Florida Wildfires
They aren’t as large as those out West, but with the drought Florida has wildfires too, and one of them just turned lethal:
From WTSP in Tampa: Wildfire kills two Florida firefighters
Tallahassee, Florida – Florida is mourning the loss of two veteran firefighters killed when a wildfire suddenly changed direction and flashed over them.
Fifty-two-year old Brett Fulton and 31-year-old Josh Burch were operating bulldozers at the front lines of the Blue Ribbon Fire in Hamilton County on Monday when they were caught in, what fire officials call, a “burn over.”
The fire was relatively small, only 12 acres, but the weather conditions changed quickly and created a firestorm.
Two other firefighters, Robert Marvin and Steve Carpenter, were injured when they ran into the flames to try to rescue their colleagues but the heat and smoke were too bad.
…Florida is having one of its worst wildfire seasons. More than 1,500 wildfires have burned about 200,000 acres across the state since May 1st.
About a quarter of that acreage was on the West border of Miami. Because of the drought, most are in what are normally marshes, which die off quickly in droughts.
Florida’s Fraudster-in-chief can’t help being a jerk. He suggested that we have a ‘rain dance’.
2 comments
This is so tragic and sad. My prayers and heartfelt sympathy to the families of these two brave men…
Microclimate is the wildcard that can make this work so dangerous. You can spend years training and working fires and learning/implementing the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders and 18 Watchout Situations, and things can still go so horribly wrong, even on a small fire…
They even had a spotter aircraft over the fire, but it was a microburst. The fire generated enough rising air to pull in the onshore wind that has been blocked for a couple of weeks by a ridge of high pressure. That’s why it has been so hot and dry down here – we haven’t been getting the winds off the Gulf.
With state employees being cut, it is a major loss to the state as well as to their families and friends. We absolutely need every experienced firefighter we have under current conditions.
Hamilton County, like a lot of Northern Florida, is poor and most of its fire departments are volunteers with minimum resources. These were veteran state forest rangers, so it is a major loss in a force that only has 2000 people for the entire state.