# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last week, we reported on the growing severity of wildfires blazing in Western North Carolina and surrounding states like South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Unfortunately, those fire continued to grow over the weekend and have now reached nearly 40,000 acres in Western North Carolina alone.

Many of these fires are not only believed to be the result of human activity, but are reportedly being set intentionally by arsonists.

While it's extremely troubling to see so many acres of cherished land burn, it's also hazardous to the health of residents. Many if the states with fires burning have warned citizens of unhealthy air quality.

What follows is a real time list of fires burning throughout these five states, the amount of acres to which these blazes have reportedly spread, suspected causes, and key information about burn bans and public land closures.

Keep in mind that the dry conditions that have facilitated this historic weather event are persisting, and as a result these numbers are constantly changing and often growing. Check back for updates.

Western North Carolina Wildfires
Tellico Fire Acres: 13,676 Containment Level: 39 percent contained Party Rock Fire Acres: 3,457 Containment Level: 15 percent contained Maple Springs Fire Acres: 7,179 Containment Level:15 percent contained Boteler Fire
Acres: 8,695

Containment: 37 percent contained
South Mountain State Park Fire Acres: 2,850 Containment Level: 15 percent contained Ferebee Fire Acres: 3,175 Containment Level: 3,175 Additional Wildfire Info
Immediate Forecast: No rain is in sight for Western North Carolina's immediate future. Fire caution and safety is of the utmost importance right now.

Public Lands Closed: The Appalachian Trail from Rock Gap to the Nantahala River, Chimney Rock State Park, Rumbling Bald Climbing Access Area, South Mountains State Park, portions of Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness.

According to press release issued by the USFS the following trails are closed: Wesser Creek, Chunky Gal from Glade Gap to Tusquitee Gap, Whitewater Falls, Foothills from NC Hwy 281 to the Bad Creek access (detour maps are posted at trail junctions), and the Appalachian Trail from the Nantahala River at Wesser south to Rock Gap Trailhead on FR 67.

Suspected Causes: According to USFS, the majority of the wildfires in WNC are the direct result of humans, and the state has even pointed to arson as a major factor in many of these dangerous and destructive wildfires.

Burn Bans: All 1 million acres of the Pisgah and the Nantahala National Forest are under a strict no burn ban.

North Georgia Wildfires
Rock Mountain Fire (Rabun County)
Acres: 4,000

Containment: 10 percent contained
Rough Ridge Fire (Fannin County)
Acres: nearly 20,000

Containment: 20 percent contained
Additional Wildfire Info
Suspected Causes: Many of these fires are being labeled as human caused, and, like the fires in North Carolina, arson has been established as a contributing factor in some of the North Georgia wildfires.

South Carolina Wildfires
Pinnacle Mountain Fire
Acres: 2,312

Containment: 25 percent contained
Additional Wildfire Info
Public Land Closures: Table Rock State Park along with portions of the Foothills Trail.

Burn Bans: The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) has issued a burn ban on the 33,000-acre Jocassee Gorges area in northern Pickens and Oconee counties, and the South Carolina Forestry Commission has expanded its burning ban from five Upstate counties to all 19 Piedmont counties.

Tennessee Wildfires
Flippers Bend Fire
Acres: 1000

Containment: 90 percent contained
Poe Road Fire
Acres: 550 acres

Containment: 40 percent contained
Mowbray Fire
Acres: 750 acres

Containment: 50 percent contained
Additional Wildfire Info
Public Land Closures: Citico Creek Wilderness in Cherokee National Forest

Virginia Wildfires
Raven Rocks Fire (Jefferson National Forest)
Acres: 2,500 acres

Containment: 60 percent contained
McAfee Knob Fire
A small brush fire in a hard to reach area near McAfee Knob Fire has been contained.
Additional Wildfire Info Burn Bans: There is a temporary restriction of open fires on the Clinch Ranger District of the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests Suspected Causes: Dry conditions and possible arson in areas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wildfire Update: More than 40,000 acres on Fire in Western North Carolina

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last week, we reported on the growing severity of wildfires blazing in Western North Carolina and surrounding states like South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. Unfortunately, those fire continued to grow over the weekend and have now reached nearly 40,000 acres in Western North Carolina alone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The N.C. Department of Transportation has changed its strategy on litter and trash along the highway. Gone are the state prisoners who picked up garbage along the road, replaced by more contractors, some who clean up before they mow the grass.

Between state prisoners, contractors and its own employees, the N.C. Department of Transportation spent nearly $19 million picking up litter along North Carolina's roads and highways last year.

To a lot of people, it seems like a losing battle.

Elizabeth Olsson wonders how the state's roads get so trashy. As she drives between her home in Apex and Dillard Drive Middle School in Raleigh, where she teaches sixth grade language arts, Olsson sees the bottles and cans, fast food cups and wrappers and plastic buckets along the way and thinks we can do better.

