The Two Thousand Sixteen Chimney Tops Fire
Near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
In late November of two thousand sixteen, after a brutally dry autumn, the Smokies burned. It began on November twenty-third as a small fire at Chimney Tops inside the national park. For days it smoldered, and then hurricane force winds arrived.
On the night of November twenty-eighth, the fire exploded down the mountains and into Gatlinburg, the resort town just up the road from here. Embers flew for miles. Roughly fourteen thousand people fled in the dark, some driving through walls of flame.
When it was over, fourteen people had died and roughly two thousand four hundred homes and buildings had been damaged or destroyed. It was the deadliest wildfire in the eastern United States in decades. Investigators said the fire had been started by two teenage boys who dropped lit matches during a burn ban.
Two juveniles were charged with aggravated arson, but the charges were later dropped, in part over questions of evidence and jurisdiction. Out of the ashes came one of the more remarkable acts of the disaster. Within about forty-eight hours, Dolly Parton's Dollywood Foundation launched the My People Fund, promising a thousand dollars a month for six months to every Sevier County family that had lost its home.
In the end the fund distributed nearly nine million dollars to more than nine hundred families, and the region's recovery slogan became simply, Mountain Strong.
