Southeast

South Carolina Fires: How to Track Every Wildfire in South Carolina in Real Time

📅 September 2026 ⏱ 54 min read ✍ US Wildfire Tracker team

South Carolina fires burn hardest between January and April, when cured pine straw, peat soils and post-frontal winds line up. The South Carolina Forestry Commission responds to roughly 3,000 wildfires a year across about 18,000 acres. This guide explains why the state burns and how to follow every incident live.

Why do South Carolina fires happen every spring?

South Carolina fires cluster in late winter and early spring because that is when the state's pine forests are fully cured, the hardwoods have dropped their leaves, cold fronts deliver dry air and gusty winds, and people burn yard debris. The South Carolina Forestry Commission names March as the state's historically worst month for wildfire.

That combination is unusual among US states, and it is why South Carolina fires get missed by people who plan around a summer season. California peaks in autumn, the Northern Rockies peak in August, but the Southeast peaks while much of the country still has snow on the ground. Anyone who assumes wildfire is a summer problem will be looking at the wrong months.

The three ingredients that repeat every year

The first ingredient is fuel continuity. Pine straw, wiregrass, gallberry and palmetto form an unbroken carpet under the canopy, so a fire that starts in one stand rarely runs out of something to burn before it reaches a road.

The second is post-frontal wind. When a dry cold front sweeps across the Coastal Plain, relative humidity can fall into the teens while sustained winds climb above 15 mph. The National Weather Service issues a Red Flag Warning when the fire danger rating is high to extreme and forecasters expect sustained winds averaging 15 mph or more, relative humidity at or below 25 percent, and temperatures above 75 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the NWS glossary.

The third is ignition, and in South Carolina that ingredient is almost always human. The Forestry Commission states that ninety-eight percent of all wildfires in South Carolina are caused by people, with careless debris burning the leading cause and woods arson second.

Those four numbers frame the problem. Fire in South Carolina is frequent and small by western standards, but the ignition rate is high enough that a single bad-weather day can produce more starts than the agency has crews. That is exactly what happened on March 1, 2025.

Why fire counts and acreage move in opposite directions

South Carolina records many ignitions and comparatively little burned area. The agency responded to only 1,264 wildfires in calendar year 2003, its lowest occurrence on record, while the twelve months from July 1, 1980 to June 30, 1981 produced 14,405 fires, the state record.

Acreage swings even harder. The twelve months ending June 30, 1950 burned 240,504 acres. February 1947 alone burned 119,169 acres, still the record for a single month. Modern seasons rarely approach those figures because detection and initial attack are far faster.

That efficiency is why a live map matters more here than the raw acreage suggests. Most South Carolina fires are caught small; the ones that are not become the Highway 31 Fire or the Covington Drive Fire, and they escalate in hours. Our fire tracker guide explains the data plumbing behind that speed.

When is the season for wildfires in South Carolina?

The season for wildfires in South Carolina runs roughly from January through April, peaking in March. The South Carolina Forestry Commission describes the state's wildfire season as "usually from late winter to early spring" and notes that wildfire occurrence is greater in March than in any other month.

A second, smaller window opens in the late fall. Autumn is generally South Carolina's driest stretch, and once hardwood leaves fall the ground fuel bed refreshes. The Pinnacle Mountain Fire, the second-largest mountain wildfire in state history, started on November 9, 2016.

The monthly record book

The Forestry Commission publishes month-by-month records going back to the 1940s. The pattern is unmistakable: fire occurrence and acreage are concentrated in a four-month block, then collapse.

April deserves special attention. The Forestry Commission has said plainly that April is historically the month when South Carolina has seen its most damaging and costly wildfires. Both the Clear Pond Fire of 1976 and the Highway 31 Fire of 2009 started in April.

How drought and La Nina shift the odds

Seasonal outlooks matter because South Carolina has no true dry season. Ahead of the 2024-2025 season, the Forestry Commission's Protection Division flagged the combination of La Nina and storm damage from Hurricane Helene, and the National Interagency Coordination Center called for above-average significant fire potential across the entire state, as South Carolina Public Radio reported in January 2025.

That forecast verified. Two months later the state had its longest-burning wildfire on record on the coast and its largest mountain fire on record in the upstate. Seasonal outlooks are probabilities, not schedules, but a stated above-normal outlook is a reason to set up tracking before the first Red Flag day.

In the five years before that season, South Carolina averaged about 1,300 wildfires annually, with 2022 producing roughly 2,000. The long-run figure the Forestry Commission cites for its own response load is about 3,000 fires a year, which includes the many small starts that never reach a formal incident record.

Who fights South Carolina wildfires and sets burn bans?

The South Carolina Forestry Commission is the state agency with primary responsibility for wildland fire on forestland outside municipal limits. Created by the state legislature on April 26, 1927, it fights fires, investigates causes, regulates outdoor burning and issues the State Forester's Burning Ban.

In 1945 South Carolina became the first southern state to offer statewide forest fire protection, at a time when the Forestry Commission owned three bulldozers, 19 farm tractors and hand tools. The bulldozer remains the signature South Carolina firefighting tool, because most of the state is flat enough to plow a fireline.

The layered response system

Wildland fire response in South Carolina is layered rather than centralized. Understanding who owns which piece explains why incident data appears on different schedules.

That last row is easy to overlook and matters a great deal. The Southern Area Coordination Center decides how, when and where orders for personnel, equipment and other resources are filled. During the Pinnacle Mountain Fire in November 2016, the incident climbed to second on that center's priority list, which is what unlocked out-of-state crews.