"I just think it's a mindset that we don't talk about anymore," Olsson said. "People are becoming numb to it, like shootings or murders. It's numbing."

The trash is also dispiriting to those responsible for cleaning it up. Don Lee, the state roadside environmental engineer for NCDOT until his recent retirement, said the department hired contractors in 2016 to pick up garbage along sections of Interstate 40 in Wake and Johnston counties that hadn't been cleaned in a while.

"They were absolutely overwhelmed and inundated with large volumes of trash," Lee said. "We had a couple of contractors who just gave up. They said they couldn't do it for the price they bid."

Litter along the highway has been an issue in North Carolina for decades; the public distress over the roadside mess prompted NCDOT to begin its Adopt-a-Highway program to enlist volunteers in the cleanup in 1988.

Now, at the behest of the legislature and two governors, NCDOT has changed its strategy toward trash to try to be more efficient and effective. Volunteers still play an important role; thousands will don orange vests and gloves as part of this month's Spring Litter Sweep that begins Monday.

But gone, as of last summer, is one of the mainstays of litter cleanup, state prisoners who once labored along the side of the road under the watchful eyes of guards. A decade ago, NCDOT paid the state Department of Correction $11.3 million a year to clean up a total of 80,000 miles of road.

Prisoners too expensive

But Lee said prison closings and restrictions that kept prisoners from working near schools or businesses helped eat away at the number of miles of road they could clean. Between 2010 and 2016, state law required NCDOT to pay the correction department more than $9 million a year for trash cleanup, but the miles cleaned fell from nearly 77,000 to about 32,000.

"The General Assembly looked at that and realized that's not a supportable option anymore," Lee said.

Even paying prisoners $1 a day, contractors are more cost-effective, state officials say, in part because they don't have to remain clustered within sight of prison guards and can clean up more trash.

So while the NCDOT expects to spend about the same on trash cleanup this year as it has in the two previous ones - about $19 million - much more of that money is going to hire contractors to pick up litter, often just before the grass along the road is mowed.

I-40 a mess

Jimmy McHenry's company, Dixie Lawn Service of Kings Mountain, has been mowing grass along North Carolina highways since 1986. He says NCDOT has upped its standards in recent years, requiring more frequent mowing and adding weed-eating and, for the first time, trash cleanup to its contracts. In the past, McHenry says, trash sometimes got picked up before the mowers went out, but often it didn't.

"We wouldn't blatantly run over trash bags, but smaller pieces of litter, they would get ground up," he said. "We can coordinate the work a lot better if we're doing both things."

This year, Dixie Lawn Service got the contract to mow and clean up trash along major highways in the NCDOT division that includes Wake and Durham counties. Since early last month, a crew of about a dozen has been out five days a week picking up trash. Along with the usual litter, McHenry says, they find heating and air conditioning ducts, ladders and other construction materials that apparently fly out of trucks.

Debris from trucks make the roads that lead to landfills among the trashiest, says Lee of NCDOT. Other messy stretches are busy highways in urban areas with fast food restaurants along them - places such as I-40 through the Triangle.

"That's one of our most difficult routes in the state, truly," Lee said. "We have 12 cleanup cycles on some of that, and you really need 24 to keep it picked up."

Lee said NCDOT cleanup contractors will make multiple passes along nearly all of the 1,340 miles of interstate highway in North Carolina and a little more than 60 percent of the nearly 13,800 miles of primary roads. But fewer than 10 percent of the 65,000 miles of secondary roads are covered by those contracts.

Volunteers through the Adopt-A-Highway program will get to some of those secondary roads. About 5,800 businesses, churches, police departments, PTAs and other civic groups take on two-mile stretches of road, picking up trash at least four times a year. Last year, Adopt-A-Highway volunteers covered more than 11,000 miles of road and collected about 967,000 pounds of trash (contractors and NCDOT employees collected nearly 5.6 million pounds).

In 2011, NCDOT launched another cleanup program that allowed businesses, organizations or individuals to pay one of two California companies to pick up along a stretch of road, in exchange for sponsorship signs with their names and logos. The Sponsor-A-Highway program began with 11 miles of I-40 and I-95 in 2012 and has since been expanded to highways statewide. Last year, sponsors paid the companies to clean up 281 miles of highway.

In the Triangle, Johnson Automotive, which has six car dealerships in Raleigh, Cary and Durham, has signed up to sponsor every available mile in the Triangle - 303 as of this month, including big stretches of I-40, I-85, I-540, I-440 and nearly all of U.S. 64 from Wendell to Apex.

Erick Kirks, Johnson Automotive's marketing director, said employees had remarked about the trash problem to each other over the years, and the company began by sponsoring a couple of miles near its Lexus dealership off I-40 in Durham. He says the company will pay $727,200 in sponsorships this year to Adopt-A-Highway Litter Removal Service of America of Encinitas, Calif., which is supposed to clean each stretch of sponsored highway every four to six weeks.

