There's little relief for fire raging in the Carolinas right now, but the last two days of March could bring some much-wanted rain.
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00:00One of the big stories lately has been wildfire activity in the Carolinas and especially in
00:06the high ground where the growing season starts a little bit later, the dormant vegetation
00:11from winter, it takes some time to green up.
00:14Now with that said, we have a much more challenging situation on our hands this spring and probably
00:20for the next five or six springs, if not longer than that, because there's a lot of dead timber
00:25that's not going to get any new life.
00:26A lot of trees have been felled by Hurricane Helene six months ago, so there's a lot of
00:31extra fuel laying around for fires and again, that dead timber is no longer connected to
00:37the roots, there's no more moisture coming into the trunks of those dead trees, so that's
00:41going to be fuel for any additional fire in these areas here, western North Carolina.
00:46Some of the logging roads may not have been priority number one to open back up either,
00:49so we've got some issues.
00:50Now we are seeing modest steps of containment there with the Black Cove fire and the Deep
00:55Woods fire now between 10 and 20 percent containment.
00:57Yesterday at this time, they were at zero percent, so those air drops and efforts on
01:02the ground are proving effective, but we've got a lot of work to do still with the Table
01:06Rock fire, zero percent containment.
01:08It's been dry in Florida too, fire danger continues there, so it's not just the Carolinas
01:13that have been dealing with this.
01:14We'd love to see some rain.
01:15Saturday, we're still dry, most of the weekend will be dry in areas east of the mountains.
01:21Now Sunday's going to look a little bit different, we'll begin to see some moisture stream in,
01:24but it takes some time before we get there.
01:26You can see almost all the moisture diverts to the north through Virginia and stays west
01:30with that strong high pressure system just kind of keeping it at bay.
01:33Saturday, a couple of sprinkles, I just don't want to count on too much out of this year
01:37in the fire areas.
01:38Here we get into late Saturday night, Sunday morning, we'll begin to see some improvements.
01:42Charleston, South Carolina has been running dry too, less of a fire threat here, but we'll
01:46begin to see some showers at least on Sunday, a greater chance for stronger thunderstorms
01:50late Monday in this area.