A devastating wildfire in Georgia that destroyed more than 50 homes this week has highlighted how climate change and other factors are making wildfires more intense, frequent and damaging in the Eastern United States, fire scientists say.
Wildfires on the Rise in the East
Often considered primarily a problem for Western North America, wildfires are increasingly affecting the East, driven by a combination of climate change, record drought, and vast amounts of dead trees left by Hurricane Helene in 2024. So far this year, 2,802 square miles (7,258 square kilometers) of the United States have burned in wildfires — much of it in Nebraska, an unusual area for massive fires — that's 88% more than the 10-year average for this time of year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. This comes as significant parts of the country experienced record warmth during winter and drought in March and April.
“The warmer we get, the more fire we see. Longer fire seasons, more lightning possibly, and drier fuels,” said fire scientist Mike Flannigan of Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada. “I think we're going to see more fire in the East. We're seeing more intense fires.”
Increasing Fire Activity in the Southeast
The number of large fires, their likelihood, and the amount of land burned have increased in most of the Southeast United States from 1984 to 2020, according to a 2023 study by University of Florida fire ecologists Victoria Donovan and Carissa Wonkka.
“The fires in the East historically and today are a lot smaller than in the Western United States, so they might not always grab as much attention as those out West. But we’re starting to see now this shift in dynamics in the East, we’re starting to quantify it,” Donovan said Thursday. “Even though the changes that we're seeing in the East are much smaller than we're quantifying out West, we think it's extremely important to start to get ahead of this problem now.”
Three months ago, Donovan, Wonkka and other fire scientists created a new network for fire researchers to study Eastern fires because some issues learned out West may not apply in the East, Wonkka said.
The Wildland-Urban Interface
Even though the West has larger and more noticeable fast-spreading fires, the East has more people in the path of flames in what scientists call the wildland-urban interface (WUI). “We found that 45% of all large wildfires in the East burn some portion of the wildland-urban interface and 55% of the area burned so that a lot of these large wildfires are associated with WUI fires,” Donovan said. Additionally, forests in the East are denser and less likely to be thinned than those in the West.
Hurricane Helene Created a ‘Ticking Time Bomb’
A week ago, federal and state officials looked at the drought, weather, and millions of dead trees from Hurricane Helene in 2024 and issued an advisory to watch for fires, said Nick Nauslar, a National Weather Service fire science and operations officer at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. “They are thinking, you know, they could see more fires, more resistance to control with the fires that they get,” Nauslar said. “It has been warmer and drier than normal across many of the areas where Helene caused damage. So there’s the potential there. You have an excess of fuel available because now (the trees are) dead and at the mercy of weather and climate. And then if you get dry and windy conditions, if you get an ignition, it’s more likely to ignite and spread.”
In Georgia alone, 13,954 square miles (36,142 square kilometers) of forest land was hit by Hurricane Helene, downing more than 26 million tons of pine and 30 million tons of hardwood, according a November 2024 University of Georgia and Georgia Forestry Commission timber damage assessment. “Many of us have worried about fuel buildup post-Helene. It’s a ticking time bomb,” University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd said.
Dry Air Makes It Worse
But it's not just downed trees — dry air also increases the likelihood of fires. It's not just a lack of rain, but the air itself is less humid, causing problems, Nauslar and Flannigan said. “As we warm … the atmosphere’s ability to suck moisture out of dead fuel, not live fuel, but dead fuel, increases almost exponentially as temperature increases,” Flannigan said. “The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start, means more fuel dried and is available to burn, which leads to higher intensity fires that are difficult to impossible to extinguish. That's what we're seeing now starting to make inroads into the East,” Flannigan said. Human-caused climate change is clearly playing a role, he said.
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