SPRINGFIELD – Even though Effingham County’s woodlands are covered well by a statewide blanket, the Effingham County Board of Commissioners is striving to boost their protection at the local level.
Since November 2021, the board has provided a $300 monthly supplement to employees at the Georgia Forestry Commission’s Effingham unit needs two wildland firefighter/ranger positions that have been vacant for several months. The personnel shortage has occasionally forced Effingham County to rely on surrounding Georgia Forestry Commission units for support.
Effingham County Chief Ranger Billy Brown discussed the situation with commissioners during Tuesday’s regularly scheduled board meeting.
“Currently, we have two active personnel in the county – me and one ranger,” Brown said. “We are trying to maintain all the firefighting that is required in the county. We are also trying to maintain all the firebreaks and customer service that we do in the county.”
In addition to preventing and suppressing wildfires, the Georgia Forestry Commission, a state agency, provides rural fire department assistance, helps landowners and communities with forest management, and grows and sells quality tree seedlings for planting.
“We try to do it all for everybody around the county,” said Brown, who is joined at the local unit by Ranger 1 Travis Blankenship. “It’s really a lot of work but we do have help from our neighboring counties right now until we can get our spots filled.”
Brown said the Georgia Forestry Commission is looking to advertise Effingham County’s openings. Applications are available at https://gatrees.org/about/careers/.
Successful candidates will operate trucks and crawler tractors in the suppression of wildfires, prepare reports, assist landowners in control burns, and perform preventative maintenance and small repairs to equipment.
The Effingham County unit’s protection responsibility includes 233,257 forested acres and 306,900 acres total. It features three tractor/plow response units and two pickup units armed with 250-gallon water tanks.
“That’s the equipment that we have right now at our disposal but we can get resources from anywhere,” Brown said.
The local unit assisted four landowners with prescribed burns that covered 560 acres last year. It also plowed 30.3 miles of initial firebreaks for nine landowners. Using harrows on 14 occasions, it plowed a total of 71.5 miles.
“The number that is big to us – the one that we are really concerned about being worse this year due to dry conditions – is the number of wildfires that we had,” Brown said.
During its most recent reporting year, the Effingham County unit responded to 37 wildfires that burned 403.1 acres. The five-year average is 28.8 wildfires that burn 182.65 acres.
During normal operating hours, the Effingham County unit’s average response time is 17.75 minutes.
“That is getting the call from our office, getting in a rig and getting it out to a fire scene,” Brown said.
The average response time is 29.5 minutes for after-hours calls, weekends and holidays.
“That is taking into account that we are using folks from Bryan County and Chatham County,” Brown said.
