Neighbors unite to save homes

SAND RIDGE -- Johnny Smith hopped on his ATV and rode into the woods until he saw wild turkeys running the other way. He knew the fire was closing in. When the gusts blew, you could hear the roar.

He poured dishwasher soap into the 300-gallon tank for his pressure washer, hopped on a tractor and began to spray as he re-cut firebreaks around a pasture. The soap made the water stick, so less could do more.

Tom Sutphin, who works for him, hopped on another tractor to help cut the breaks. Tuffy Rast and other neighbors down the road climbed on their tractors and went to work, cutting breaks and setting small backfires.

Anything to keep the flames from their homes, their barns, their horses and livestock.

They were at it when gusts of 20-30 mph on Thursday evening pushed the fire through their woodland neighborhood of a half-dozen or so homes. Rast watched it come in from three directions around his log home.

"When it came through here," he said Friday, pointing to the smoking charred ruin of pines on both sides of the road, "it was 20 feet high with flames."

When it reached Smith, the flames were shooting 20 feet high from the treetops.

The neighbors in this small Dorchester County community worked side by side to save each other's homes Thursday evening and night when the 1,247-acre fire, now called the Sand Ridge fire, blasted through.

Crews from Norfolk-Southern Railroad property nearby arrived to help. Fire trucks rolled in and professionals told residents they should leave, but they stayed put.

"Wading through alligators, that's all I can say," Smith said with a tight grin. "The whole community, everybody who could do something, came together."

They were not alone. Firefighters from a half-dozen volunteer stations or more converged on the blaze. S.C. Forestry Commission crews joined them.

At Sand Ridge on Friday, the pine woods was scorched. In spots, columns of smoke rose and sporadic stumps were in flames. A small fire erupted and crossed the firebreak line at mid-day, but was put out.

Crews continued to make what Scott Hawkins of the forestry commission called desperately needed improvements to the firebreaks.

A black ring of cindered pines circled Rast's pastureland, and the grass was charred across one of the pastures. But Sutphin had helped save his chicken pens and stalls, at one point battling fire already underneath a storage container.

Rast's property was largely safe. So was the neighbors'. A mobile home set back in the woods lost its skirt to the flames, but Sutphin and others battled back the blaze and saved the place.

"Almost got by us, man," Sutphin said. "It roared all around us."

On Thursday as the fire closed in, Jason Merchey set free the chickens in his small clearing and evacuated, hoping for the best. After Rast had saved his own place, he went down the road between them and set a backfire on his own property to stop the advance of flame, and saved Merchey's place.

"They did a good job protecting my property and stopping a fire that had burned for hours and hours," Merchey said. The property owners were meticulous enough about it that the tractors cutting fire breaks worked around a stand of wild blueberries, so as not to kill the fruit.

"Most people, if they grew up in the country, most of them know what to do," Rast said.

Hawkins, of the forestry commission, said the agency does not endorse people setting their own backfires to try to control a blaze, but property owners have the right. "By law, they have to notify the forestry commission," he said.

But by that point, commission crews were already on scene, fighting the wildfire.