By Steve Gorman
April 24 (Reuters) - Georgia Governor Brian Kemp declared an emergency on Friday for 91 counties in his state, where authorities are battling two major wildfires that have caused record property damage as more than 120 homes and other buildings have gone up in flames.
The Highway 82 and Pineland Road fires - one sparked by a party balloon, the other by a welder's torch - are by far the fiercest among dozens of blazes ravaging the drought-stricken Georgia countryside and neighboring states of Florida, South Carolina and Alabama in recent days.
No casualties were reported in Georgia, which has borne the brunt of the wildfires. But a volunteer firefighter died on Thursday evening after suffering an unspecified medical emergency while fighting a brush fire in northern Florida, according to various news media reports.
The conflagrations were primed by a confluence of climate extremes gripping the Southeast, authorities said.
EXTREME DROUGHT, HEAVY FUEL BED
Unusually sparse rainfall this spring following heavy vegetation growth in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene last fall has created a fuel bed of drought-parched timber and brush now posing the kind of wildfire hazards more typical for the Western United States in summer.
"We are in extreme drought conditions, and wildfire activity has already surpassed our five-year average," Georgia Forestry Commission Director Johnny Sabo said in a video message posted online. "Right now conditions are so dry that even one small spark can quickly turn into a dangerous wildfire."
As of Friday night, the Highway 82 and Pineland blazes had scorched more than 39,500 acres (16,000 hectares) combined, incinerating at least 122 homes and other structures, state forestry officials said. The tally of destruction marked the biggest property loss from a single fire event in Georgia's history, the governor told a press conference.
Nearly 1,000 more homes remained threatened, he said.
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Fires are scattered across Georgia, with the two biggest clustered in the southeast near the Florida border, roughly 250 miles (400 km) southeast of Atlanta, the state's capital and largest city.
News footage of the fires showed walls of pine trees engulfed in flames, and Kemp described "fire that is burning to the top of trees and burning from one treetop to another."
With firefighters and water-dropping aircraft struggling to halt the advance of the flames, crews were trying to protect homes still in harm's way, Kemp said.
Teams had managed to carve containment lines around 10% of the perimeters of each of the two major fires, forestry officials said.
In a move aimed at hastening and consolidating Georgia's disaster response, Kemp declared a state of emergency in 91 of Georgia's 159 counties. Sabo announced a 30-day ban on the outdoor burning of refuse, agricultural waste or campfires in the same counties, the first such restriction in the state's history.
The origin of the two biggest blazes illustrated how a small ignition source could touch off catastrophic fires.
Investigators determined that the Highway 82 blaze began on Monday, when an aluminum-coated balloon landed on a transmission line, triggering an electrical spark that ignited surrounding vegetation.
The Pineland Road fire, burning since April 18, was touched off by a stray spark from a welding operation that fell to the forest floor, authorities said.
Authorities said they expected extreme fire conditions to persist through the weekend, with gusty winds and little chance of rain in the forecast.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by William Mallard)