That layering also explains the data lag. Records for South Carolina fires reach public feeds on whichever agency schedule owns the incident, which is why a state-lead fire and a federal fire on the same day can update hours apart.

Burn ban authority under South Carolina law

Two statutes give the state its teeth. Section 48-35-50 of the South Carolina Code allows the State Forester to prohibit fires, and Section 48-35-40 allows the Governor to ban all outdoor burning during forest fire emergencies. The Forestry Commission publishes both authorities on its forest protection law page.

A State Forester's Burning Ban restricts yard debris burning, prescribed burning, campfires, bonfires and other recreational fires in all unincorporated areas of the state. It does not apply to cooking fires or to fires in appropriate enclosures such as outdoor fireplaces, chimineas and permanent fire pits that comply with state fire codes.

Enforcement is real. During the Highway 31 Fire in 2009, Forestry Commission law enforcement officers cited a Conway man for failure to notify the Forestry Commission under Section 48-35-10, carrying a fine of up to $262.50, and for allowing fire to spread to lands of another under Section 16-11-180, carrying a fine of up to $470.00.

The burn notification law most residents forget

South Carolina requires notification before outdoor burning, not a permit. State law obliges citizens to notify the Forestry Commission before burning yard debris, and the agency operates a dedicated toll-free number for each of the 46 counties, from Abbeville to York.

The notification law does not apply inside town or city limits, where local ordinances take over. Outside those limits the law also requires you to clear a firebreak around the burn site, keep adequate personnel and equipment on hand, and stay with the fire until it is completely safe.

Smoke carries its own obligation. Under DHEC Regulation 61-62.2, prescribed burning and site preparation burning are legitimate uses of outdoor fire, but the smoke must conform to state air quality standards, and the person burning is responsible for health or safety hazards the smoke causes.

What fuels make SC fires spread so fast?

SC fires spread fast because the Coastal Plain fuel bed combines fine surface litter that ignites instantly, waxy evergreen shrubs that burn hot, and organic peat soils that carry fire underground. The Forestry Commission describes the Horry County fuel type as pine overstory with a heavy understory of palmetto, gallberry, wax myrtle and other waxy vegetation in Carolina bays.

Each layer fails in a different way. Pine straw provides the flashy surface fuel that lets a fire move. The shrub layer provides the energy that makes flame lengths unmanageable. The peat provides the persistence that keeps a fire alive for weeks after the flaming front is gone.

Carolina bays and peat

Carolina bays are elliptical wetland depressions scattered across the Coastal Plain, and their soils are organic. When those soils dry out they become fuel. The Forestry Commission's own assessment of the Highway 31 Fire noted that organic soils make fire difficult to control and dangerous: fire burns under firelines, equipment bogs down, and trees fall with no root system left to hold them.

The historical record shows how long that persistence lasts. A wildfire in Carver's Bay in Georgetown County on October 7, 1983 ignited underlying peat moss and burned underground for 25 days before being controlled, having consumed only 823 acres. A 1997 Carver's Bay fire burned 3,150 acres and was contained in five days but was not declared under control until May 6, weeks later.

That behavior explains the single strangest statistic about South Carolina fires: the Covington Drive Fire held at 80 percent containment for 36 consecutive days in 2025 while smoldering peat resisted every attempt to extinguish it.

Why bulldozer lines are harder than they look

In peat, a fireline is a judgment call rather than a procedure. The Forestry Commission explains that the bulldozer blade must scrape down to mineral soil to build a barrier the fire cannot cross, but if the crust of the peat is disrupted the dozer may sink and become stuck.

The operator therefore has to judge how deep to run the blade to build an effective line without becoming trapped in it. That is why South Carolina fires in the bays often require aviation support even though the terrain is flat, and why containment percentages move slowly once the easy ground has been plowed.

Upstate fuels are a different problem

In the Blue Ridge Escarpment counties the fuel is duff, leaf litter and dead hemlock rather than palmetto and peat. During the Pinnacle Mountain Fire the Forestry Commission found duff at least a foot deep in most places, on a mountain that had not been burned, prescribed or otherwise, for as long as anyone could remember.

Dead and dying hemlocks along the Saluda River were dry enough that the 2016 fire essentially stepped across a river that drought had reduced to a stream narrow enough to walk over. Fuel condition, not fuel type, decided that outcome.

How does hurricane debris drive South Carolina fires?

Hurricanes convert standing forest into ground fuel, and South Carolina fires burn hotter and longer in the years that follow. Hurricane Hugo shattered 4.4 million acres of South Carolina forests on September 21, 1989, creating what the Forestry Commission calls the most dangerous wildfire potential in the state's history.

The mechanism is simple physics. A live tree holds its needles and branches 60 feet in the air, where a surface fire cannot reach them. A blown-down tree puts the same material on the ground, in a jackstrawed pile that dries faster than intact forest and blocks the bulldozers that would otherwise plow a line.

The Gimme 12 campaign after Hugo

South Carolina's answer to Hugo was prevention at a scale never attempted before. In 1989 and 1990 the Forestry Commission launched a campaign called Gimme 12, asking the public to voluntarily postpone all outdoor burning for twelve months. The agency describes it as the most intensive forest fire prevention effort ever mounted in the United States.

