Another Reason To Dislike Invasive Kudzu: It's A Superb Ladder Fuel, Turning Ground Fires Into Crown Fires

EDIT

When kudzu vines tangle themselves onto the crowns of trees and dry out in the winter, they can become a dangerous “ladder fuel,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One spark near the ground can easily ignite the vines, the flames climbing to the tops of trees. That’s already happened in Tryon. When high winds downed a power line in March 2025, a spark on a patch of kudzu unleashed a 600-acre forest fire, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In a separate incident that month, Kudzu Warrior volunteer Don Dicey was on the ground when fires broke out in Pacolet, South Carolina, a small town about 20 miles from the North Carolina border. He said visiting fire crews from Indiana told him that whenever flames touched a vine, “it went up like somebody just poured gasoline on it. That’s how combustible they are, how dry.”

Crown fires are much hotter, faster and harder for firefighters to control than ones contained to the forest floor. “When you’re thinking about increased fire risk, the amount of fuel, the structure of the fuel, the connectivity of the fuel and the moisture of the fuel matters,” said Chelsea Nagy, deputy director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Earth Lab. “If you have a lot of fuel that’s present, and it’s all connected and it gets dry and then there’s a fire, that leads to trouble.”

Kudzu is most widespread in the South, but it has reached 32 states, increasing wildfire risk from Florida to Washington state and Massachusetts. It wouldn’t have happened if not for a decades-old experiment in land management.

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16022026/invasive-kudzu-vine-fuels-wildfires-in-the-south/