Kirks takes I-540 between home in Cary and the Raleigh dealership and notices when it gets trashy.

"I've called them a couple of times and said, 'Hey, I know you guys just cleaned a couple of weeks ago, but it's really bad,' and they'll do an emergency cleaning," he said.

'Hard violation to detect'

Of course, the real problem with litter on the highway is not the lack of efforts to clean it up but that it keeps winding up there in the first place.

Last year, police, sheriff's deputies, state troopers and other law enforcement officers issued 3,320 citations for littering or for failure to keep items from flying from the back of a truck. The charges led to 1,078 convictions.

Douglas Britton of Greenville used to write a lot of tickets for littering during his 33-year career as a state trooper, but he said that's because he had the benefit of an unmarked car. He remembers passing a car just as the driver tossed a half-full cup of soda out his window that splashed on Britton's windshield.

But most people who litter aren't going to do it in front of a law enforcement officer, making citations for littering relatively rare.

"That's a very hard violation to detect," Britton said.

Britton, who retired in 1995, says he thinks the problem has gotten much worse over the years. He drives to Ahoskie several times a week and says he's appalled by what he sees along N.C. 11, including an old couch that's been out there, just south of the Roanoke River bridge, since September.

"There's trash everywhere. I think they use the highway for a trash dump," he said. "I don't understand why they can't carry the stuff home and put it in a can or something."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our roads are a trashy mess. The state is trying a new way to fix them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The N.C. Department of Transportation has changed its strategy on litter and trash along the highway. Gone are the state prisoners who picked up garbage along the road, replaced by more contractors, some who clean up before they mow the grass.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image: Qypchak/ Wikimedia Creative Commons
Let's give bees a chance

In recent years, beekeepers report they're losing on average 30 percent of all honeybee colonies each winter-twice the loss considered economically tolerable. Just as worrisome, wild bee populations are also in decline.

We rely on bees to pollinate 71 of the 100 crops that provide 90 percent of most of the world's food. Imagine no almonds, fewer apples and strawberries, less alfalfa to feed dairy cows, and the list goes on.
Image: Flickr User: Fried Dough - Creative Commons
6,000 times more toxic than DDT

Scientists point to several causes behind the problem, including global warming, habitat loss, parasites and a class of bee-killing insecticides known as neonicotinoids (or neonics).

When seeds are treated with neonics, the chemicals work their way into the pollen and nectar of the plants-which, of course, is bad news for bees and other pollinators. Worse, for the bees and for us, neonics are about 6,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT.

Just one example: After a nearby farm planted corn seeds coated with neonics in 2013, a farmer named Dave Schuit lost 37 million of his bees. "Once the corn started to get planted our bees died by the millions," said Schuit.
Image: Waugsberg / Wikimedia Creative Commons
A growing movement to ban bee-killing pesticides

Given the consequences for our farms and our food, you'd think we'd be doing all we can to protect bees and other pollinators from threats like neonics.

Instead, big agrichemical companies like Dow Chemical, Bayer and Syngenta are fighting to prevent bans. And Syngenta has asked federal regulators for permission to use even larger quantities of these pesticides-as much as 400 times more than currently allowed.

Some governments are taking action. Alarmed by the role these chemicals are playing in bee colony collapse disorder, the European Union has banned them; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has committed to phasing them out on the public lands they manage; the Home Depot and Lowe's are phasing them out; and Seattle, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey and Oregon have all agreed to take some form of action against neonics.

The EPA should take action now to restore bee populations to health. But so far, the agency hasn't stepped up.
Image: Justin Leonard / Flickr User-Creative Commons
Together, we can give bees a chance

Right now, we're letting big agrichemical companies use more of the chemicals that are known to kill bees just as we're in the midst of an unsustainable die-off in bee populations. That has to change. Now.

Join us in calling on our state leaders to limit or ban the use of bee-killing pesticides.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Millions of bees are dying off, with alarming consequences for our environment and our food supply. We rely on bees to pollinate everything from almonds to strawberries to the alfalfa used to feed dairy cows. What happens if the bees disappear? It's simple: No bees, no food.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Of course, there are plastics companies that don't like this idea. Earlier this year, their opposition helped block a bill banning plastic foam containers in California.

But across the country, plastic foam bans have passed in over 200 cities and other communities, from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me. Some companies are also getting with the program. By the end of this year, McDonald's will phase out foam cups and containers worldwide, in favor of 100% recycled materials. It's time to take this effort to the next level, but we're going to need all the support we can find.

Our national network has won similar efforts to reduce waste and plastic pollution, from statewide pro-recycling laws to the first statewide plastic bag ban in California. We know how to combine professional research and advocacy with citizen support to get results.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Of course, there are plastics companies that don't like this idea. Earlier this year, their opposition helped block a bill banning plastic foam containers in California. But across the country, plastic foam bans have passed in over 200 cities and other communities, from Portland, Ore., to Portland, Me.