When one smells smoke there’s fire, or so the old saying goes. That was true last week, but the fire was not in Gilmer County, nor was it one that had gotten out of control.
Several local residents posted their concerns on the Facebook pages of the Gilmer Sheriff’s Office and Public Safety Department about a possible large fire in the county. However, it was a prescribed forest service burn in Tennessee that caused the smoke to be seen and smelled all the way down here.
Fire Chief Daniel Kauffman said Gilmer Fire and Rescue did receive calls about the smoke last week, but there’s not much else to report as the fire was not in the county.
“We received a lot of calls regarding the smoke, but we did not respond to any calls. It appears that the controlled burn taking place in Tennessee had smoke change directions and made its way to Gilmer County. This was the first one of the year to have smoke travel this far,” he added.
The U.S. Forest Service was doing a prescribed burn of land in the Cherokee National Forest in Polk County, Tenn., Monday, April 24, when the smoke was heaviest in Gilmer and parts of Pickens County. They’ve been doing prescribed burns over thousands of acres of the Cherokee National Forest since March.
Christopher Joyner, public affairs officer for the Cherokee National Forest, said this particular prescribed burn was very close to the Tennessee-Georgia line, which contributed to the smoke traveling this far south.
“It was just over 2,300 acres and was pretty far south into Polk County,” he added.
The Forest Service and other agencies that do prescribed burns actually follow prescriptions that include certain weather and environmental conditions, and there has to be some amount of wind blowing when the burns are done, Steven Bekkerus, of the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest district, told the Times-Courier recently.
“It can’t be too windy, but there also can’t be no wind. We want the smoke to be able to get up and out,” Bekkerus said.
“We have a prescription set for what conditions are predicted. The window of prescription is so narrow. We’re looking at (factors like) smoke dispersion, mixing height, fuel moisture and a lot of different things,” said Joyner. “One of the concerns is if you don’t have enough lift (from wind) to get the smoke out of there, you end up getting what’s called an inversion, which is similar to a flue on an old fire stove. It will make it to where the fire won’t even burn.”
The Pickens Progress newspaper reported that the traveling smoke caused similar concern in the Jasper area last week, but it was learned that there was no cause for alarm. Pickens County Fire Chief Tim Prather told the newspaper the fire department there also received several calls, but he found out from the fire chief of Fannin County that a prescribed burn near Etowah, Tenn., was the source of the smoke.
Joyner noted that the Ocoee Ranger District, which includes Polk County, is nearing the end of its prescribed burn season.
“As summer goes on, we don’t do a lot of prescribed fire because the conditions and the prescription can’t be met,” he added.
Anyone can sign up for e-mail burn alerts, which give advance notification of prescribed burns in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest district, which includes Gilmer and several other north Georgia counties. The address to sign up for those alerts is FS.USDA.gov/goto/CONFemails.
To receive burn alert notifications for the Cherokee National Forest area, call the Ocoee Ranger District at 423-338–3300.