Owners return to their homes near wildfire to find damage, thankful it's not worse
SOUTH CAROLINA (WTVD) -- Heavy thick smoke continues to fill the air in some neighborhoods that surround the Carolina Forest in Myrtle Beach following a wildfire that prompted evacuations over the weekend..
A smoke notice has been issued for Tuesday mornings and also an air quality alert for Horry County, South Carolina.
Homeowners in the Walker Woods neighborhood were evacuated over the weekend and on Monday were allowed to return to their houses.
Some owners returned and did find damage to their houses from the fires. "You can see this is just like a scorched earth and the fence is just melted from the heat," said Mike Abel. The fires had no mercy on Abel's fence that once surrounded his home.
"This is burnt completely, this palm, the shrub survived because it was behind the fence and the fence like kept the fire off of it as it melted." The trampoline, along with the siding on his house was also damaged by the flames, but his biggest worry was inside his home, his dog Bowie.
Abel says, "I didn't know that he was okay until I have a security camera in the front on the driveway and a firefighter stopped in his pickup truck because there were flames on my front yard. and he's, like, literally pounding them out with his feet and I could hear both bark through the camera microphone."
That bark gave Abel hope and after the evacuation orders were lifted for Abel's neighborhood, he was relieved to see Bowie.
Abel says he is also thankful, considering the magnitude of the fires and how close it came to his home. "It's I mean, it's horrible, but I'm blessed. I mean, this is the worst of it. The fact with the size of this fire and that no one that I know of in this community lost their home or their life, I'd say we're all pretty lucky," Abel adds.
Donald Piper is another homeowner in the Walker Woods neighborhood whose home was damaged by the fires. He says, "It came across that road just as fast as I've ever seen fire move. I was wetting things down in order to try it, and I knew I was going to get across the road, but when it came across the road, it was traveling."
Too much for Piper to handle with his garden hose and he knows fires. Before retiring to Myrtle Beach, he was a firefighter for 30 years in Wisconsin. With this fire, Piper and his wife evacuated and let firefighters do their job. Piper adds, "Good thing there were no injuries, but there's lots of damage." The fire damaged Piper's fence and siding to his home but he says he's thankful it wasn't more.
"Well, it's a little too close for comfort. You hate to see it happen to anybody."
Fire crews responded to hot spots in Carolina Forest throughout the day. At one location, crews pulled their fire hoses deep into the forest and tell is they created a man-made sprinkler to saturate the ground.
As for the community in the Carolina Forest area, volunteers are in full force outside the Carolina Forest Community Church, providing meals for first responders.
Rick Vines says, "We're the central hub point for Carolina Forest. We're housing a ton of different fire departments all the way into North Carolina, multiple counties to South Carolina, just making sure they're fed and fueled up to go out there and help keep this fire contained."
Containment is the goal. Fire crews say 100% containment could take several days as it comes down to the weather conditions.
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