Wildfire Threat Could Burn Helene-Hit North Carolina Communities Off the Map

Months of neglect from federal officials threatened to combine the worst elements of two recent major disasters.

Fortunately, residents in western North Carolina, a region ravaged by Hurricane Helene in September and then largely ignored by former President Joe Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency for months thereafter, appear to have escaped a wildfire threat similar to the one that devastated Los Angeles, California, earlier this month.

According to Fox Weather, as of Thursday emergency crews had fully contained a large wildfire in McDowell County, North Carolina, east of Asheville, the largest city in the region and one that suffered heavy damage from the September hurricane.

Nighttime drone footage shows a wildfire glowing in neon orange as it burned on a mountainside near Old Fort, North Carolina, on Wednesday. https://t.co/lKCL444ojF pic.twitter.com/YYihXKNFsr

— FOX Weather (@foxweather) January 30, 2025

High winds in the area toppled a power line on Wednesday, causing the fire to ignite. As it grew to roughly 220 acres, it damaged a home and triggered an evacuation order. Authorities have since lifted that order.

Nonetheless, according to FOX News Multimedia Reporter Chelsea Torres, the hurricane’s devastation made firefighters’ job much more difficult.

“The emergency management of this county had said that it’s a lot of that debris from Helene and the cut-down trees, the dry brush, that’s making it challenging for a lot of these firefighters,” Torres said.

Meanwhile, WTVD in Durham, North Carolina, reported that emergency crews continued to battle a second wildfire, 200 acres in size. As of Thursday evening, crews had contained only 20 percent of that second fire.

The WTVD report, however, included no mention of additional evacuation orders. In fact, the worst appears to have passed since weather conditions improved late Wednesday, per Fox Weather.

As of Friday morning, the North Carolina Forest Service’s interactive map showed a 120-acre fire active in McDowell County that was only 20 percent contained. But the map showed no other active fire larger than 75 acres in the entire state.

In sum, the combination of good weather of good work from emergency crews appears to have averted potential disaster.

Still, one cannot help but return to Torres’ comment regarding “debris from Helene.”

Western North Carolina, of course, is a heavily wooded area. Some of that debris, therefore, might have lingered in those forests even if federal officials had made an effort to help those residents clear the area and rebuild following Helene.

The fact, remains, however, that federal officials made no such effort. Moreover, Americans learned that FEMA officials even avoided giving aid to supporters of now-President Donald Trump.

None of that comes as a surprise to those of us who have long since recognized the most salient fact of all. In short, incompetence explains only so much. Biden’s administration existed for the sole purpose of harming ordinary American citizens.

The same holds true for elected Democrats at the state and municipal levels. After all, the appalling behavior of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Democratic Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles during the devastating wildfires earlier this month made it nearly impossible to determine whether they acted from incompetence or malice.

Trump visited both North Carolina and Los Angeles last week. In The Tar Heel State, he heard horror stories from residents abandoned by Biden’s FEMA. And in Los Angeles he heard from angry homeowners while calling out Bass to her face.

The good news, of course, is that for the next four years no one needs to worry about federal neglect. Residents in western North Carolina and southern California finally have an ally in the White House.

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