The logic was that the state could not remove 4.4 million acres of downed timber, but it could remove the ignitions. Since 98 percent of South Carolina wildfires are human-caused, suppressing the ignition rate was the only lever available at that scale.

Helene debris and the 2025 season

The same pattern repeated in 2025. Hurricane Helene had come through the southern Appalachians in late September 2024, and the Forestry Commission's account of the Table Rock Fire records an abundance of downed timber from Helene that increased the fuel load on the mountain.

Crews on that fire were photographed sawing large trees out of firebreaks because the Helene debris remained down. On steep ground where bulldozers cannot work, every downed tree across a hand line is a delay measured in hours.

Elsewhere in the Southeast the sequence has produced very large fires. Hurricane Michael destroyed 72 million tons of standing timber across the Florida Panhandle in 2018, including about 1.3 million acres of longleaf pine habitat; two years later the Bertha Swamp Road Fire burned more than 33,000 acres of that timberland, fueled by the debris.

What this means for tracking

Treat the two or three seasons of South Carolina fires after a landfalling hurricane as elevated regardless of the seasonal outlook. If your county took wind damage, assume that a fire there in March will be harder to stop than the same fire would have been three years earlier, and start watching a live map earlier in the front's passage.

What happened in the Carolina Forest fire of 2025?

The Carolina Forest fire, officially the Covington Drive Fire, started on March 1, 2025 behind homes along Covington Drive in the Carolina Forest community just north of downtown Myrtle Beach. It burned 2,059 acres in Horry County and became the longest wildfire from ignition to control in South Carolina history at 95 days.

It began as one ignition among many. The Forestry Commission recorded 102 new ignitions statewide on March 1 alone, despite having asked the public to voluntarily postpone outdoor burning because of low relative humidity, extremely dry fuels and gusty winds. That single day forced a statewide burning ban.

Day-by-day timeline

Why this fire was so hard to finish

Carolina Forest sits in about the worst place in South Carolina for a wildfire. Thousands of homes ring a forested expanse that abuts the Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve, more than 10,000 acres of Carolina bays, pine savanna and blackwater swamp. The Forestry Commission calls it perhaps the most illustrative example of the wildland-urban interface anywhere in the state.

Aviation carried much of the load. South Carolina National Guard aircraft logged 154 flight hours and made 1,192 drops totaling 1,293,300 gallons of water on the incident. Two UH-60 Blackhawks and a CH-47 Chinook worked both the active front and the forested edges next to houses.

Even so, the fire was not finished by suppression. It was finished by weather: several significant rain events raised the water table enough to extinguish hotspots that had been smoldering in the peat for weeks. Nearly 100 agencies assisted over the course of the incident, according to WMBF News.

The second fire nobody remembers

Fewer than seven miles northeast, across the same forested expanse, the Blackthorn Fire had ignited earlier the same day and was threatening homes on the northern rim of Lewis Ocean Bay. Crews contained it the next day, March 2, at 600 acres.

It pulled personnel and equipment that would otherwise have gone to the larger fire southwest of it. That is the practical meaning of a 102-ignition day, and it is the reason a live map that shows every detection, not just the headline incident, is worth having open. Our guide to reading a fire tracker map covers how to spot the second fire before it makes the news.

How large were the 2025 upstate South Carolina fires?

The 2025 upstate South Carolina fires burned 15,973 acres as the Table Rock Complex, the largest and costliest mountain wildfire event in state history. The Table Rock Fire accounted for 13,845 acres and the Persimmon Ridge Fire for 2,128 acres, and the Forestry Commission puts the total suppression cost above $11 million.

The Table Rock Fire started on Friday, March 21, 2025 as a small blaze atop Table Rock Mountain in Pickens County. Officials allege it began when a group on a hiking trail in Table Rock State Park failed to extinguish their cigarettes properly.

How a 35-acre fire became a complex

The Forestry Commission had issued a Red Flag Fire Alert on March 20, the day before ignition, because a cold front was forecast to bring extremely low relative humidity and sustained gusty winds through the weekend. The agency issued a statewide burning ban on March 21 itself.

By Saturday afternoon, March 22, the fire was estimated at 35-plus acres, with more than 30 personnel from the Forestry Commission, The Nature Conservancy, Greenville Water, the USDA Forest Service and local fire departments working to contain it. It grew to 300 acres overnight, spreading in multiple directions.

The same Saturday, a second fire of roughly 50 acres ignited in the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area between Caesars Head State Park and Jones Gap State Park. Named the Persimmon Ridge Fire, it diverted the aircraft that had been dropping water on Table Rock. By the end of the third day Table Rock exceeded 1,000 acres and Persimmon Ridge was mapped at 314 acres.

Aviation on a scale South Carolina had never seen

The steep terrain of the Blue Ridge Escarpment ruled out the bulldozers that contain most South Carolina fires, so the response leaned on aircraft. At peak activity more than 500 personnel were assigned, and the combined aerial fleet dropped 1,011,433 gallons of water on the two fires. Federal air tankers added 33,400 gallons of retardant along the active fronts.

The March 27 retardant drop by a very large air tanker was the first such drop anywhere east of the Mississippi River. That single detail says more about the 2025 upstate season than any acreage figure: the Southeast had to reach for a western tool.

How it compared to Pinnacle Mountain in 2016

The previous benchmark was the Pinnacle Mountain Fire, which started on the southwest side of Pinnacle Mountain in Pickens County on November 9, 2016 and consumed 10,623 acres before being declared controlled on December 16. The Table Rock Fire alone was about 30 percent larger.

