Fire Near Lynchburg... Or Not

I work inside all day on Friday. So when a friend called me and asked if I knew anything about where all the smoke was coming from, I didn't know what she was talking about. But when I left work, sure enough, a bad smelling smoke was in the air.

So I did a little bit of googling, and this is what I found: it appears that the smoke is coming from a swamp fire in South Eastern VA, in a place called the Great Dismal Swamp, a wildlife refuge that crosses the VA-NC border. The fire started due to lightning, and was first reported last week Thursday (August 4th). It has grown to 5793 acres as of today. Looking at the Wikipedia article, the fire is burning about 5% of the swamp's acreage. A number of stats and an up-to-date article (as of today) are available here, including counts of personnel and equipment currently fighting the fire (230 people as of today).

The reason for the smoke in the Lynchburg area is a change in wind direction sometime within the last day or so. Recent reports of smoke in Halifax County have been tied to the fire, according to this article.

From the previous article I found out about this site, which has some original source (government) information on the fire. The best part is the map that shows the area of the swamp that is actually on fire.

However, the most impressive image, in my opinion, is this satellite photo showing the smoke visible from space. That photo appears to have been taken before the change in wind direction.

This is reminding me of a recurring thought whenever I hear of wildfires in the States--I read an article in high school that said that the "Smokey the Bear" policy on fires forests was actually leading to worse fires. The article said it is actually better to let small fires burn, because that clears out fuel that is otherwise left for larger fires. If the small fires are stamped out with German precision, the fuel just builds up, leading to larger, more widespread fires, than if the natural chain of events was allowed to follow a reasonable course. I don't know whether or not this Dismal Swamp fire is a result of the "Smoky the Bear" attitude, but I do wonder.

I tried a quick Google search on Smokey to see if that would lead me indirectly to the article I read in high school, or something similar, only to discover that even Wikipedia mentioned the concept in its article on Smokey. It appears that the article I read represents a trend over the last 10 to 20 years away from the old Smokey who said that any fire is a bad fire, to a new Smokey, focused more on preventing wildfires, than on ecologically good (and even necessary) small fires.

One of my intuitive evidences for agreeing with the idea that it is good to have small fires is that growing up in South Africa, I remember every winter there would be occasional "veld fires" that would burn up a few acres at a time and then die. It was not uncommon to drive around towards the end of the winter and see blackened fields all over the place. But we more frequently heard of wildfires in California and Australia in our local news than we heard of wildfires in South Africa. I think both of these things stem from the antithesis of the Smoky-the-Bear mindset. In South Africa, we would give fires a bit more room to do their business (within reason), and in the end we would have a number of small fires as opposed to one large fire. Again, I don't know the reality behind what I perceived, but that has contributed to my agreement with the less intense Smokey Bear concept.