The Wildfire Season Is Here
Both Central Florida and the Texas Panhandle are dealing with huge fires caused by low humidity and strong. variable winds.
OAK HILL — Central Florida’s first major blaze kicked off the annual fire season this week by scorching more than 16,000 parched acres, destroying three structures and sending one firefighter to the hospital.
The Iron Horse Fire, straddling the Volusia-Brevard county line, has moved swiftly since Monday through rural areas between Oak Hill and Mims. Dry brush and foliage, from hard freezes this winter, provided fuel.
In Volusia County, flames left charred ground and tree trunks burned at least 20 feet upward. Naked palmetto bushes looked like blackened pieces of ginger root twisted on the ground.
(CNN) — Texas firefighters were making significant progress Tuesday against wildfires that have consumed at least 78 homes and, at their peak, were burning the length of a football field every minute.
Sustained winds of 40 mph, gusting to 60, combined with 2% relative humidity in some areas to cause the grass fire conflagration Sunday, said Mark Stanford, chief of fire operations for the Texas Forest Service.
On Tuesday, however, firefighters had all 21 remaining fires at least 50 percent contained, Stanford told CNN Radio.
Crews want to have them fully contained by Thursday, he said.
“Friday will be another bad day for us,” Stanford said. “Not as bad as Sunday, but it will be a very high fire danger day across that region. So we want to make sure that we’ve freed up all of our fire resources so that they can respond to new starts we may have.”
The Florida fires are being fueled by the vegetation killed by the hard freezes they had down there. The Panhandle of Texas has been experiencing single digit relative humidity. It is shaping up as a very bad season, and it just started.
5 comments
Does a fire that is 50 percent contained burn only half your home?
All it means it that it can only spread along half of its perimeter, which is usually more than sufficient to become a mega-fire.
In one sense it contains itself to that level by eliminating all of the available fuel in the areas it burned over. If the wind shifts 180° it puts itself out. That happens in Florida with the on-shore/off-shore wind shift near the coast.
…I’m trying to figure out if the increased incidence of reporting of these early-season fires in places like Florida and Texas are a result of greater interest, increased at-risk population, or a harbinger of things to come. Up until about 15 years ago the fire season travel itinerary was defined by ‘California in the spring/the upper West in the summer/back to California in the fall’. It wasn’t that areas to the east of our little patch of God’s Country didn’t have fires, because it wasn’t all that uncommon to run across agency fire crews from Tennessee or the Carolina’s on major western fires; but you just didn’t see the stories about eastern fires like we’ve seen over the last decade…
…and 50% containment means that there is only a 50% chance that your entire home will burn up, so pack accordingly…
OK, no; it actually means that a positive physical barrier (comprised of fire line and natural inflammable terrain) has been established around half of the fire perimeter as of the moment of reporting (usually the half on the backside of the fire, since that is where you start building line). There can still be active burning within that portion of the perimeter and ‘control’ isn’t established until you have both 100% containment and sufficient distance of mop-up inside the fire line to provide a near guarantee that wind and weather won’t carry sparks outside the line. As an aside, it most certainly is not unheard of to have the fire blow out across that ‘contained’ portion of the perimeter as the result of a wind shift and burn up 100% of whatever it comes across…
Thanks, Jack K., for reminding me to put “snark” tags around my snark.
In Florida it is a combination of population spread, bad agricultural practices, and climate change. A decade ago it would still be raining down there until summer, but no longer.
A lot of wetlands have been drained to make way for houses and sugar cane, and the area has dried out from the lack of rainfall. We have had fires in swamps during the extended drought the Southeast suffered through, but that is over. The population increase and development have put serious stress on water resources, so I think the current pattern of early wildfires is the new normal.