A massive Lincoln County wildfire believed to have been started by sparks from a lawnmower on Saturday roared back to life earlier this week before dying back down to smoldering embers Tuesday evening.
The East Lincoln fire has consumed at least 400 hundred acres in what has been the area’s biggest fire over the drought-stricken summer.
The blaze started off of Garnet Trail and spread south to Sauls Road and Bronze Drive Southeast.
The Mississippi Forestry Commission sent wildland firefighters to the blaze, and they were able to contain it Sunday before it apparently rekindled Monday and jumped fire breaks.
Video posted to social media Monday showed a wall of towering flames reaching into treetops near a firebreak.
By Tuesday evening, the fire appeared to be contained again. Thick smoke enshrouded farmland and yards in the area as embers smoldered in thick woods and on cutover. Planted pine trees along the roadsides were charred only a few feet up and appeared unscathed above that.
More than half of Mississippi, including everywhere south of Interstate 20, is under a burn ban.
Pike County supervisors on Friday extended the county’s burn ban through Sept. 29, and it’s likely to get extended again when the board meets that day.
Pike County hasn’t had measurable rainfall in more than two months, and the extended forecast calls for continued high heat, low humidity and winds up to 10 mph — all conditions favorable to wildfires.
Firefighters in Pike County have been tending to brush fires on a near-daily basis, Civil Defense Director Richard Coghlan said, adding that a 20- to 30-acre fire is typically the norm.
While officials allege that some of the fires have intentionally been set, including a large fire that burned in east of McComb last month, others have had more unintentional origins. One recent fire outside Summit occurred after a truck tire blew, sending sparks from the rim into dry grass. A safety chain dragging from a truck caused another fire on River Road, Coghlan said.
“It doesn’t take much right now,” he said. “It’s normally hard to set a fire with a cigarette, but right now, you flick a cigarette out and it’ll catch the woods on fire.”
Three or four Pike County fire departments were battling a large fire off Highway 48 east of Magnolia on Tuesday afternoon.
“It sounds to me like it’s 20 or 30 acres and that’s not unusual for it to get that many in this kind of weather,” Coghlan said. “Sometimes it’s way back in those woods and they can’t get to it.”
Coghlan said some of the fires have intentionally been set.
“We’ve had a lot of people still burning trash” — an activity that is illegal in Mississippi regardless of whether a burn ban is in place, he said. “They’re most likely going to get a ticket. The sheriff’s department has written a lot of tickets in the last two or three weeks.”
Coghlan said no homes have been destroyed in the fires.
“None of the fires have destroyed property, with the exception of maybe a shed here and there,” he said. “They’re keeping that off of the buildings.”
Coghlan said the situation has been taxing on local volunteer firefighters, not to mention departments’ already thin operating budgets.
“In the last two months they’ve burned enough fuel that we wouldn’t have burned in six months, and diesel is so high,” he said. “When you’ve got to run all the way down from Sunnyhill to Progress, that’s burning a lot of fuel. They’re managing, but it’s going to be tight the rest of the year.”
