Wildfire season is here. Helene and DOGE could make it worse.
Thousands of downed trees still litter the hillsides on and around Elk Mountain in northern Buncombe County, and residents are worried that once all the wood dries out it will pose a significant fire hazard. Watchdog photo by John Boyle.
Limited resources and tricky topography already pose challenges. Now those problems have been exacerbated.
When Chris and Sara Evensen bought their home off Elk Mountain Scenic Highway in 2018, they felt like they’d hit the natural beauty jackpot: a nice home on two acres, ensconced in a gorgeous hardwood forest.
Now they fear their slice of paradise has become a tinderbox.
Like a scythe-wielding giant, Tropical Storm Helene felled hundreds of acres of woodlands that surround them. Last month, a truck working on storm recovery on the mountain clipped a power pole, igniting a fire along the Elk Trail neighborhood.
The blaze was contained, but it validated the fears of the Evensens and their neighbors. Their anxiety has only flared in the weeks since then, as high winds buffeted the mountains and fanned wildfires in western North Carolina and beyond.
“Fires are starting really easily,” Chris Evensen said. “That’s pretty much the center of conversation up where we’re at.”
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As Western North Carolina enters its spring wildfire season, fire officials and other experts warned in interviews with Asheville Watchdog that a collision of meteorological and political factors could make for perilous conditions.
Fire season begins
Fires start and spread easily in the dry, windy weather typical to the region this time of year. Debris from Tropical Storm Helene, including hundreds of thousands of acres of downed trees across the state, threatens to fuel fires and hinder the crews trying to put them out. And in a realm where resources often run thin even in politically stable times, recent cuts to federal agencies including the U.S. Forest Service could limit both fire prevention and response.
And Western North Carolina has a lot of wildfires. Between 1997 and 2020, the 21 counties that make up the region saw more than 9,000 fires burn more than 148,000 acres, according to Steven Norman, a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. More than half started as debris burns.
“This is important to know because we now have a great deal of tree debris from Helene,” Norman said. “We’ve got to deal with that safely.”
These mountains have two fire seasons: One from October through December, another from March through early May. As winter gives way to spring in Western Carolina, humidity levels drop. With trees still bare, the sun, up a bit longer each day, has an easy path to the forest floor, where it bakes leaves, grasses and twigs into easy fuel. As flowers and shrubs blossom, they suck up the moisture that remains in the ground.
Foresters rely on weather fronts to dampen the land every week or so, said Greg Yates, who retired in 2018 as the North Carolina Forest Service’s regional forester for the western third of the state. Miss one, and it’s an “active fire situation.” Miss several, “then things really start getting dried out,” Yates said, and it’s no longer just the little stuff — what foresters call “the fnes” — feeding flames.
“You go from having the quarter-inch-and-less wood available and contributing to the fire, to an inch, to three inches, to six inches,” he said. “All that just builds on intensity.”
These conditions, in any year, make it easy for a spark to become a wildfire. Depending on who you ask, this year’s season arrived either slightly prematurely — Buncombe County Fire Marshal Kevin Tipton pegged it to an unusually early brush fire in Leicester on Feb. 4 — or right on cue, with several substantial fires igniting around the state during the last week of February. Over the following week, according to the North Carolina Forest Service, more than 2,000 acres burned across North Carolina, though rain Wednesday provided some relief.
“By tomorrow,” Philip Jackson, a spokesperson for the state agency, said, “it’ll be as if we never got that rain, because things dry up real quickly.”
Recent conditions would presage a more-active-than-usual fire season on their own merits, said Riva Duncan, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a forest fire manager in North Carolina’s national forests before retiring at the end of 2020. But 2025 is poised to be an abnormal year in many ways, Duncan and other experts said. It’s why Yates, asked for his impressions on the months ahead, responded: “Just glad I’m retired.”
