Upon seeing images of the devastation caused by wildfires that for weeks have ravaged the Hawaiian island of Maui, leaving death and destruction in their wake, Joe Gosiewski called his granddaughter who lives roughly 100 miles west on the island of Oahu to make sure she was safe.
But in that moment, the family also couldn’t help but mentally relive their own tragedy from 14 years earlier when a wildfire consumed their North Myrtle Beach home.
“My heart and my gut hurt,” Gosiewski said. “I felt so bad. My wife and I had flashbacks.”
The Barefoot Resort resident still gets emotional talking about the events that occurred in the early morning hours of April 23, 2009, when Horry County residents, too, would know what is was to flee from a flame.
While wildfires in South Carolina don’t often rage to the extent seen other regions, the Palmetto State has had major blazes over the years, including two in recent history.
Driving through flames in North Myrtle
Gosiewski, a former Barefoot Resort Residential Association board member and president, recalls being awakened by the sounds of North Myrtle Beach firetrucks and police car sirens and public safety officials going door to door on Windy Pines Drive, telling residents they needed to evacuate immediately.
“They were driving through flames,” he said. “The houses on (nearby) Club Course Drive were already in flames. The fire was 60 feet high, as tall as our trees. It was creating its own fire tornado.”
Gosiewski and his wife Nancy only had the chance to grab themselves and their cellphones. The fire destroyed everything else they had, including their home.
“We pulled out of the driveway and I put down the garage door and my wife said, ‘My car, my car,’ because her car was still in the garage. I got probably 60 feet down the street and I looked in the rearview mirror and I said, ‘Honey, we ain’t going back because the lot next to us is on fire.’ “
Gosiewski said he is grateful for the city’s quick response and the help they received in the aftermath of the fire.
“If it was not for public safety, firefighters and the city of North Myrtle Beach, we would be dead,” Gosiewski said.
In fact, no lives were lost in the blaze. Although firefighters had to take shelter within their fire shields, everyone came through without injury.
Wayne Cordiner (left) and Kyle Cahill, from the St. Johns Fire Department, sift through the rubble of a home that was destroyed by the wildfire at Barefoot Resort in North Myrtle Beach on April 24, 2009. File/Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
Residents of Hawaii, particularly in the historic town of Lahaina, have not been as fortunate.
The death toll in Hawaii has risen to 111 and more than 1,000 people are unaccounted for. Gosiewski listened on the phone as his grandaughter, Carly, told him of people who went into the ocean to escape the blaze and haven’t been recovered.
The causes of the Maui fires have yet to be officially declared, but reports and video have emerged showing an electrical malfunction and spark from a power line may have started the first of the blazes reported on Maui last week. The flames were fanned by powerful winds from Hurricane Dora over drought-stricken grasslands in the central part of the island.
By comparison, the fire that over took the Gosiewski’s house in Barefoot Resort — a North Myrtle Beach community of more than 2,500 homes, condos, golf villas and townhouses — was started when a Conway resident was burning yard waste and lost control. Firefighters responded and thought the fire had been extinguished, but it later reignited and spread.
Commonly known as the Highway 31 Fire, it would go on to burn more than 19,000 acres, leveling 76 homes and damaging 97 others, causing $25 million in property damage and $17 million in agricultural damage over the course of nearly a month.
Humans cause SC fires
“Almost every fire we go to is human-caused; they aren’t naturally occurring,” said Darryl Jones, forest protection chief at the S.C. Forestry Commission, the lead agency to respond when a wildfire breaks out anywhere in 13 million of the state’s roughly 20 million total acres, or about 65 percent of South Carolina’s land mass.
Jones said about 55 percent of wildfires in South Carolina come from outdoor burning that gets out of control, someone burning leaves or pine straw trying to clean up their yard. Another 20 percent is from arson. The rest are attributable to miscellaneous causes — a downed powerline, a vehicle in high grass. Lightning strikes account for less than 2 percent.
Between 2,000 and 3,000 wildfires break out in the Palmetto State annually, burning about 20,000 acres and 50 homes. The average size varies from year to year — 6 acres in a slow year, 25 acres in a bad year, Jones said.
Wildfire season in South Carolina stretches from late winter to early spring — peaking in February through April.
“There are days in that time of year where we’ll have 100 or more wildfires in one day,” Jones said.
