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'La Nina' winds blowing state a parched spring

As dryness nears danger levels and water levels decline, officials brace for battles with brushfires and drought.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published March 21, 2006

[Times photo: Mike Pease]

This stand of cypress trees, which normally grows in water on the edge of a pond off Bearss Avenue in Tampa, is surrounded now by land that is beginning to crack with dryness.

With helicopters and bulldozers at the ready, state forestry officials are preparing for a busy brushfire season as the driest conditions in years already have stoked fires throughout Florida.

Inundated by hurricanes the past two years, the state now is seeing its driest weather since 2001, when fires scorched some 400,000 acres statewide.

Forestry officials are scrambling to anticipate where the next fire will break out.

"It's that time of the year," said Gene Madden of the state Division of Forestry. "It doesn't take much to get a fire up and running."

Forecasters say the dryness is likely to continue for the next couple of months, already spiking water consumption as much as 20 percent in some areas as residents try to keep their lawns green.

Last week, a brushfire swept through 500 acres near Sebring. Two more fires consumed 900 acres in Polk County. And in the Panhandle, flames raced to within 20 feet of homes in the Holley-Navarre area east of Pensacola.

Nearly a month has passed since the last good rain fell on the Tampa Bay area. A little precipitation is expected today and Thursday, but not enough to do much good, said Ernie Jillson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Ruskin.

"Even if it rains, we won't get a lot," he said.

How dry is it? Firefighters judge the level of a drought on an index that goes from 0 to 800, with higher numbers being the driest. As of Sunday, some sections of Palm Beach and Hendry counties south of Lake Okeechobee were in the 600s. A stretch from Naples to Stuart topped 500, as did several hot spots in the Panhandle.

This is just the beginning. The weather is likely to stay this dry all spring, forecasters say.

Blame La Nina. The opposite of the rainy El Nino weather pattern, a La Nina occurs when unusually cold water in the Pacific Ocean impedes the formation of clouds above the surface, so that winds blowing across the sea carry less moisture to the southern United States.

Thanks to the hurricanes of the past two years, Madden said, the woods are full of fallen timber and dried-out vegetation ready to turn a spark into a conflagration.

"There's a lot of fuel on the ground and it's had time to cure, so it's more likely to ignite and to burn hotter and longer," he said.

As usual in dry weather, homeowners in Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties aren't letting the lack of rain affect the health of their lawns, according to Tampa Bay Water officials.

"Demand is 20 percent higher than the same time last year," said David Braccano of Tampa Bay Water. He said the increased demand is largely due to people trying to keep their grass green.

Hillsborough County's four water enforcement workers have noticed an uptick in lawn watering. County officials will begin running advertising to remind everyone there are still restrictions on watering.

"They would prefer that people know the restrictions so they don't have to give tickets," said water department spokeswoman Michelle Van Dyke.

Last week Tampa Bay Water stopped skimming water from the Hillsborough and Alafia rivers and the Tampa Bypass Canal and instead tapped its new 15-billion-gallon reservoir that opened last fall, Braccano said.

The utility is draining 55-million gallons a day from the reservoir, and can continue taking up to a quarter of the area's drinking water from that source for six months, Braccano said. The utility's troubled desalination plant, still under repair, is not supplying any water at this point. The repairs are not scheduled to be completed until this fall.

Dry weather and wildfires are nothing new to Florida. Some plants, like palmetto, can't spread their seeds without fire. But as the state's booming population has pushed into areas that were once pine forests and scrub, wildfires have emerged as a serious threat to homes and businesses.

Florida's annual wildfires usually burn 112,000 acres. But drought in 1998 led to half a million acres burning between Memorial Day and mid July, causing more than $500-million in damage.

By July 4, 1998, the wildfires had forced the evacuation of 130,000 people, including nearly everyone in Flagler County. Conditions grew so dire that Gov. Lawton Chiles asked the whole state to pray.

Summer rains finally helped firefighters get the upper hand, but by then more than 2,000 fires had burned parts of all 67 counties, damaging or destroying more than 300 homes and 33 businesses, and injuring 124 people.

Once summer ended, the drought continued. In February 2001, Lake Okeechobee caught fire, scorching more than 20,000 acres of dried-up lake bottom. The water level in the Everglades dropped so low no one could use airboats. Gov. Jeb Bush convened a water summit, where state officials drafted a plan for trucking water to towns that ran out.

That summer the drought finally ended. The pendulum swung the other way in 2004 as a series of hurricanes poured lots of rain onto the state, causing extensive flooding, followed by similarly wet conditions last year.

And it's not over. The other thing La Nina weather patterns bring is an increase in hurricane activity, Madden pointed out.

So if any fires are still burning at the start of hurricane season June 1, he joked, "don't worry about it, the hurricanes will put them out."

--Times staff writers Bill Varian, Carrie Weimar and Eileen Shulte and researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

[Last modified March 21, 2006, 02:30:40]