The Brantley County fire crossed the Glynn County line late Friday, pushing the evacuation map into a populated corridor and bringing the cumulative damage to roughly 7,500 acres and a hundred destroyed homes. [1] Gov. Brian Kemp, at a Friday press conference, called the event "the most devastating fires in Georgia history" — language that turned a still-active incident into the state's modern wildland-urban-interface benchmark. [2] The paper carried the broader emergency Friday as a Southeast drought the record has not seen in twenty-five years.

Federal authorities took command of the response Friday afternoon. Kemp also identified the ignition source: a balloon contacting a power line, an arc that found a tinder-dry pine understory and ran with the wind. The Brunswick News carried the chronology and the dispatch-side story of a 911 operator working the incident from a console while her own home burned. [3]

A hundred destroyed homes is not the largest single-fire loss in U.S. record, but it is the largest in Georgia's, and it has happened in country that does not maintain a full Western fire response. The "most devastating" line is what governors say when the next number is going to be worse.

The wind forecast Saturday holds.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago