A team from the Shawnee National Forest may be headed to Tennessee to help battle raging wildfires near the Great Smoky Mountains that have reportedly killed three and forced thousands to evacuate.
Scott Crist is a fire specialist with the Shawnee. He says his team is on standby if needed. Crist says the vegetation, hardwoods and pines in the Shawnee are similar to the Smokies, but he says there is more undeveloped land in Tennessee.
"Here, we have what we consider to be big areas of undeveloped, or wild, land fuels where a fire could have a lot of room to move. Well, they have way more over there. So, if the fire is in a remote spot, and if it's burning aggressively, it may get to be fairly big before they even get to it. Whereas, we tend to get to our fires fairly soon here."
Crist says he can't say a large fire like this could never happen in the Shawnee, but he says it's unlikely.
"I would say every year in southern Illinois there are probably some structures lost due to wild land fire. Frequently, it may be a shed or a barn or something that's stemmed from someone accidentally burning leaves or something like that and it gets out of control. But, the large scale fires where there's a lot of property loss and a lot of impact to the community, they're fairly rare."
Crist says recent rains have reduced the fire danger in the Shawnee National Forest. But, he says the fire danger can change quickly.
"We have a network of weather stations that takes the information and some software that calculates what the fire behavior might be and we use that to help determine what our fire danger is and some of our staffing for it. But, we recalculate that every day."
A spokesperson for Great Smoky Mountains National Park said the fire was likely human-caused, though investigators are still trying to pin down more specific details.