Fire burned through marsh grass piled up in Hurricane Dorian flooding, officials say
As Hurricane Dorian made a glancing blow at North Carolina’s coast, it brought strong winds, lots of rain and storm surge.
Flooding through the Cedar Island Refuge pushed piles of marsh grass up onto the road, video shows. Those grasses dried out since the storm, and turned into a wildfire that grew to about 35 acres over the weekend, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The refuge, on the Pamlico Sound just inside from Cape Lookout National Seashore on the Outer Banks, is in a rural area with one main road, NC 12, passing through.
Officials declared the fire controlled on Sunday, but some people “may see smoke from interior pockets for the next few days,” according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Cedar Island has about 11,000 acres of marsh in the refuge, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Marshes like the Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge will naturally burn every 1 to 3 years, the Fish and Wildlife Service said, but a lack of wildfires in these types of environments in recent years has actually hurt the ecosystem.
Hurricane Dorian hit North Carolina on Sept. 6 as a Category 1 storm. While the state was spared severe flooding seen in recent hurricanes, some parts of the Outer Banks, most notably Ocracoke Island, had severe damage from storm surge and winds.
