Fire danger remans high in the Carolinas, but badly needed rain on the way

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.

Transcript

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.