Wildfires' latest toll is a highway fatality

A milk truck driver is killed when smoky haze from a swamp fire contributes to a pileup near Orlando.

By Times staff and wire reports

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 7, 2001

Smoke from a wildfire just west of Disney World was blamed Tuesday for a six-vehicle pileup that left one driver dead.

The name of the victim, who was driving a milk truck, wasn't immediately released.

The accident shut down U.S. 27 at the Polk-Lake county line north of Interstate 4 for several hours.

Firefighters have been battling a 3,500-acre blaze in the Green Swamp for two weeks. While state forestry firefighters have been successful in containing most of the blaze in the area known as Four Corners, fires have been hard to extinguish in the dry underbrush.

Fire officials this weekend said the brush fire was 100 percent contained and was expected to burn itself out in the muck of the Green Swamp.

More than a dozen fires were burning around the state Tuesday, but Stan Risk, the officer in charge at the Division of Forestry, said none was out of control.

The biggest was a fire that consumed more than 30,000 acres at Lake Okeechobee that forced the evacuation of a fish camp over the weekend, but that was nearly under control Tuesday, as was a smaller fire in the Everglades, Risk said.

The Okeechobee fire jumped the lake's retaining dike in a couple of spots on the southwest side, but no homes or businesses have been damaged and no injuries have been reported.

Apparently, the fire started Friday several miles north of Moore Haven and has been traveling to the southwest, burning up grasses and trees along the dike and on the lake's dry bottom.

With the worst of the dry season still months away, more than 330 fires have swept across more than 10,000 acres in Florida this year, not counting the Okeechobee fire. That compares with fewer than 3,000 acres burned by this time last year.

Fifteen Florida counties are in the upper reaches of the Keetch-Byram Drought Index that indicates dryness, making them the nation's tinderbox. The driest is Charlotte County, at 664 on the 0-800 Keetch-Byram scale. The other counties averaging 600 or above on the scale are Manatee, Sarasota, Polk, Dixie, Gilchrist, Osceola, Broward, Indian River, Okeechobee, Highlands, Hardee, DeSoto, Lee and Collier.

The National Weather Service continues a fire weather watch from noon until sunset in all west central and southwest Florida counties except Pinellas. The relative humidity is expected to dip between 30 and 35 percent in those areas.

Federal disaster aid to counter freeze damage

President Bush has authorized federal disaster aid for people in 49 Florida counties who were left jobless because of recent winter freezes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Tuesday.

John W. Magaw, acting director of FEMA, said the president's declaration makes available federal funding to supplement unemployment benefits for farm and fishing industry workers who lost jobs as a result of freezing weather that struck much of Florida in December and January.

Michael Bolch of FEMA was named by Magaw to coordinate the federal assistance. Bolch said procedures for requesting the aid will be announced soon.

Freeze-related crop damage totaled $179-million, then-state Agriculture Secretary Bob Crawford said in January.

The counties eligible for assistance to affected workers include Citrus, Hernando, Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk and Sarasota.

- Associated Press

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