The spread of the Arabia Bay fire was slowed by less than half an inch of rain, but it will take a lot more than that to put out the fire that is burning in peat, four to eight feet deep. The fire is still putting up a great deal of smoke which will continue to be a problem for south Georgia for quite a while. The smoke has required that some roads be temporarily closed and caused several vehicle accidents. As one of our site visitors reported earlier, the FAA ordered that an air show at Moody Air Force Base be cut short last weekend due to reduced visibility.
The fire has burned 867 acres and is being managed by a Type 3 Incident Management Team. Firefighters can’t fight the fire directly in the swamp, so they have used tractor plows to construct fire lines around the outside of the swamp, and are waiting for the fire to burn up to the lines, eventually burning, they expect, 5,000 acres.
The Georgia Forestry Commission is providing updates about the fire on their Facebook page.
I enjoyed listening to the soft, south Georgia accents in this video report about the fire.
