North Carolina’s wildfire threat has reached crisis levels in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, with state officials warning legislators that the Forest Service cannot handle what’s coming. That is according to testimony delivered Thursday to the Joint Legislative Emergency Management Oversight Committee, where senior forestry officials and the state fire marshal laid out the scale of the problem — and didn’t soften the verdict.
Forestry officials conservatively estimated that Helene damaged 822,000 acres of timber when it swept through western North Carolina. Satellite imagery now suggests the true extent was considerably greater.
State Fire Marshal Brian Taylor told the committee he does not believe the agency is ready for what the next 15 years will bring. “The fire service manages in chaos, and we will not fail — that’s just our mentality,” Taylor said. “But I don’t feel that we are currently ready for the fire risk, fire danger that we have in the next 15 years.”
Deputy State Forester Kevin Harvell told legislators that from the air, entire stands of flattened trees are easy to spot — forest and logging roads rendered completely impassable. “Firefighters quite literally have to cut their way through to the fire,” Harvell said. Every delayed response, he added, puts more homes and lives at risk.
Last year’s Black Cove fire illustrated exactly what that looks like in practice. When a downed power line sparked the blaze in Polk County in March 2025, Helene’s remnants fuelled it for days — it took several weeks and crews from 20 states to bring it under control, with more than 3,500 acres burned.
And that is not an outlier. State Forester Greg Hicks told the committee that North Carolina has averaged 4,600 wildfires a year over the past decade. “Yesterday alone there were 94 wildfires across the state — it was a fire day, hot, dry and windy — and 434 acres burned,” Hicks said.
The agency’s capacity to respond is thinning just as the risk intensifies. In many counties, the NC Forest Service operates with just three staff — a county ranger, an assistant ranger, and a heavy equipment operator — meaning a local fire department is frequently the first unit on scene.
Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler has confirmed 100 positions are currently vacant. Pay is the core issue. A forest technician starting on US$39,115 a year may find themselves on that same salary a decade later, with no step increases tied to experience. A forest fire equipment officer earns between US$32,700 and US$45,000 annually.
Henderson County Emergency Services Director Jimmy Brissie said the vacancy problem runs right across the state. “Almost every county has a position vacant,” Brissie said. “That means it takes much longer to get additional resources in place when there is a large fire.”
Republican Representative Mark Pless of Haywood County — a former firefighter — was direct about what understaffing costs ultimately. “You’re going to be there for days and days trying to get it put out,” Pless said. “And that’s not an incident that needs somebody with three or four years of experience. It needs people who’ve been out there for a long time, saving lives and saving property.”
The Helene-felled timber is expected to keep wildfire risk elevated in western North Carolina for at least a decade. The state also carries more wildlife-urban interface acreage — where housing intermingles with undeveloped wildland — than any other in the country.
It comes as Wood Central reported that the US Forest Service and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission finalised a US$290 million Good Neighbour Agreement to accelerate Helene recovery — the largest of its kind ever approved by the agency. And whilst that funding represents a significant commitment on paper, the workforce to deliver it is shrinking. Wood Central reported that the US Forest Service is under-resourced and ill-equipped to execute the Trump administration’s domestic timber agenda, with DOGE cuts and mass firings stripping state agencies of the on-the-ground workforce they rely on when large blazes cross jurisdictional lines.
Hicks said the agency’s priority for this legislative session is fixing the pay structure. House Bill 599, which would lift NC Forest Service salaries by 7.5 per cent, has been introduced in the legislature. Whether it passes will go some way to determining how ready North Carolina actually is — and forestry officials are not confident the state can afford to wait.
