GEORGIA — Amid drought conditions and larger fires, Georgia Forestry Commission Director Johnny Sabo told lawmakers the cost to put out the blazes in south Georgia cost more than half of his annual department budget.
“We’re looking about $35 million between these two fires,” Sabo said about the cost of putting out the Pineland Road and Highway 82 fires in south Georgia. “To put that in perspective, my annual budget is $52 million.”
Those figures don’t include the costs of helping communities recover from the damage and losses afterward.
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Sabo said no one in Georgia is immune to the effects of fires in the state and that in the southeast United States, firefighting continues year-round, 300 days of the year.
How fires have grown in Georgia during drought
Sabo said Georgia has experienced a more active fire season than in previous years, with the number of fires up 88%. It was made more dangerous by drier conditions.
“Just a really dry year, which I don’t think I have to stress or tell anybody about,” Sabo said. “We take a lot of pride in our average fire size being five acres. We took a hit to that this year.”
The data from Sabo showed the yearly average acreage of fires was 5.6 acres in previous years. The size of the fires made it so smoke was even visible to residents in the metro Atlanta area.
He told lawmakers that the average fire size for the current fiscal year was 18.8 acres, but there were several that were magnitudes larger.
Compared to the last five years of fire data, Sabo told lawmakers the size had increased 595% on average.
The data, and costs, come from a busy fire season for Georgia. In the current fiscal year, the Georgia Forestry Commission responded to and suppressed 4,910 wildfires which burned more than 92,400 acres.
Just beginning on New Year’s Day, the 2026 calendar year has already seen nearly 83,800 acres burn, 62% of the annual total, according to Sabo.
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Impacts on the ground
As Channel 2 Action News reported during the fires in south Georgia, entire towns were evacuated as crews from multiple agencies worked to keep the flames under control.
Sabo said the fires that spread from Highway 82 and Pineland Road in mid-April were among the worst the state had seen, driven by wind and fuels so dry and volatile that they spread in multiple directions.
The Pineland Road fire and Highway 82 fire, covered thousands of acres of land each.
Georgia’s first thousand-acre fire of the year was in April, beginning in Florida and spreading over the border into Georgia, according to Sabo.
Firefighting team ups
The effort to put the fires out still was successful but communities still experienced heavy damage. Sabo said 110 homes were lost just during the Highway 82 fire. Even so, he said crews were able to save 350 homes.
Air support during fire suppression went long enough that Sabo said “we actually started to run out of jet fuel and retardant” while working in the Lake City area.
The extreme conditions led to Sabo praising what he called a big group effort to handle the blazes.
In addition to boots on the ground, federal agencies approved funding for fire response as the flames raged across the state.
“I’m fairly positive when I say between us and Florida this past year, we’ve done more tanker drops in about two weeks than we did in all other years combined in the history of our states,” Sabo told lawmakers. “Absolutely crucial to what we were doing. And just so you know, that our federal counterparts, as soon as they started seeing everything happen, they moved everything from across the country and had it staged to us without us even asking.”
Costs of fires in Georgia
In Georgia, the economic impact of wildfires was $59 billion of the $250 billion nationally, according to Sabo.
That means fires in the state of Georgia accounted for nearly a quarter of the country’s financial losses from wildfires.
“We understand its our livelihoods,” Sabo said. “It’s our jobs and it’s our way of life, and so that’s something that the Georgia Forestry Commission” is committed to, along with partner organizations and associations.
On top of impacts to industry, more than 100 homes were destroyed.
Working toward recovery
As for recovery, Sabo said the Georgia Department of Agriculture was handling resource management for those efforts.
“Commissioner Harper and his team are leading the way,” Sabo said about block grants for fire recovery. “We have roughly 5,800 applications.”
The state has 20 staff who review applications for recovery resources, according to Sabo. Nine of them are foresters from the Georgia Forestry Commission.
"I know that’s Commissioner Harper’s goal and also a goal of just getting the money out as quickly as possible, but we want it to be right," Sabo said.
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