A brush fire burns near the 3000 block of Cherokee Valley Road on Tuesday. The Georgia Forestry Commission held public meetings about cleaning up the brush to avoid fires earlier this month.Four days after firefighters met in Ringgold, Ga., to talk about the threat of fire breaking out in swaths of felled trees left over from 2011 tornadoes, a burn pile sparked a wildfire on tornado-slammed Cherokee Valley Road on Tuesday afternoon.
The fire started about 1:40 p.m. and by 4 p.m., it had grown to cover roughly 20 acres. The wildfire, driven by a stiff northwest wind, jumped two bulldozed fire lines as it burned through the dry timber.
“This is what we didn’t want to happen,” Catoosa County Deputy Fire Chief Jim White said as he monitored the blaze from a command post on Cherokee Valley Road.
The wildfire was started by a burn pile for which a residential permit had been issued, White said. But a residential burn permit is for small, hand-piled burn piles, and this pile was being stacked high by machinery.
“It’s a long story. They had a permit, but it wasn’t for what they were burning,” White said.