Both fires shared the same constraints: terrain too steep for dozers, deep duff, and drought. Pinnacle Mountain required CL-415 amphibious water scoopers dipping from Lake Jocassee and dropping up to 1,600 gallons at a time, plus a Type 3 incident management team from Utah and hand crews from as far west as Oregon, California and Washington.

Neither fire destroyed a home and neither killed anyone. That outcome, twice, in terrain that would have produced a disaster in the western United States, is the strongest available argument for South Carolina's evacuation practice, which the state applies early and broadly.

How do coastal and upstate SC fires differ?

Coastal SC fires burn in flat, peat-floored pine flatwoods where bulldozers work but fires smolder for months. Upstate SC fires burn on the Blue Ridge Escarpment where terrain blocks equipment but rain ends the incident quickly. The two halves of the state require different suppression tactics and produce different tracking signatures.

The 2025 season demonstrated both at once. The coastal Covington Drive Fire took 95 days from ignition to control at 2,059 acres. The upstate Table Rock Fire reached 13,845 acres and was contained 18 days after ignition.

What the difference means on a live map

Coastal incidents produce a long tail of satellite heat detections that persist after the perimeter stops growing. An upstate incident produces a short, intense burst of detections that stops abruptly when rain arrives.

If you are watching Horry or Georgetown County, expect the satellite layer to keep flagging heat inside an old perimeter for weeks, and expect the official acreage to stay flat while it does. If you are watching Pickens or Greenville County, expect acreage to jump by thousands between updates during a wind event, then freeze.

Our explainer on what real-time wildfire data actually means covers why those two signatures look so different in the same feed, and how to avoid reading a smoldering stump hole as a new run.

Which wildfires in South Carolina were the worst?

The worst wildfires in South Carolina by size, damage and cost are the Clear Pond Fire of 1976 at 30,000 acres, the Highway 31 Fire of 2009 at 19,130 acres and $50 million in damage, and the Table Rock Complex of 2025 at 15,973 acres and more than $11 million in suppression cost. All three started from human ignitions.

The Forestry Commission also records an unconfirmed catastrophe from before modern record-keeping. On February 16 and 17, 1898, a series of wildfires swept the state; old reports indicate 14 people killed and up to 3 million acres charred from Aiken County to Chatham County, North Carolina, driven by a 40 mph wind.

The record book at a glance

The Clear Pond Fire and what extreme looks like here

The Clear Pond Fire started from an unattended campfire between Conway and Myrtle Beach on April 10, 1976. With relative humidity in the teens and winds of 20 to 30 mph behind it, the fire had burned 11,000 acres by midnight on the first day.

The next day the smoke column reached 10,000 feet and extended 200 miles over the Atlantic Ocean, visible to weather satellites. Ashes and burned debris fell as far as 40 miles north of the fire. When the wind shifted on the afternoon of April 11 it created a headfire 14 miles wide, adding another 17,000 acres before the day ended.

On April 12 the humidity dropped to 14 percent and the fire crossed a four-lane highway despite firefighters massed along it, with embers raining down half a mile ahead of the flames. The final footprint was about 14 miles long and 6 to 7 miles wide. More than 65 Forestry Commission bulldozers and 113 agency personnel from 28 counties worked the fire, and no homes were lost.

The Highway 31 Fire and the interface problem

The Highway 31 Fire is the reason Horry County plans the way it does. It was reported at 12:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 22, 2009, with the temperature at 71 degrees, humidity at 24 percent and west winds at 17 mph gusting to 30.

It made a six-mile run that afternoon to Highway 31. Overnight a wind shift drove it across Highway 22 toward Barefoot Resort, where most of the home losses occurred, and 2,500 people were evacuated during the night. At the height of the fire as many as 4,000 people were out of their homes.

The final tally was 19,130 acres, 76 homes destroyed and 97 damaged, with total damage estimated at $50 million, including $17 million in forested woodland loss. More than 700 individuals from more than 20 different agencies took part, and five National Guard Blackhawk helicopters flew water buckets. No lives were lost and no injuries occurred.

The worst week the state ever had

Between March 30 and April 5, 1966, South Carolina firefighters faced ten wildfires that each burned between 1,500 and 8,000 acres, with more than 200 new fires reported per day for about three days. The Forestry Commission still identifies that week of South Carolina fires as the worst in state wildfire history.

April 1, 1966 alone produced the 6,350-acre Windsor Fire in Barnwell and Aiken counties, the 7,400-acre Gaston Fire in Lexington County, a 5,080-acre fire in Berkeley County, a 3,000-acre fire in Calhoun County and a 2,100-acre fire in Hampton County. Resource exhaustion, not fire behavior, was the defining problem.

That is the scenario a statewide burning ban is designed to prevent. When 102 ignitions arrive in a single day, as they did on March 1, 2025, the agency's constraint is arithmetic rather than tactics.

How do you track South Carolina fires in real time?

To track South Carolina fires in real time, open a live map that fuses four public feeds: official NIFC incident records, interagency fire perimeters, NASA and NOAA satellite heat detections, and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts. US Wildfire Tracker does that fusion in one view at wildfire-map.org, free and without an account.

No single agency publishes all four. Incident records and perimeters come from the interagency WFIGS services and NIFC Open Data. Thermal detections come from NASA's MODIS and VIIRS instruments and NOAA's Hazard Mapping System GOES analysis. Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches come from api.weather.gov.

