The Pineland Road fire in Clinch and Echols counties is now 40 percent contained at roughly 32,575 acres, the Georgia Forestry Commission reported, and the Echols County evacuation order along the Fruitland and Bamberg perimeters has been lifted. [1][2] The 40,000-acre threshold the paper has been watching since Friday's 38-percent update holds for a fourth straight day. Full control is still expected by late May.

What changed in 24 hours is small and meaningful. Containment moved up two points; resourcing rose to 272 personnel and 84 engines, dozers, and overhead support assets; and the strategic backfires set Tuesday and Wednesday have done their work along Highway 94 to the north and U.S. 441 to the west. [3] Fire behavior remains active — wind-driven runs, spotting, and isolated torching — but the perimeter is now defined more by where crews have laid the line than by where the fire has gone.

The lab-closure offset the paper has been pairing with the line stays in place. The Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab is still scheduled to shut, and the smoke-forecast products it produced for Southeast fire seasons have no replacement on the federal calendar. The Hotshot Wake Up account, the most reliable wildland-fire daily on X, continues to log Pineland Road in its recurring update register; it has not yet logged the lab. [3]

Saturday's fire is a smaller fire than Friday's, by exactly the percentage points the line shows. The instrument that would have measured next year's is the offset.

-- DARA OSEI, London