‘We still have a town:’ Life on the edge of Louisiana’s biggest wildfire

MERRYVILLE – As one of the largest wildfires in Louisiana history raged through the pines toward Kathy DeVille’s house, the retired teacher’s phone buzzed with calls from her former students.

“I could hear that fire roaring,” said DeVille, who spent decades teaching in the town of Merryville, near the Texas line. “When I came outside, all my little fifth graders had showed up as grown men, all wanting to help.”

Two of them brought bulldozers. They cut through the trees, scraping a line deep in the soil between her backyard and the fire. The flames lapped at her barn and kennels, where her husband breeds hunting dogs, but stopped short at the bulldozed border.

Corralling the rest of the Tiger Island Fire happened much the same way, with fleets of bulldozers playing an outsized role compared to the wildfire responses in the West, where fires are fought mostly with hand tools and large groups of firefighters on foot.

“It’s a dozer show here,” said Vicky Edge, a Georgia firefighter and operations manager for the Southern Area Incident Management Team, an inter-agency organization that took command of the Tiger Island firefighting operation last Sunday.

The firefighting crews and heavy equipment sent from around the South and as far away as California and Vermont tackled the fire in much the same way as DeVille’s bulldozer-ready pupils. Bulldozers cut wide fire breaks around a swath of forest just as flames neared the towns of Merryville and Singer in Beauregard Parish. The response also made heavy use of helicopters and airplanes, which dropped huge volumes of water and retardant on the fire.

Close call

The strategy has worked — at least for now. While the fire has held at just over 30,000 acres for much of the week, firefighters say there’s a high likelihood flames will spread if the area is hit with wind gusts of more than 15 miles per hour. As of Friday afternoon, the fire was 50% contained.

A mandatory evacuation order for Merryville was downgraded to voluntary last Sunday. By Thursday morning, the town of about 1,000 people was taking its first cautious steps toward normalcy. Stu’s Grill, one of Merryville’s two restaurants, reopened, and a group of retired men were taking their usual spots at a long table. This northwest corner of Beauregard is timber country, with lumber and paper mills backing much of the economy, but many old timers couldn’t remember seeing the forest burn like it has the past couple weeks.

“We’ve never had anything of this magnitude,” Gary Barrett said. “The way the trees burned — they went up like paper towels.”

Barrett and his wife evacuated after sheriff’s deputies banged on their door at midnight and urged them to leave. But his fellow Stu’s regular, Chuck Beard, didn’t flee.

“Why not? ‘Cuz I’m an a**hole,” he said. Beard did, however, prepare to evacuate by loading his truck with a few provisions and his “best guns.”

He admitted it was a close call.

“We better be glad they sent helicopters and airplanes,” he said. “Those things saved this place.”

Gabe Kemp, a volunteer firefighter in Merryville, said he raced from his day job in DeRidder, about 20 miles away, when he heard that burning embers had drifted into town and started a fire 20 feet from his family’s home. He arrived to find a helicopter dousing the flames.

“It was scary,” he said. “We’re fortunate we still have a town.”

About 20 buildings, including homes and barns, have been damaged by the fire, which state investigators on Saturday declared to be arson. No serious injuries have been reported. 

South vs. West

Of the more than 260 firefighters and support personnel at the fire, 28 are helicopter pilots and nearly 50 are bulldozer operators. Hand-crew firefighters common in the West numbered just 23.

A similar-sized fire in Oregon has about 1,000 firefighters and is costing $1.4 million per day. The Tiger Island Fire has required about a quarter as many firefighters at a daily cost of about $725,000.

“This response is mostly mechanical,” Edge said while watching bulldozers use V-shaped blades to knock down trees and push soil into berms to block the fire’s spread.

Most Western wildfires are on varying and remote terrain that would be difficult for bulldozers to access. It would also be exceedingly expensive to fly aircraft to Western blazes as frequently as firefighters have for the Tiger Island Fire, which is near several ponds, lakes and rivers.

Cutting a bulldozer line in Arizona or Wyoming would likely leave a lasting scar on the landscape, but in the fecund green spaces of the South, bulldozer lines usually grow over within a few years.

“Our land heals because of all that moisture,” Edge said before remembering just how usually dry Louisiana has been. Wracked by a long-running drought and record-breaking heat, the soil moisture levels in Beauregard Parish are close to a desert’s, she said.

As she spoke, a bulldozer tried to shove a pine over by its roots but snapped it like a toothpick.

“Hear that popping sound?” Edge asked. “The trees shouldn’t be doing that.”

The pine’s heartwood, which would normally be damp and sappy, was dry like firewood that’s been curing outdoors for years.

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‘Never been this dry’

Hot, dry conditions and thousands of trees toppled by Hurricanes Laura and Ida have made much of Louisiana ripe for wildfires. About 600 wildfires burned across the state last month. That’s about how many wildfires the state typically gets in a year. The Tiger Island Fire is likely the largest wildfire in nearly a century.

People in Merryville say the conditions are unprecedented.

“My family’s been on this land since 1902,” said DeVille, whose property includes about 100 wooded acres. “It’s never been this dry.”

While Louisiana is getting hotter, drier summers thanks to climate change, the densely planted character of its forests adds to the growing wildfire risk.

About half of Louisiana is covered with farm-like forests that are often crowded with rows of a single tree species. This density and lack of diversity tends to make wildfires burn hotter and faster.

While the Tiger Island Fire was in a lull this week, it could easily flare up and begin threatening nearby communities again, Edge said. The incident management team may have to stay until late October unless soil-soaking rains sweep through the region and deal Tiger Island a death blow. 

DeVille is praying for a rainstorm, but isn’t going to budge if all she gets is more fire.

“I’ll watch this place burn or I’ll watch it be saved,” she said.