Helene debris complicates tricky terrain
North Carolina’s terrain makes for tough fires. It has more places where forested land mingles with development — what’s dubbed the “wildland-urban interface” — than any other state, and most of its residents live within these in-between zones. Buncombe County is rife with these areas: Town Mountain near downtown Asheville, the Bee Tree community in eastern Buncombe, Reynolds Mountain in Woodfin. These are the places Tipton thinks of when he imagines a worst-case scenario.
The mountainous topography creates its own challenges. In the valleys, tunneled winds send fire hurtling forward. In the hills, blazes can quickly scrape the sky.
“Fire goes uphill — the steeper it is, the faster that fire is going to run,” said Duncan, who was working in the national forests during the destructive fire season of 2016. “Fire just gets up and goes here.”
In the wake of Tropical Storm Helene, the landscape has become even harder to manage. The National Interagency Fire Center cited Helene as the source of “the most notable concerns” as it predicted above-normal fire potential along the path of devastation the storm cut from Florida’s Big Bend across the southeast and into Appalachia. The expanses of fallen trees — what firefighters call “blowdown” — can create an impenetrable barrier.
“Like taking a handful of toothpicks and scattering them, dropping them in a pile on a table,” Tipton said. “They’re not all facing in one direction.”
Landslides and floods have further isolated already-remote areas; many of the old logging and farm roads that fire crews rely on for access, especially when trucks and heavy equipment are involved, have been rendered impassable or disappeared entirely.
“You have those roads that are blocked with just a boatload of trees — thousands of trees,” Yates said, mentioning a hundred-year-old access road on his own property in Madison County that’s no longer usable. “Keeping the fires small is all about getting to them quick. Any of those delays can add up.”
Buncombe has some of the region’s largest blowdowns, Norman said, citing satellite images and aerial photography. Much of it, he said, is on south- and east-facing slopes, the same places that tend to burn hottest in wildfires.
The largest pieces of debris pose more of a problem for access than they do as fuel, Duncan said. Downed hardwoods can hold moisture for months after they fall, and they’ll become more worrisome the longer they sit, drying into tinder for the autumn fire season and into 2026. But a hot, slow-moving fire sitting near blowdown could speed up the process, as radiant heat parches the wood and turns it into copious fuel for a hungry blaze.
Tipton has already had to call aerial support for one fire that was unreachable because of blowdown. Jackson said state crews have battled fires among fallen trees in McDowell and Polk counties. With access points shut off, especially in western Carolina, the state relies more on crews that can hike in on foot and set fire lines by hand. That means they could be slower to respond to fires that have more fuel to feast on — ”there are literally mountainsides that experienced complete blowdown,” Jackson noted — and will in turn burn hotter and spread quicker.
Will federal layoffs worsen cycle of resource drain?
These circumstances could conspire to fuel a cycle of resource drain. Slower responses mean bigger fires. Bigger fires call for more personnel, more equipment. The more occupied those crews are, the harder it becomes to respond to new fires, and so on.
A particularly active fire season, then, could strain a state fire workforce already spread thin. Vacancies pockmark the state forest service, Jackson said. Some entire counties — such as McDowell, the site of recent fires — are without any state fire personnel.
The current fire danger map shows “extreme” risk for Asheville, Buncombe County, Henderson, Transylvania, Madison and Polk counties. The risk of wildfires is “very high” this spring throughout the rest of western North Carolina. U.S. and North Carolina Forestry Services map
Low income and burnout have created a self-perpetuating pattern. Pay for the state forest service’s first responders starts at $35,000 a year, barely over the poverty level for a family of four in North Carolina. Many of these rangers and forestry technicians work extra hours to fight fires, but they receive compensation for this overtime in the form of comp days rather than extra pay. But actually using that time is hard, Jackson said, because fire doesn’t take days off, and when these workers are able to take time off, they often spend it taking jobs to fight fires elsewhere to make ends meet.
“They run into the ground,” he said. “They’re not leaving because they want to. They’re leaving because they have to, because the money does not allow them to live.”