The 60-second South Carolina check

1. Open the live map and filter to South Carolina, or allow browser geolocation to show fires near you within a set distance in miles.
2. Read the fire probability tier on each marker first. Weak signals below 25 percent probability are hidden by default because they are frequently prescribed burns or industrial heat.
3. Open the nearest marker and check whether an official NIFC record is attached. A detection with no record behind it is a lead, not a confirmed wildfire.
4. Read the three timestamps: "Last NIFC update", "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat". In the Carolina bays these will often disagree by days, and that gap is informative.
5. Check acres and percent contained. In South Carolina a fire stuck at the same containment figure for weeks usually means peat, not a stalled response.
6. Look for a National Weather Service fire-weather alert over your county. A Red Flag Warning turns a distant fire into a planning problem.
7. If the fire is close, use the directions-away option to route to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze before roads close, and share the fire link with anyone who needs it.

That sequence takes under a minute once you have done it twice. It is the same procedure we describe in our guide to answering is there a fire near me, applied to a state where the answer changes fastest in March.

Why satellite timing matters more in the Southeast

South Carolina fires are frequently small, and small fires are exactly what polar-orbiting satellites miss. MODIS and VIIRS see a location a handful of times per day; GOES watches continuously but at coarse resolution. A 12-acre fire in a Kershaw County pine stand may never trigger a detection at all.

The inverse problem is worse here. During prescribed burning season, thousands of intentional fires produce thermal signatures identical to wildfires. Any tracker that does not grade its detections will fill the map with legitimate agricultural and forestry burns every February and March.

That is why US Wildfire Tracker assigns each detection a fire probability tier that fuses whether an official NIFC record is linked, how fresh the perimeter is, and how recent the satellite heat is. The app states plainly that hotspots can reflect prescribed burns or industrial heat, and lets you show the weak signals when you want them.

Keeping it running while you work

The Chrome extension listed as Fire Tracker in the Chrome Web Store opens the same map in the browser side panel or a full tab, which is the practical difference during a multi-day incident. The data refreshes automatically every few minutes while it stays open, and if a refresh fails it shows the last saved results rather than an empty map.

It is free, requires no account, and carries no ads or third-party ad trackers. Location, when you enable it, is used only to find nearby fires and is never stored, sold or shared. Setup takes about a minute and is covered step by step in our fire tracker app manual.

What layers belong on a South Carolina fire map?

A useful South Carolina fire map carries five layers: official incident markers, mapped perimeters, satellite thermal detections, National Weather Service fire-weather polygons and a road-level basemap. Each answers a different question, and in South Carolina each one fails in a characteristic way.

Reading them together is the skill that separates a useful view of South Carolina fires from a confusing one. An incident marker with a stale perimeter and fresh satellite heat means the fire is still moving. A fresh perimeter with no recent heat means it is probably done growing even if the record stays open.

The state-jurisdiction gap

Most South Carolina wildfires are handled by the Forestry Commission and local departments without federal involvement, so they may never generate a federal incident record. A tracker that only reads NIFC will therefore show fewer South Carolina fires than the state actually has.

Satellite layers partially fill that gap, which is the reason a fused map beats any single feed. A 400-acre fire in Marlboro County with no NIFC record can still be visible as a cluster of VIIRS detections with a low probability tier attached, and that is enough to prompt a phone call to the county.

Our nationwide wildfire map guide covers the same gap in other state-lead regions. South Carolina is simply one of the clearest examples, because its fire count is high and its federal footprint is small.

Which counties see the most South Carolina wildfires?

Horry County dominates the record for large and destructive South Carolina wildfires, followed by Georgetown, Kershaw, Chesterfield, Marlboro and Berkeley on the Coastal Plain, and Pickens, Greenville and Oconee in the upstate. The Forestry Commission's own chronology returns to the same handful of counties decade after decade.

Geography explains why South Carolina fires concentrate where they do. The sand hills belt runs diagonally from Aiken to Bennettsville and carries deep, droughty sands under pine. The Grand Strand puts dense subdivisions against Carolina bays. The escarpment counties combine steep terrain with drought-prone slopes.

The Horry County problem

Horry County holds the state's largest fire on record, its costliest fire on record and its longest-burning fire on record. The Forestry Commission's Highway 31 case file lists the local fire history plainly: the 1954 Bombing Range Fire at 10,162 acres, the 1967 Buist Tract fire at about 6,000 acres and the 1976 Clear Pond Fire at 30,000 acres, all in essentially the same landscape.

The same file notes that in the decade before 2009 the agency had responded to fires at Legends, Long Bay, Walker Woods, Avalon and Black Creek Plantation, all in that area. The 2002 Legends fire burned 1,648 acres. This is not a county with an occasional fire problem; it is a county with a recurring one.

Development has raised the stakes rather than lowered them. Thousands of homes now ring the forested expanse next to Lewis Ocean Bay, and the Forestry Commission calls that arrangement perhaps the clearest wildland-urban interface example in South Carolina.

How to filter a tracker by county

US Wildfire Tracker filters by state rather than county, so the practical approach in South Carolina is to select the state view and then zoom to your county, or to use the nearby-fires option with a distance you choose in miles. For most residents 25 miles is the useful radius; along the Grand Strand, where a fire can make a six-mile run in an afternoon, 10 miles is the number that changes your day.

