Mopping up Grand Strand wildfire

MYRTLE BEACH - The black cloud that had risen out of the pines behind Steve Erb's home was gone. Lying in bed on a sunny Sunday morning, he thought the fire had moved on. Then he heard the Black Hawk helicopter coming in low.

The massive fire on the edge of Myrtle Beach was nearly all contained Sunday after burning through nearly 20,000 acres and destroying or damaging more than 150 homes.

Firefighters moved into a dual "mopping up" and prevention mode, spending the day scurrying from one pop-up fire to another and cutting fire breaks through the dense woods.

Though the fire is estimated to be 85 percent contained, firefighters will work in the area for several weeks before they consider the situation to be under control.

Sunday, they were cutting the breaks behind the fire, worried that the blaze could flare up again and go the other way.

Winds were forecast to turn from the south Monday and come in from the Northeast, picking up speed. That would put the sprawling Carolina Forest community in the cross hairs, the place between the beach and Conway that Lois Edwards of the S.C. Forestry Commission described as 'all the subdivisions in the world.'

Erb's house sits right at the wood's end of Carolina Forest, where pines overhang his backyard. The firebreaks were being cut only a few miles away.

It was unsettling, to say the least, two days after watching the black smoke pass.

"This thing lights up and I'm done," he said. "This is one way to get rid of a mortgage."

The Forestry Commission still had all of its people and equipment at work on Sunday, but support from area fire departments had been cut in half.

Down the road from Erb's house where firefighters were cutting the breaks, radio traffic wasn't about flare-ups. It was about lunch.

"Everybody's taking a deep breath. We feel like we've got a handle on it," said Forestry Commission firefighter Michael McGill, who had been battling out in the woods since Thursday night. But firefighters realize that having a handle on it could change in a hurry, he said.

'It's long, hot, nasty dirty work,' said firefighter Sammy Connell as he jumped from a truck into the dust again and pulled out the hose to spray down another smudge of smoke.

"It's been rough. It's been a lot of long days and hard days. Everybody's tired, and we're missing our families," said McGill, who is from Anderson in the Upstate. He's been battling the blaze since Thursday with four or five hours sleep at a time.

By Sunday, firefighters were not only chasing pop-up fires. They were chasing sightseers from the hot woods, where smudges of smoke rose like campfires from black tree trunks that looked like a photo negative of a winter woods.

Terry Cook is one of two firefighters who survived when the fire turned and burned over them as they crouched in survival blankets. By Sunday the reality of what happened had sunk in.

"I think from now on I just want a desk job," she sighed, smiling. But she and the other firefighter who escaped, Wayne Springs, stood awaiting orders.

"I'll go back in if they want me to go," Springs said.

The fire was a freak. Fireballs popped high in the trees and jumped over some sites to devastate others. One resident in hard-hit Barefoot Resort figured his house was lost and moved his car to a cul de sac by a pond, where he thought it would be safe. The car burned; the house didn't.

The blaze was so big and unpredictable that firefighters on Sunday were surprised at how quickly they stopped it.

The effort had been so frantic just a few days earlier that a man in Barefoot Resort running four hoses to keep his house doused had to give one to scrambling firefighters.

S.C. National Guardsmen called for helicopters from North Carolina because so many of theirs were deployed to Iraq.

The peat bogs and pines that make a tinderbox of the region around Carolinas Parkway were bad enough. Firefighters also faced piles of pine straw in carefully landscaped subdivision yards where fire erupted and raced.

Edwards of the forestry commission tightened her lips and gave a nod when asked how intensive development could occur in the spot where the worst wildfire in the state's history happened in 1976.

"We knew it was going to happen," she said. "The people moving in didn't."

On Sunday, U.S. Highway 501 out of Myrtle Beach was packed with traffic, not people fleeing fire, just vacationers returning home. At the gate of Hillsborough subdivision, a fountain spewed. Along the road front to either side, the pines were charred.

On Sunday afternoon, Steve Erb was out in his driveway washing his truck. Just last weekend he had been in his back yard burning yard debris, doing the same thing that started the fire in a homeowner's yard only a few miles away.

Erb thought of that as he looked up at the pines.

"The smoke just hovered in the pine trees," he said. "You ever light up a Christmas tree as a kid? It's a torch. Never again am I gonna burn back there. Never, never again. I'll pick it up and put it in the garbage."

Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.