While most of the drama has passed with the Gulf State Park wildfire, it’s still an active fire that pops up and burns from time to time.

Battalion Chief Wesley McConnell said crews are still running patrols.

“Mostly just riding around the perimeter checking out hot spots,” he said Monday morning. “We hit several during the afternoon. The wind picked up pretty good and pushed it up the little ridge there were the swing is on the Oak Ridge Trail.

“At the point up there there’s a little valley that runs across. The wind pushed it the side of that valley. It was just a slow burn along the ground. It didn’t get up in the trees or anything. It pushed it up to the Oak Ridge Trail there.”

Parts of the fire are smoldering underground and will flare up to the surface from time to time.

“Burning in the duff as they call it,” McConnell said. “That’s the rotted leaves that have turned into kind of a peat moss. It’s pretty thick out there in places. A lot of it has been 20 years plus since it’s actually burnt. It’s burning along in that and popping out of the ground at different spots. We had a couple of those yesterday, too.”

Without a good rain, those types of flare-ups continue almost indefinitely.

“We had one on Cotton Bayou over here back 20 years ago, it managed to hang on for about a year,” McConnell said. “At different times it’d pop up out of the ground. The duff layer over there, the peat moss, was a lot thicker. That was a good two feet thick over there. Most of it out here is six, eight, 10 inches.”

With the smoldering peat moss and regular coastal winds, McConnell says crews regularly monitor the burn areas.

“We had a crew going out and the state park had a man doing patrols about every 45 minutes last night,” he said. “And we’ve got a crew going out and go back to patrolling and looking for hot spots. Supposed to have winds to be 15 to 20 mph today and the forecast I looked at said it was actually going to do that all night and into tomorrow.”