Light up the bonfires and get rid of those burn piles. Pike County’s 31/2-month-long burn ban has been lifted.
Pike County supervisors lifted the ban at their meeting Thursday at the recommendation of Civil Defense Director Richard Coghlan.
“Mr. President, if it pleases the board, I’d like to lift the burn ban,” Coghlan said at the conclusion of the meeting.
“You’d be a popular man,” board president Lee Fortenberry said.
“It very much pleases the board,” Supervisor Robert Accardo added.
Pike County was the last county south of Interstate 20 that still had a burn ban in place, according to the Mississippi Forestry Commission.
Much of the state had been off limits to burning since mid-August, when Gov. Tate Reeves enacted a partial statewide burn ban amid an extreme drought that has left much of the state parched with unusually low humidity and high temperatures, triggering wildfires that charred more than 20,000 thousand acres of land across the state.
Reeves lifted the statewide order on Nov. 14, but counties still had the option to keep their burn bans in place.
The Mississippi Forestry Commission reported that the only remaining burn bans in Mississippi are in 18 counties that include Hinds County and a cluster of counties in the northern part of the state.
