A fire that began with a lightning strike on April 06, 2017 on the Florida/Georgia line, 7 miles east of Fargo, Georgia, spread quickly with most of the fire activity traveling north into a vast area of Georgia. It was named the West Mims Fire and is almost a month old to date with no signs of abating. Currently this fire is 107,845 acres determined by using the false-color image taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite. This image was collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on May 02, 2017. The false-color component is able to show the extent of the burned area which shows up as a brick red color in the image.
The West Mims Fire is only 8% contained at present and fire officials have predicted that it will not be completely contained until November. As this part of the country is entering summer with hotter, drier conditions punctuated with summer lightning storms it is likely the fire will continue to grow. Short term predictions show that a cold front pushed south of the West Mims Fire last night which brought a much drier and slightly cooler air mass across the area. High temperatures reached the mid 80s with minimum humidity values falling into the 22-26% range. Dry northwest winds of 5-10 mph with gusts up to 15 mph prevailed across the area. High pressure will build north and east of the fire area on May 3 continuing very dry conditions and above normal temperatures–all indications that contribute to fire growth, not to fire suppression.
West Mims Fire, Georgia, Aqua natural-color image from May 3, 2017.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption: NASA/Goddard, Lynn Jenner with information from Inciweb.