Homes destroyed, pets lost and precious memories burned to ashes in Georgia wildfires

By Zoe Sottile, Sara Smart, Sarah Hutter, CNN

(CNN) — It took just 30 minutes for Brytney Quinn to lose everything.

On Tuesday, the mother was going through the motions of a normal day in southeast Georgia’s Brantley County: getting her children ready for school as her husband prepared for work.

But around noon, multiple firetrucks and police cars swarmed their neighborhood, urging them to evacuate. A massive wildfire – believed to have been sparked by a children’s party balloon landing on a power line – was fast approaching, primed to destroy more homes than any wildfire in the state’s history.

She grabbed her daughter and her pets and left the house around 12:20 p.m.

Around half an hour later, she checked her surveillance cameras and saw her home in flames.

“My house is gone,” Quinn said tearfully in a video she shared with CNN showing the burned remnants of her house.

The Highway 82 Fire that engulfed Quinn’s home has devoured thousands of acres in south Georgia, destroying dozens of buildings and forcing hundreds to evacuate from their homes. It’s just one of several dangerous wildfires burning across Georgia and Florida, fostered by the worst spring drought conditions on record.

And Quinn isn’t the only one facing huge losses from the massive blazes. The Highway 82 Fire and the larger Pineland Road Fire have together destroyed more than 120 homes, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday, when around 4,000 homes were still in the evacuation zone.

“We got the two most dangerous, biggest problematic fires anywhere in the United States within really just a very small area that we’re having to fight,” he said.

Glowing red flames raced through the dry vegetation of southern Georgia, whipping up massive clouds of dark smoke that hung heavily over the region. The fires left behind the desiccated husks of vehicles and homes and blanketed neighborhoods with ash.

Residents found themselves clutching medications and family heirlooms before racing away from their homes, unsure if there’ll be anything left to come back to.

Across the state line, a volunteer firefighter died after a “medical emergency” while fighting the Old Dixie Highway Fire in Hilliard, Florida, according to the sheriff’s office.

For Quinn, the losses are devastating.

“My babies lost their home and the only place they felt safe,” she said. “Now we have nothing to go to but rubbish … how are we going to recover from this?”

‘We’ve just got to start over’

Like Quinn, grandparents Elizabeth and Tony Spear had just minutes to evacuate from their Brantley County home Tuesday.

“Firetrucks came down the road and said we had to leave immediately,” Elizabeth Spear recalled. “I threw a few things in a bag — our medicine, cellphone, charger, just very minimum — and went flying out the door, jumped in our little car and just left.”

Originally thinking they were safe, the Spears didn’t plan to evacuate.

It wasn’t until Thursday that they returned to the site where their house of 17 years once stood. Instead of seeing their family home, they were faced with ashen land, a destroyed shed and two burned-out vehicles.

“All of my grandma’s jewelry was lost and things from her mom who passed,” their granddaughter Ashleigh Anderson said. “All of their possessions were burned. They were only able to bring about two pairs of clothes.”

The couple also lost three pets in the blaze: two chihuahuas and a black lab.

“We lost everything,” Elizabeth Spear said. “It’s just total ashes.”

The Spears are striving to center their faith and love as they look to rebuild what they lost.

“It’s just stuff. You can replace stuff,” Elizabeth Spear reflected. “It does hurt a little bit that I have a lot of stuff that’s gone that I’ll never see again – but I have my life. I’ve got my life and I’m going to be OK.”

“We’ll make it through, you know – we’ve just got to start over.”

A rush to preserve history as flames approach

When Kathy Hendrix was ordered to evacuate from Browntown Road in Waynesville, Georgia, her first thought wasn’t herself or her own belongings.

Instead, her mind went to Confederate Park – a site her father built and the home of some of the county’s historical records, Hendrix told CNN affiliate WTLV.

“When they came around and said, ‘Evacuate! You have to leave, you have to go now,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to have 15 minutes to save the history of our county,’” Hendrix said.

With a black cloud of smoke rapidly approaching, Hendrix and her grandchildren raced to the park. They rescued a trove of documents that trace the ins and outs of over a century of life in Waynesville: newspapers, legal filings, marriage records and other files.

Some of the documents are marked with ash now – a testament to the fate they narrowly escaped.

“What’s in the back of my car right now is the history of our county – our legal records, our happenings,” Hendrix told WTLV, showing the yellowing stacks of paper stowed in the trunk of her car. “This is Brantley County … insurance can’t replace this.”

