Luke Sanderson drove the quiet, curving road to the back of his neighborhood, steering his black pickup truck over bumpy tire tracks into a clearing. He stopped and stared at the stacks of dry wood piled high in the dirt.
“I wouldn’t assume they’d try to burn this,” said Sanderson, a young homeowner whose Jackson County neighborhood is still scorched from a wildfire that tore through last month. “But who knows?”
The burning of felled trees has long frustrated residents of this growing Mississippi Coast subdivision, where fresh homes are rising up in place of tall pines.
But after two wildfires erupted in the area in August, the burning is also stoking new suspicion.
An official cause of the fires is still unclear, and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said no charges had been filed in connection to the blaze. But neighbors say that for months, construction crews have cut trees, stacked brush in piles across the dirt and burned them to ash instead of trucking the debris to a dumpster.
Sanderson and others say they saw one pile of branches burning near a building site off Old Fort Bayou Road on the day their neighborhood ignited.
A wildfire sent flames through the woods of the Talla Pointe subdivision, where Sanderson lives, torching 126 acres and threatening 55 homes. Another fire north of Old Fort Bayou Road and across from the Espana Woods subdivision burned 25 acres and threatened several more properties. Flames crackled through backyards in Talla Pointe, but authorities said, miraculously, no homes were damaged.
Fires burn often in Jackson County
Neighbors say even before the wildfires, their streets had been smoky for months.
Josh Pitts, who has lived with his family in Talla Pointe for five years, said ashes have fallen on his home and car. “We’ve had to deal with the constant smell of smoke,” he said.
In hot, dry weather, he said he noticed the burns weekly. The subdivision has expanded since his family moved in, and the construction and burning shifted to the outer edges of the land.
He said once there were days he could not play in his yard with his children.
“The smell,” he said, “would almost suffocate you outside. You come back inside and you just reek of a bonfire.”
Laurri Garcia, another neighbor, said she saw proof of the smoke even when she could not smell it: Her white-bottomed pool collected dark soot at the bottom. She swept and cleaned more often than usual.
Once, she said, she came home in the evening after the construction crews had left and saw a pile smoldering, its small flames still flickering. It was in the middle of a dirt patch, she said, far from any homes.
“It was most definitely still burning,” she said, “and there was nobody in sight.”
Is open burning allowed?
Sanderson wanted the burns to stop.
In late January, he posted a photo of a large bonfire releasing smoke at dusk on his neighborhood Facebook page. “We have to do something about the fires off of Bayou Talla Drive,” he wrote. “The entire neighborhood is in a cloud of smoke.”
Sanderson started making calls, he said, including to the fire department and the county. Nothing panned out. “I couldn’t find who would ultimately be responsible,” he said.
Burning comes with rules. Mississippi prohibits open burning of waste except in several cases, including the burning of land-clearing debris. People burning branches or felled trees cannot use rubber tires, plastics or other starter fuels that would lead to excessive smoke. Fires cannot cause traffic hazards and cannot happen if the area is under a high fire danger alert or emergency air pollution warning. Burning of old trees and branches is prohibited within 500 yards of an occupied home.
Counties can also adopt their own rules under the state’s guidelines, such as requiring contractors to notify local departments or get local burn permits. Jackson County fire officials did not return phone calls about local ordinances. Troy Ross, who represents the neighborhood on the Board of Supervisors, said he was not aware of local regulations unless a burn ban is in effect.
Ross said many local contractors burn felled trees on construction sites because trucking them away takes longer and is far more expensive. He also said builders and contractors usually alert the fire department if they choose to burn.
But he urged caution. “Exercise good old fashioned common sense,” Ross said. In hot, dry weather, “if you burn something, it could spread.”
Shannon Coker, communications director for the Mississippi Forestry Commission, said Jackson County was not under a burn ban when the fires hit in early August. Neighbors said they worried about the controlled burns that day because they remembered it was windy. Earl Etheridge, the county’s emergency manager, said his team did not notice a controlled burn the day of the fires: When they got to the neighborhood, the woods were already burning.
MS Coast neighborhood still scorched
The calls came fast from neighbors. Sanderson and his wife were headed to New Orleans, he said. They heard the news and turned around.
“I was in shock,” he said. He found burnt pine needles in his driveway. His neighbors’ air filters were black with ash. Sanderson said he went to buy his own filter, to cleanse his home of the bonfire smell. The store was sold out.
Wildfires are still unexpected in South Mississippi, which is far more accustomed to storms and floods. But they are also common. Crews fought five blazes in April, including a grass fire near Interstate 10 in Moss Point that slowed cars for several hours as startled drivers passed through a cloud of smoke. Another fire burned 419 acres in Hancock County last February.
But none of the recent fires burned more dangerously than Talla Pointe. Flames soared above neat rows of homes and raged straight to the edge of manicured backyards. Behind a street called Smokey Court, the woods are still singed brown.
Sanderson kept driving through the scars. “This was all nice and green,” he said. “It’s just completely burned.”
He said he has not seen anyone light the piles since. He hopes it stays that way.
“That,” he said, “would make us all happy.”
Source Agencies