It’s too early to say how job and budget cuts from the federal level could affect state fire response, Jackson said. But the U.S. Forest Service, which is responsible for managing fire on federal lands, will face imminent challenges, Duncan said.
Though primary fire personnel have been nominally exempt from layoffs, much of the Forest Service’s firefighting is done by employees with other jobs who are certified to help fight wildfires. Those workers are especially important in the eastern U.S., where fire workforces are smaller than they are out west, Duncan said. They haven’t been spared the axe.
Federal firefighters from the western states, now in their off-season, have arrived in the east to provide support, she said. But whether the Forest Service would have the resources to fight multiple large fires at the same time remains an open question.
And because fire doesn’t respect jurisdictional boundaries, the federal squeeze could affect other agencies that often battle fires alongside federal personnel. The state forest service “literally ran out of resources” in 2016, Yates recalled, because many federal firefighters from elsewhere had already been sent home for the season when severe fires broke out.
“We wouldn’t have that this spring, but what are we facing as far as resources go now?” he said, adding that the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency is “going to wreak havoc with resources.”
Those federal layoffs could also stymie prescribed burning, an important fire-management practice that requires an intensive legal compliance process, with experts such as biologists and archaeologists signing off on burn plans, Duncan said. Those burns — which also take place this time of year — are crucial for lowering wildfire risk and nourishing wildlife.
“It’s an ecological tool,” she said. “Fire in the right time and place is very important.”
Homeowner: Two years to clear out all the downed trees
The Evensens accepted high winter winds as an inevitability when they chose to live atop a largely exposed ridge on Elk Mountain. But Helene erased the windbreak that served as their protection.
Chris Evensen said meteorological equipment on the property has recorded gusts as high as 86 mph. Now, when it blows, they leave their upstairs bedroom and sleep atop the concrete foundation in the basement, hoping no embers are carried on the wind.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood remains covered with what Chris vensen can see only as fuel.
“All the neighbors are working on their own houses, trying to get the stuff cleared from the immediate area of the houses,” he said. “There’s just so much that if I was doing it myself, it would take me two years to get a lot of that. I’m talking like giant poplars that are hundreds of years old — thick enough that I couldn’t even wrap my arms around them, and they just completely uprooted.”
A drone photo above Elk Mountain in summer 2024, juxtaposed with drone photo of Elk Mountain after Tropical Storm Helene. The “blowdown” flattened an entire slope and downed trees are now potential fuel for wildfires. Chris Evensen photos
He and his wife hope that maybe the neighborhood can work with a logging company to take away downed timber for free, and that some kind of organized governmental plan emerges to remove all the blowdown. The worry about fire never ebbs, but they want to stay on the mountain.
Norman noted that 98% of wildfire ignitions in the mountains are human-caused. He and other fire officials advise residents to take small steps to protect their homes from fire, such as cleaning their gutters and clearing leaves and combustible vegetation from around the house. But the best thing they can do is the most obvious, experts said: Don’t start a fire. That means being especially cautious of cigarette butts and fireplace ashes and cognizant of running equipment that could cause a spark. And it especially means resisting the temptation to set Helene debris ablaze.
“I know people are aching for some normalcy and being able to get that big pile of junk out there that reminds them every day of what they went through, there’d be some great satisfaction on a number of different levels of putting a match to it,” Yates said. “But now is not the time.”
He nodded to the so-called “Swiss cheese model” of risk management, which posits that catastrophes originate not from a single cause but from many layers of behavior, each with their own small failures.
Low humidity. High wind. A foolish decision to light a match. Bad weather, blocked roads. A crew that’s exhausted, inexperienced, short-handed. A fire that’s growing now, getting bigger and hotter and moving fast.
“How many holes have to line up before it starts getting ugly?” Yates said. “That in a nutshell, brother, is what used to keep me up at night when the wind blew.”
(Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at 828.337.0941, or via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The Watchdog’s local reporting during this crisis is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication.)
