A McDowell County wildfire was 90% contained by Wednesday morning, one week after it was first reported. The North Fork Fire was first reported on Jan. 29. As of Feb. 5, the fire had burned 644 acres in areas heavily damaged by Hurricane Helene five months earlier.

The wildfire strikes an inland region of North Carolina that is still recovering from the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene in September.

Before leaving the governor's office, Roy Cooper stated in media interviews that Republican state legislators passed a bill that "actually took money away from western North Carolina." WFAE's Marshall Terry and WRAL's Paul Specht fact-check Cooper's claim.

After Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina last September, tens of thousands of homes were damaged and large swaths of the region were damaged by flooding. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to speed up recovery,

Helene reshaped much of western North Carolina’s landscape, rerouting rivers and felling large swaths of forests. Aerial timber surveys indicate that Helene damaged over 800,000 acres of North Carolina’s forested land.