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A dry season
By MIKE BRASSFIELD Palmetto trees burned like gasoline-soaked torches as flames threatened back yards. Nervous men climbed up on their roofs to spray their lawns with little garden hoses. Their wives gathered insurance papers and prepared for their houses to burn down. This scene Wednesday near Port Richey was a reminder that Florida's wildfire season has arrived. The Tampa Bay area is by far the driest part of the state right now, and the recent windy weather has been fanning sparks into brush fires with increasing frequency. "The last few days, we've seen a pretty dramatic pickup in the number of fires," said Jim Brenner, fire management administrator with the Florida Division of Forestry. "We've been able to get to the fires and put them out before they cover too many acres. But that could change dramatically from hour to hour, and definitely from day to day." The Tampa Bay area is more combustible than the rest of the state because it hasn't received as much rain. "We're at a point of high threat," said Eric Oglesby, a hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Ruskin.
The Forestry Division identifies potential trouble spots by using a drought index that measures the amount of water in the ground. The scale ranges from zero to 800, with zero being flood-like and 800 being desert-like. Every local county is in the upper 500s or 600s -- in the danger zone. The scary thing is, Florida is just now entering the driest part of its annual dry season. Little rain is expected for several months. "We've got at least three months to go," Brenner said. Over the past three years, Florida's worst drought on record sparked many huge and destructive wildfires. With the land dried out, some of the biggest fires in recent memory covered vast areas with smoke and flame, gutted scores of homes, and forced entire counties to evacuate. State officials don't expect a repeat of that this year because Florida finally started getting more rain last summer and fall. But it's impossible to predict what's going to happen. "We're in better shape overall, but that doesn't mean we're not going to have a rough year," said Terry McElroy of the state Agriculture Department. "It is almost totally a function of weather. If it stays dry and the rains are sparse, then we're going to have wildfires." So far this year, McElroy said, 480 Florida brush fires have burned 4,600 acres, a relatively low number compared with the past few years. About 140 of the fires were started by people burning brush or trash without a permit. Florida has always had wildfires. Long before the state was covered with buildings and roads, lightning strikes started fires that ran for weeks -- maybe even months -- through the landscape. The only difference today is that civilization gets in the way. Lightning is still a common cause of brush fires. Some fires, such as the one that menaced homes near Port Richey on Wednesday, are set by arsonists. Others are caused by children or careless people's campfires, charcoal grills, fireworks and cigarettes. "About 33 percent of our fires are started by children playing with matches," said Pat Dwyer, the Forestry Division's senior ranger in Pinellas County. Many others are started by people who ignore Pinellas' ban on outdoor burning, he said. Brush fires tend to be less of an issue in Pinellas simply because so much of the land is paved over. But wildfires do flare up now and then, occasionally threatening homes. Right now, foresters say, the plants around here are as dry as kindling. The other day, Dwyer visited the scene of a 20-acre controlled burn in the Brooker Creek Preserve in north Pinellas County. Officials burned a thick layer of dry brush that could have fed a forest fire. Deep inside the blackened area, eight days after the burn, some spots were still smoldering. "There were little hot pockets," Dwyer said. "That just shows you how dry it is."
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