The 2016 Gatlinburg Fires

The summer of two thousand sixteen was one of the driest on record in the southern Appalachians. By November, the drought had lasted long enough that the forest service was reporting extreme fire danger across the region. Streams were low. The understory was brittle.

On November twenty-third, a fire started on the Chimney Tops, a rocky outcrop above Gatlinburg visible from the valley. For several days it smoldered, contained by the park's firefighters. Then on November twenty-eighth, the wind arrived.

Wind-driven fires in a drought landscape move faster than most people understand until they have seen it. By the night of November twenty-eighth and into November twenty-ninth, embers were crossing ridgelines and landing in the resort city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the neighboring community of Pittman Center below. The evacuation warnings came in many cases too late. Fourteen people died. Seventeen thousand acres burned. More than two thousand structures were damaged or destroyed in a city whose entire economy depends on hotel rooms, shops, and restaurants.

The Chimney Tops trail above the fire's origin point was permanently changed. The ridgeline view that made the trail popular now looks out over a burn scar that will take decades to fully recover. The trail itself was reconstructed and reopened after years of closures.

The National Park Service's post-fire analysis linked the conditions that enabled the fire's extreme behavior to the prolonged drought of two thousand sixteen, and noted that drought patterns of that intensity in the southern Appalachians were consistent with long-term climate trends. That is not a political statement. It is what the fire investigation said.

Gatlinburg rebuilt. The town's tourism-based economy returned faster than most observers expected. The burn scar above it did not disappear.