Tourists streaming back to Gatlinburg
Main drag is intact, but side streets show devastation.
Visitors GATLINBURG, TENN. — jammed the main roads and sidewalks in Gatlinburg as the tourist gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park reopened to the public Friday for the first time since wildfires there killed 14 people.
While the shop-and-restaurant-lined main drag was left intact, the charred remains of homes, vehicles and businesses on side roads served as a reminder of the cleanup and repairs that await in the days ahead. Officials estimate 2,500 buildings were damaged by the wildfires that spread from the park amid high winds Nov. 28.
The hills around the resort area echoed Friday with with a steady chorus of chain saws. Fleets of utility vehicles and contractors’ trucks came and went. There was little need for security as many of the homes were so heavily burned that there was nothing left to steal.
Tricia Jeter had run the Grand Prix Motel for less than a month when the fires appeared on the ridges around Gatlinburg. Her husband, Kurt, hosed down the roof to keep embers from lighting the building on fire.
“When that fire came across the top, the wind moving it down the mountain was such that when it hit the cabins they looked like you’d lit the head of a match,” Kurt Jeter said. “It would ignite and then it was gone, gutted.”
Several nearby buildings were heavily damaged or destroyed. The Jeters have been working quickly to make rooms available to people displaced by the fires.
“We have people scrambling to find a place to live, because the city’s back open so they need to get back to their jobs,” Tricia Jeter said. “If we had more rooms, we’d put more people here. But we’re full.”
On the winding roads around the city, undamaged homes stood next to burned foundations. Fire at the Laurel Point Resort covered the indoor pool with a thick layer of ashes and debris. An abandoned pickup truck sat burned in a 15-minute parking spot.
Also reopening Friday was the park, where prosecutors say two juveniles started the fire Nov. 23. They have been arrested.
The Smokies are the country’s most-visited national park, and Superintendent Cassius Cash said the days following the fires have been “the most challenging and emotional days our community has likely ever had to endure.”
Officials are trying to guard against the side effects of the fires, including flash flooding and mudslides because of the loss of vegetation.