The smell of burnt wood wafted through the air making Donna Conard cough as she walked through the charred remains of the woods near her Sherrills Ford home.  Just a day earlier, flames had crept within 50 feet of her house on Chubbs Lane in a wild fire spanning more than 20 acres.

She and her husband Wayne were returning from a trip to Lowe’s Home Improvement with a hot tub for the backyard at about 2:30 p.m. on Sunday when Conard smelled smoke.

At her request, Wayne went around to the front of the house to check things out, just as a neighbor started yelling, “The woods are on fire” and sirens sounded in the background growing increasingly louder.

“There were flames, mostly in the underbrush,” Conard said.  “That’s where a lot of it was.”

The fear of the fire reaching her house prompted her to go inside and take pictures of each room in her home for insurance purposes.

“At one time, as far as I could see down the road was fire,” she said.

Conard and several of her evacuated their homes on Sunday as firefighters battled to keep the fire away from homes.

Sherrills Ford/Terrell Fire and Rescue firefighters were called to 3366 Chubbs Lane off Dockside Lane about 2:40 p.m. where two homes were already endangered by flames, Chief Keith Bost said.  One of those was Conard’s at the end of the street.

He said the first 30 minutes on scene were spent protecting the homes by blasting the flames away from the homes with water.  Bost said he had about 40-45 firefighters concentrating on keeping the fire as far away from the homes with flames creeping as close as 50 feet to some homes.  Meanwhile about 10 firefighters from the North Carolina Forestry Service came in with bulldozers to start fire reduction tactics.

Bost said the Forestry Service dug trenches to keep the fire contained by creating a boundary without flammable vegetation.

Although there were no mandatory evacuations, Bost said homeowners fled to their boat docks and lake shores where they waited out the fire.

The fire spread from to Dockside Lane and Lake Bluff Drive, which required additional trucks and manpower from other departments.

Brush trucks were brought in from Catawba and Denver along with another 20 firefighters from Bandys, Catawba and Denver volunteer fire departments, which worked alongside the North Carolina Forestry Service.

Bost said his crews faced wind speeds of 30-45 mph and low humidity levels, which made fighting the blaze difficult.  Bost said when there is a lack of moisture in the air, it’s much easier for fires to ignite and burn materials faster than when humidity levels are high.

The high winds also fuel bigger and more dangerous flames.

“I had reports of 30-foot flames,” Bost said.

The wind gusts helped push the fire across lakebeds of Lake Norman where grass stands in place of the water that was there before the drought.

Through a combined effort, the fire was extinguished by about 7 p.m., however Bost said burning embers and smoldering stumps still posed some risk to rekindling the fire.  He sent his engineers to check on the area every hour from then on through the night, but the fire did not re-ignite.

“Luckily, we saved all the structures,” Bost said.  “It’s all land and property that burned.”

He said the land in the area will benefit from the fire this spring when it should come back greener after the fire burned away all the undergrowth.