Keep the fire list panel open alongside the map. During a multi-fire day like March 1, 2025, the list is what reveals that a second incident has appeared seven miles from the one you were watching.

Counties with formal wildfire protection plans

The Forestry Commission has completed landscape-style Community Wildfire Protection Plans for Berkeley, Horry, northern Newberry, Orangeburg, Jasper, lower Beaufort, Oconee and Pickens counties, plus Paris Mountain. More than 1,300 South Carolina communities have been assessed, and almost 642 rate at high to extreme wildfire risk.

If your community is on that assessment list, the plan itself is worth reading once. It names the access roads, water sources and evacuation constraints that a live map cannot show you, and it tells you which direction the county expects fire to come from.

What do burn bans mean for wildfires in South Carolina?

South Carolina uses two distinct instruments that are easy to confuse. A Red Flag Fire Alert is an advisory issued by the Forestry Commission that asks people to voluntarily postpone outdoor burning. A State Forester's Burning Ban is a legal prohibition on outdoor burning in unincorporated areas, and violating it is an offense.

A third instrument comes from the federal side. The National Weather Service issues Fire Weather Watches and Red Flag Warnings, which describe forecast weather rather than legal status. All three can be active at once, and they mean different things.

What a burning ban does and does not cover

A State Forester's Burning Ban does not apply to fires used for cooking, nor to fires in appropriate enclosures such as outdoor fireplaces, chimineas and permanent fire pits that comply with the state's fire codes. It does apply to prescribed burning, which is why bans have real economic cost for landowners.

Bans are also lifted county by county rather than all at once. After the March 1, 2025 statewide ban, the Forestry Commission lifted it for all but Georgetown and Horry counties on March 5, for Georgetown on March 8 and for Horry on March 10. During the Table Rock Complex the ban came off for all but Greenville, Horry, Oconee, Pickens and Spartanburg counties on March 31, and for those five on April 2.

Track the lifting schedule, not just the imposition. A county that stays under a ban after its neighbors are released is a county where the agency still has fires it cannot walk away from.

The notification requirement stays in force

Even with no ban in effect, state law requires notifying the Forestry Commission before burning yard debris outside city limits, clearing a firebreak, keeping equipment and people on hand, and staying with the fire until it is safe. The agency runs a separate toll-free number for each county.

The Covington Drive Fire arrest warrant shows what failure looks like in practice. Investigators alleged the fire pit sat close to a tree line within a subdivision, that no appropriate water source was readily available, and that no garden tools were on hand to control the fire before it spread to land owned by a neighboring homeowners association.

Does prescribed burning reduce South Carolina wildfires?

Yes. Prescribed burning is the primary tool South Carolina uses to keep wildfires small, and the Forestry Commission states the logic in one line: by removing fuel such as leaves, pine needles and twigs under controlled conditions, the chance of a damaging wildfire is greatly reduced, because if there is little fuel there can be only a little fire.

The Southeast burns more acres intentionally than any other region of the country, and that work is the main reason most South Carolina fires stay small. In South Carolina the practice is old, legal, regulated and largely conducted by private landowners rather than agencies.

Who burns and how much

The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources burns about 30,000 to 35,000 acres of forest land every year on its own properties statewide, plus another 5,000 to 6,000 acres of agricultural land including dove fields, managed waterfowl impoundments and marsh. Upland pine stands are typically burned on a two- to three-year rotation, mixed pine-hardwood on a three- to five-year rotation.

That rotation interval is the point. Fire-maintained longleaf pine stands carry low fuel loads and produce easily managed, low-intensity fires. A stand that misses its rotation for a decade behaves like the duff-covered mountain that produced the Pinnacle Mountain Fire.

Why wet years are dangerous years

Prescribed fire needs a narrow weather window: dry enough to carry, wet enough to control, with wind that will move smoke away from roads and neighborhoods. Extended periods of flooding, tropical storms and hurricanes reduce the number of suitable burning days, which means fuel accumulates in exactly the years that feel safe.

That is the counterintuitive part of Southeast fire management. A run of wet seasons is not a reprieve; it is a deferral. The Forestry Commission's Certified Prescribed Fire Manager program, offered several times a year, exists partly to expand the pool of qualified people who can use the windows that do appear.

Prescribed fire and the tracking problem

Governors of South Carolina have repeatedly proclaimed March as Prescribed Fire Awareness Month, which places the state's heaviest intentional burning inside its heaviest wildfire month. For anyone reading a satellite feed, that overlap is the single largest source of false alarms.

A prescribed burn and a wildfire look identical to a thermal sensor 500 miles up. The distinguishing signals are all contextual: a burn notification on file, a rectangular footprint aligned to property lines, heat that appears mid-morning and disappears by evening, and the absence of any official incident record.

US Wildfire Tracker handles this by hiding weak signals below 25 percent probability by default and by warning that hotspots can reflect prescribed burns or industrial heat. If you want to see everything during February and March, you can turn the weak signals on, but expect the map to fill up. The mechanics of thermal detection are covered in our wildfire tracking explainer.

How are fires handled on SC national forest land?

The USDA Forest Service manages the Francis Marion National Forest in the Lowcountry and the Sumter National Forest across western and central South Carolina, and it runs its own prescribed fire and suppression programs there. Federal incidents on those forests generate NIFC records, which is why they show up reliably on a national fire map.

