on the highway, it can cause visibility issues late at night, things like that,” Cook said. “So these are all things that kind of linger that we’ve got to take into consideration.”
“A remote location’s good because there’s not that risk to immediate houses, but it’s not like we can leave it alone,” he continued.
A spokesperson for the NC Forest Service told WRAL News they hoped the new water pumping effort would get the fire contained completely within the next several days.