The 47-day fall wildfire season in Virginia ended at midnight Wednesday with much-needed rain across most of the Commonwealth. However, Patrick County and the Town of Stuart, as of the time of publication of this article, don’t plan to lift area burning bans until the county sees more rain.
From October 15 through November 30, statewide, Virginia Department of Forestry crews responded to 172 wildfires that burned a total of 5,501 acres on privately-owned land.
The firefighters protected 412 homes and other structures, but four homes and 22 other structures were damaged.
“With drought conditions, warm temps, low humidity and high winds, we dealt with a number of difficult fires this fall,” said John Miller, VDOF’s director of fire and emergency response.
Because of the wildfire risk, 29 counties and six towns/cities put burn bans in place. As of Thursday morning, the counties of Lee, Rockingham and Smyth along with the City of Staunton rescinded their bans.
“Because these burn bans were implemented by county and municipal governments, those same government entities must rescind or cancel their bans,” Miller said. “The Virginia Department of Forestry did not put the burn bans in place and does not have the authority to rescind the bans put in place by local governments.”
To battle the 172 wildfires this fall, VDOF used full-time agency personnel; a number of part-time, on-call wildland firefighters; five crews from the Department of Corrections; paid and volunteer firefighters from numerous localities, and other agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service.
Miller said, “We greatly appreciate the help provided by our partners, and we also want to thank all of the citizens and businesses who provided us with food, water and other kinds of assistance while we were out battling a number of these wildfires that took several days to suppress.”