The Francis Marion borders the Cainhoy, Wando and Clements Ferry Road communities outside Charleston, an interface zone that has grown quickly. The Sumter includes the Oconee County terrain where the 2,856-acre Jumping Branch Fire burned mostly on national forest land in April 1978.

Federal prescribed burning near Charleston

Residents along Interstate 526 regularly see smoke plumes from Forest Service burns in the Francis Marion during spring. The agency has stated that it uses prescribed fires throughout the year to reduce overgrown vegetation and protect local communities, infrastructure and natural resources from wildfires, and it warns that nearby roads may close for several days during those operations.

For a tracker user, this is the most common false positive in the Charleston metropolitan area. A cluster of detections inside the Francis Marion boundary in March, with no incident record and no perimeter, is almost always a planned burn.

Where federal and state responsibilities meet

Most large South Carolina fires are interagency from the second day. The Table Rock Complex drew Forest Service personnel from the start and eventually federal large air tankers and a very large air tanker. The 1991 Cumbee Bay Fire in Berkeley County burned 1,508 acres mostly on Forest Service land while the state agency ran the plow lines.

The practical consequence is that jurisdiction does not tell you who is on scene. Read the managing organization field on a fire record for the agency of record, but assume mutual aid, and expect resource ordering to run through the Southern Area Coordination Center once a complex incident management team arrives.

How does smoke from SC fires affect I-95 and US 501?

Smoke from SC fires is a highway hazard as much as a health one. The Forestry Commission's record of the Covington Drive Fire notes that heavy smoke blanketed the entire Myrtle Beach region for many weeks, affecting visibility for aircraft and motorists alike. Overnight inversions concentrate that smoke at road level.

With South Carolina fires the dangerous combination is smoke plus fog. During the Highway 31 Fire, incident managers warned nightly of an expected inversion with heavy concentrations of fog and smoke in the early morning hours, creating public safety concerns on roadways. Smoke idled overnight crews on several shifts.

Why South Carolina geography makes this worse

The Coastal Plain is flat, humid and prone to radiational cooling on clear nights. Smoke that rose during the afternoon settles into low ground after midnight and mixes with fog, producing near-zero visibility in patches rather than uniformly. The National Weather Service notes that fog contributes to numerous travel accidents every year and that visibility restrictions also affect takeoff and landing procedures for pilots.

The roads at risk are predictable. US 501 runs from Conway to Myrtle Beach directly through the landscape that produced the Clear Pond and Covington Drive fires; the 1976 fire crossed it. Highways 22, 31 and 90 in Horry County all cross the same fuel complex. Interstate 95 runs the length of the Coastal Plain through Jasper, Hampton, Colleton, Dorchester, Orangeburg, Clarendon, Florence, Dillon and Marlboro counties, several of which have long wildfire histories.

What to do about it

1. Before an overnight or pre-dawn drive during fire season, check whether an active incident sits upwind of your route on a live map.
2. Read the transport wind direction in the National Weather Service fire weather planning forecast; NWS Charleston issues forecasts focused on wind, relative humidity, mixing height and transport wind for land management agencies.
3. If you meet dense smoke, slow down, use low beams rather than high beams, and avoid stopping in a travel lane where you cannot be seen.
4. Treat a burn scar you can see from the road as a source for weeks. Stump holes and smoldering soil in the Carolina bays keep producing smoke long after flames are gone.
5. Watch for road closures in official alerts; South Carolina agencies close highways during heavy smoke rather than relying on driver judgment.

For the health side of the same problem, our forest fire smoke tracker guide covers particulate levels, the AQI categories and the thresholds at which sensitive groups should change behavior. A fire map and a smoke map answer different questions and you generally need both.

What should you do when South Carolina fires threaten?

When South Carolina fires threaten, leave when told and do not wait for flames to be visible. South Carolina's record is that early, broad evacuation works: the Highway 31 Fire destroyed 76 homes with zero deaths and zero injuries, and the 2025 Table Rock Complex and Covington Drive fires produced no deaths, no injuries and no destroyed homes.

That record is not luck. Horry County ordered 2,500 people out overnight during the Highway 31 Fire and as many as 4,000 at its height. Pickens County called voluntary evacuations of about 100 residences on the second day of the Table Rock Fire and expanded to more than 1,000 residences four days later.

How South Carolina evacuation notices work

Counties, not the Forestry Commission, order evacuations in South Carolina. Notices arrive through county emergency management, sheriff's offices and municipal channels, and the state supports them through the South Carolina Emergency Management Division and its alerting systems, including Wireless Emergency Alerts and NOAA Weather Radio.

South Carolina does not use a single statewide zone-lettering system the way some western states do. Notices are typically described by subdivision, road or landmark, which is precisely why having a map with street-level detail open matters. Knowing that the order covers "communities along the southern and southwestern edges of Carolina Forest" is only useful if you can see where that is.

Directions matter more than distance

The Highway 31 Fire made a six-mile run in an afternoon and then jumped a highway overnight after a wind shift. A fire eight miles away that is moving toward you is a more urgent problem than a fire three miles away that is moving away from you.

Read the wind before the distance. Then use the map's directions-away function to send a route to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze rather than improvising at the intersection, and share the fire link with family so everyone is looking at the same thing.

Stay out of the burn scar afterward

Forestry Commission notes from the Highway 31 Fire recorded a specific concern about sightseers and off-road enthusiasts touring the burned area while burnout, mop-up and aerial drops continued. Stump holes, smoldering soil and standing dead trees are the hazards; firefighters have encountered displaced bears and snakes as well.