Her granddaughters also saved another piece of history: A 100-year-old “Bambi” storybook.

A wedding chapel reduced to ash-covered ruins

Along with homes, the flames incinerated a site that once hosted countless happy days: a wedding chapel in Waynesville, which was once a Baptist church.

The owner of the chapel, Ginger Hunter, told CNN she not only lost her entire business but her home as well.

Hunter has been running the Wedding Chapel at Covenant Acres for five years. She works as both an officiant and wedding photographer at the venue.

Couples tied the knot beneath the spire of the historic white chapel, surrounded by greenery. Now the green has turned to grey: The property is coated with a layer of ash. The chapel – along with the reception hall, bridal suite, and multiple storage buildings – is entirely gone.

“I am so thankful we were able to get out safely. We saw the flames behind the chapel and knew we only had moments,” Hunter said.

Hunter says they had no insurance on the buildings that burned.

“We lost my wedding dress, my mom’s wedding dress, my daughter’s wedding dress,” she added.

The blazes have affected Hunter’s children, too. Her daughter lost her entire business and her camper van, and her son, a senior in high school, lost his vehicle.

“My mind still can’t comprehend how in one moment life is happening, and instantly life looks differently,” Hunter said.

They’re still looking for two cats and two dogs that are missing.

The first step in the recovery process for Hunter is finding a new home. Then she and her family will start to rebuild their businesses.

“I am at a loss for words to describe my heart right now,” Hunter added. “So much loss and sadness.”

Harrowing escapes and families in limbo

As some families mourn the losses of their homes, others are in limbo, waiting to see if their homes were destroyed – or if they will be the fire’s next victims.

Bobbi Enke didn’t find out until Friday morning her home and the neighboring home of her father-in-law were consumed by the fires.

“We got out what was sentimental to us, but we didn’t get anything big,” said Enke, who brought the family’s two dogs and cat as they evacuated, along with her toddler’s clothes and toys. “I’m also still nursing my daughter, and I had to leave all of my breast milk in the fridge.”

She and her husband were still not able to return home as of Friday evening as an evacuation remained in effect. They learned about their home’s fate from a video a neighbor sent, showing ashy land filled with charred remnants.

Her father-in-law, Johnny Enke, lives right next door, and they grabbed his wife’s ashes before his home burned down. But he was refusing to leave.

A single father to five children, he built his home with the intent to pass it down to his family.

“The house that he built is what he wanted to leave behind to his children, and it’s no longer here,” Bobbi Enke said. “He is in heart failure, and he is not able to work anymore. He wanted to stay back and protect what he could leave behind to his kids.”

Her father stayed behind as well to make sure Johnny got out, leaving just 30 minutes before their house burned down.

Elsewhere in Brantley County, Drake Smith and his family evacuated their home earlier this week when the wildfire came too close for comfort.

“It wasn’t panic until we had seen the fire over the tree line,” he told CNN’s Derek Van Dam Thursday. The situation “changed in a matter of twenty minutes” – the temperature suddenly rising from cool to hot as the inferno approached.

Filled with fear, he and his family grabbed clothes and some “sentimental stuff” as they hurried to evacuate.

“We knew the fire was coming. We knew it was bad – and we honestly thought the house was gone,” he said. “And we didn’t know until the next day what was happening.”

The family is still poised to evacuate again if the wind brings the fire their way again.

“We’ll just have to stay in vehicles until we can figure it out and hopefully the house will still be standing,” he said.

Chloe Cothren and her sister told WTLV Wednesday they were still waiting to find out.

“It’s really sad,” she said. “Everybody has worked so hard for everything they have, and we’re just all going to lose it. It just doesn’t feel real.”

‘We gotta do something together’

Amid the wreckage of homes burned down and precious sentimental items destroyed, some local business owners are going out of their way to help their fellow community members.

Among them is Rosa Cosco, the co-owner of Tacos Del Ranchito, who offered free meals to evacuees Wednesday, according to WTLV.

“We lost our home to a fire, so when we heard everything, we kind of all stuck together, and we’re like, ‘We gotta do something together,’” Cosco said.

Similarly, Shelby Drummond, owner of Shelby and Shane’s Country Cooking and Catering, said she felt inspired to give back, the same way that her own family once received help after a house fire.

“We’re just giving back to the community because they gave to us so much,” she told WTLV.

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CNN’s Rebekah Riess, Graham Hurley and Maria Aguilar Prieto contributed to this report.