South Carolina has a long growing season and gets a lot of rain — 55 or 60 inches a year. But in the fall, plants go dormant and dry out. In January, high-pressure weather systems blow in, bringing low humidity and high winds.
Federal researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say climate change has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States, where rising heat and extended drought doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015. And from 2020 to 2022, above-average acreage was consumed by wildfires.
Jones said he thinks more data needs to be collected on South Carolina’s fire season, but over his more than 30 years fighting wildfires, he’s noticed the season has gotten longer, starting earlier in January and later into May.
“We’re going from normal conditions to really dry and bad conditions quicker than we used to,” he said. “It’s not like it used to be and things are more extreme.”
State Rep. William Bailey was the director of public safety for North Myrtle Beach when the Highway 31 fire burned. So when he turned on the national news and saw flames and smoke billowing out of homes and businesses in Maui, his thoughts ran back to April 2009 when police officers and firefighters were trying to hold off flames at Barefoot Resort with sprinklers, water hoses and whatever equipment they could grab at the time.
“It’s a horrible, helpless feeling that I hope very few people ever have to go through because I’m telling you, I went home that night, once we got a break where I could change clothes,” Bailey said. “I just stood in front of the sink and threw up.”
Bailey said the devastation of the Maui wildfires is overwhelming, especially with the loss of life.
“We were very fortunate, I think, because we were able to get the cars moving out of Barefoot and getting them away from the fire, where it appears in this particular fire those cars didn’t have the same ability to move around and get where they needed to go,” Bailey said.
More than 7½ years after the Highway 31 Fire, South Carolina would experience its largest-ever mountain fire at Pinnacle Mountain.
Mountaintops on fire
Pierce Womack was the Pickens County deputy director of emergency management during the November 2016 fire. He currently holds the same title in Greenville County.
Early on, he said, a statewide call for help went out, bringing an extra 200 firefighters every day to help. Firetrucks were stationed in nearby neighborhoods in case falling ash were to ignite any fuel such as leaves on a roof or dry grass.
Again there were no fatalities or major injuries to homeowners or firefighters.
Rachel Snuggs was a freshman studying forestry at Western Carolina University, nearby in North Carolina. She remembers walking to class and looking out to see the mountaintops on fire.
Firefighters battle the Pinnacle Mountain fire in the Upstate in 2016. The blaze, which started in November of that year, took weeks to control, becoming the largest mountain fire in South Carolina history. S.C. Forestry Commission/Provided
The Pinnacle Mountain Fire, started by some Boy Scouts camping in Table Rock State Park whose campfire got out of control, was one of a series of fires burning across eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia and western North Carolina at the time.
Now Snuggs is a forester with South Carolina’s state parks charged with managing the forests within those parks, including wildfire mitigation efforts.
In an effort to reduce the occurrence of wildfires that spread out of control, S.C. Forestry conducts controlled burns across the state, with about half a million acres burned prescriptively each year, Jones said. And controlled burns are routinely conducted in 16 of South Carolina’s 47 state parks.
“Fortunately for us, the landscape is in better shape than a lot of the U.S. where they don’t do a lot of active management and they don’t get the ability to burn,” Jones said.
Snuggs said having a history of management makes it less likely an area will be impacted in a catastrophic way when fire does break out.
But changing factors complicate these types of controlled burns.
Fire risk in SC evolving
As more people move to South Carolina and the Southeast, cities and suburbs are expanding into once-rural areas. Health concerns over smoke inhalation and trouble breathing can make burning impossible if there’s a neighborhood nearby.
Remnants of household items from homes burned in the Barefoot Landing Resort in North Myrtle Beach stand near woods on April 25, 2009. File/Grace Beahm Alford/Staff
For example, Givhans Ferry State Park in rural Dorchester County is in the path of residential growth sprawling out of Charleston, Snuggs said. And Sesquicentennial State Park in the fast-growing area of northeast Columbia is surrounded by neighborhoods, several of which back directly up to the park.
In the case of Sesquicentennial, Snuggs said foresters have instead turned to “fuel breaks,” cutting out midlevel growth in the forest to reduce burnable material and make it possible for first responders to get into areas where homes are at risk.
When a fire does break out, Jones said his team turns to heavy equipment, including bulldozers, to clear down to the dirt and contain the flames, which can be complicated in residential subdivisions or when homes are built close to tree lines.