The rule is simple. Contained means the perimeter is held. Controlled means there is no longer heat inside the line. Wait for controlled.

How can homeowners prepare for SC fires in the WUI?

Homeowners reduce SC fires risk by managing the first 30 feet around the structure, not the forest beyond it. The Forestry Commission runs the National Fire Protection Association's Firewise USA program in South Carolina, conducting wildfire risk assessments and writing community action plans from the results.

The scale of the exposure is national. The Forestry Commission cites US Fire Administration figures showing 46 million residences in 70,000 communities across the United States are at risk from wildland-urban interface fires. South Carolina's share grows every year as coastal communities expand.

What South Carolina's own assessments found

More than 1,300 South Carolina communities have been assessed by the Forestry Commission's prevention team. Almost 642 of them rate at high to extreme wildfire risk, and 213 Community Wildfire Protection Plans have been completed, with about 157 communities holding a finished plan.

Nationally recognized Firewise USA communities in South Carolina cluster exactly where the fire history is: Briarcliffe Acres, Captain's Harbour, Harbour Towne, Heather Lakes, Hidden Harbor and Long Bay Club in Horry County; DeBordieu Colony and Camden Creek at Allston Plantation in Georgetown County; Keowee Key, Keowee Harbours, Emerald Pointe and Beacon Shores in Oconee County.

The work that actually matters

1. Clear pine straw, leaves and needles from roofs, gutters and the ground within five feet of the walls. In South Carolina this is the single highest-value hour you will spend.
2. Remove or thin waxy evergreen shrubs such as wax myrtle and palmetto directly against the house; these are the fuels that produce the heat in a Coastal Plain fire.
3. Screen vents and enclose eaves so embers landing half a mile ahead of a front, as they did in 1967 and 1976, cannot get inside.
4. Keep firewood, propane tanks and mulch piles at least 30 feet from the structure, and store nothing combustible under a deck.
5. Maintain a driveway wide enough for an engine and clear enough overhead for a brush truck; access failures cost structures more often than flame lengths do.
6. Ask the Forestry Commission for a community wildfire risk assessment if your subdivision borders undeveloped forest or a Carolina bay.

None of this work against South Carolina fires is exotic and none of it requires a contractor. It is the reason the 2025 fires destroyed no homes despite burning more than 18,000 acres between them in some of the state's most exposed terrain.

Insurance, real estate and the historical record

Historical perimeters of past South Carolina fires are worth checking before you buy. The Forestry Commission's own Highway 31 file notes that the same Horry County landscape burned in 1954, 1967, 1976, 2002 and 2009, and again in 2025. Land that has burned repeatedly will burn again.

US Wildfire Tracker can show optional historical fire perimeters alongside current incidents, which lets you see whether the parcel you are considering sits inside a footprint that has burned within living memory. That is a different question from today's risk, and both are worth answering.

Which South Carolina fire map terms should you know?

A South Carolina fire map uses vocabulary from three systems at once: state forestry, federal wildland fire and the National Weather Service. Getting the definitions right prevents the two most common misreadings, which are treating containment as extinguished and treating a satellite hotspot as a confirmed fire.

The glossary below covers the terms that appear most often on South Carolina incidents specifically.

Contained

A control line has been completed around the fire and is expected to hold. Fire may still be burning inside it.

Controlled

No heat remains anywhere inside the line. This is the standard South Carolina uses to close an incident.

Carolina bay

An elliptical wetland depression with organic peat soil. Burns underground and can smolder for weeks.

Duff

The decomposed litter layer beneath fresh leaves and needles. Deep duff was a defining problem on Pinnacle Mountain in 2016.

Fireline or plow line

A strip scraped to mineral soil, usually by bulldozer in South Carolina, that removes fuel from the fire's path.

Mastication

Mechanically chipping vegetation to create a fuel break, used on a 30-foot strip beside homes during the Covington Drive Fire.

Burnout

Deliberately burning fuel between the fireline and the fire's edge to widen the barrier.

Spot fire

A new ignition started by embers landing on the unburned side of a line. South Carolina fires have spotted a mile ahead.

Reburn

Fire moving again through an already burned area once scorched needles fall and create a new fuel bed.

Red Flag Fire Alert

A South Carolina Forestry Commission advisory asking the public to postpone outdoor burning voluntarily.

State Forester's Burning Ban

A legal prohibition on outdoor burning in unincorporated areas under Section 48-35-50.

Red Flag Warning

A National Weather Service product issued when fire danger is high to extreme and critical wind and humidity thresholds are forecast.

Fire probability tier

The confidence grade US Wildfire Tracker assigns a detection based on official record linkage, perimeter freshness and satellite heat recency.

Weak signal

A detection below 25 percent probability, hidden by default because it is often a prescribed burn or industrial heat.

Complex

Two or more incidents managed together, as with Table Rock and Persimmon Ridge in 2025.

WUI

Wildland-urban interface: the zone where a built environment meets or intermingles with natural vegetation.

Two more distinctions are worth carrying. Acreage on a South Carolina incident is usually a mapped figure updated on an agency schedule, not a live measurement, and it often lags a wind-driven run by hours. Personnel counts appear only when NIFC provides them, which is inconsistent for state-lead fires.

If you want the full national vocabulary rather than the South Carolina subset, our fire tracker guide carries a longer glossary covering satellite instruments, incident types and management levels.

Frequently Asked Questions About South Carolina Fires