Officials work on plans to rehabilitate N.C. fire zone

By Ryan Hutchins

PONZER, N.C.

The damage caused by the 41,355-acre wildfire that's burned here stretches on for miles.

What should be lush forest in the middle of northeastern North Carolina's farm country has been reduced to fields of debris.

The charred black and brown soil is littered with uprooted trees, burned branches and smoldering pine needles. Many of the trees are Atlantic white cedar - some that had been petrified in peat-laden soil.

And while wildfires are a natural part of an ecosystem's cycle, blazes like the one that's been burning since June 1 can do significant damage, according to Sue Wilder, a regional ecologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"When it does occur at this level, it's fairly catastrophic," Wilder said in a phone interview Thursday.

She and state officials are in the early stages of creating a plan to rehabilitate the area.

The plan also will involve places where hundreds of firefighters and heavy equipment have damaged land and roads.

The sandy lanes that run through the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and around nearby farms are rutted and uneven - still being pounded by crews trying to stop the fire, which started nearly five weeks ago during a lightning storm.

In some areas, bulldozers have created "potato patches" - roughly 40- to 50-foot-wide containment lines. High-volume pumps have damaged the edges of streams and lakes used as sources of water for flooding operations.

The fire still burns underground and in the interior, sparking up on the edges from time to time.

But once it's mostly extinguished - from rains or by burning out - efforts will be made to fix the damage done by workers.

"We'll hopefully leave it the way it was before we got here," said Bill Pickens, a North Carolina Forest Service worker and the fire's new plans section chief.

He showed a draft of a rehabilitation plan Thursday morning at the incident command center.

It had been created by the last planning crew, and Pickens said much of it would change and be built upon as the fire calms down and better damage assessments are made.

The team will use GPS

technology to map out specific areas damaged by suppression efforts, such as locations where potato patches were made or heavy pumps were placed. Once the areas that need to be fixed have been identified, crews will make the changes.

Wilder, speaking in general terms about recovering from fires, said that fixing the suppression damage is one of three parts typical to fire rehab.

The second part involves emergency stabilization, such as fixing weakened roads and hills.

"We don't usually have a lot of those kind of damages here," she said.

The last area involves longer-term efforts to rehabilitate the forest land.

That's a process that will take years of work, mostly by federal employees working in the refuge.

"We might try to plant some Atlantic cedar," she said.

The fire, which now is contained, has caused no damage to structures and has burned about two dozen acres of farmland. Property owners may be able to seek help through the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Full restoration plans won't be done until the fire is out. Firefighters still were trying to improve containment lines Thursday afternoon, dousing some smoldering areas, constructing sprinkler systems, and preparing to flood some land with water drawn from a canal system.

Near the intersection of Gold and Evans roads, a flare-up consumed an entire tree - roughly 40 feet tall - in a matter of seconds. It's nothing out of the ordinary.

"We're just kind of waiting for the folks on the ground to tell us they're fairly comfortable with us moving in there," Wilder said.

Ryan Hutchins, (252) 441-1627, ryan.hutchins@pilotonline.com